Streaming Synology Diskstation Video Through Apple TV With Plex

My wife's been shaking her head at me the past few months as I was slowly but surely converting our DVD collection to our home Synology Diskstation NAS. This was particularly because we had a super old Apple TV, and could only stream them via Airplay. The quality and interface was.. not so great.

However, for our anniversary I bought the latest generation Apple TV, installed Plex (on both the Apple TV and NAS), and via the below tutorial, was able to setup a streaming interface of our DVD collection better than I could have imagined:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7LfXVVfYhI

There was only one wrinkle in my setup however: I wanted to keep our videos under /Volume1/video/* as opposed to /Volume1/Plex/Library/*, especially because keeping them in the former location allowed us to continue to stream videos on our phones and iPad via DS File, while Plex allows only free streaming to Apple TV.

So the obvious solution was to create symlinks from video/* to Library/*. However when doing so, Plex could see the directory but not access it. Searching Google showed various hacks to enable Plex access, but the actual solution was quite simple: the plex user on the Synology Diskstation simply needed read access to the video/* directory.

Super simple, and worked like a charm. Happy streaming!