Open a folder. It plays.
No playlist to build — the folder is the list. Your Apple TV plays your own files straight from your NAS: no media server, no account, no subscription. All you need is a share — your NAS, or a folder your Mac already shares.
What it does, in four lines
Open a folder. It plays.
No playlist to build — the folder is the list. Drop a folder on the Mac app and the first video starts at once; it carries on by itself and remembers where you stopped.
Your Apple TV plays your own files, straight from your NAS.
No media server, no account, no subscription. The app talks to the share you point it at, over your local network only.
Tag it while you watch — the video waits for you.
Press ⌘T and the tag panel opens under the picture. Playback holds while you label — the video doesn't move on underneath you — and typing applies the tag instantly.
Tag it once on the Mac. It's already on the TV.
Tags and posters are written into a .FolderVideoPlayer folder on your own share. The TV just reads them — no sync, no export, no account.
Your own videos, finally findable
No transcoding server, no photo-library tax, no “supported cloud only” — your files, presented properly no matter how deep the folders got.
Browse any SMB share
Works with Synology, QNAP, Windows, macOS, Linux — anything that speaks SMB. Find your share by name over Bonjour or type its address. The folders you sorted years ago, and the ones you never got round to, both open as they are.
Thumbnails that never slow down
Every thumbnail is generated once and never again — even at 5,000+ videos, browsing stays instant. Frames are kept on the TV and beside your files on the share, so a second device never rebuilds them.
Find it by what you remember
Tag a video from the TV or the Mac — no save step — and find it again by the tag, not the file name you forgot. Tags live in a small folder on your own share, so the Mac, the TV and every device pointed at it see the same ones.
Picks up where you stopped
Quit mid-video, come back days later — it offers to carry on from the exact spot. A 40-hour archive is watchable again when the TV remembers where you are in it.
The whole folder plays. Tag it while it runs.
The free Mac app is where the pair starts. Drop a folder on the window — or press ⌘O — and the first video starts at once. No playlist to build, nothing to drag: the folder is the list, it carries on by itself, and every video keeps its own resume point.
No media server. Tag it once — it's already there.
The Apple TV app talks straight to the share you point it at — your files, over your own network, nothing in between. You need a share already: your NAS, or a folder your Mac shares. That's file sharing, not a media server.
No media server
Nothing to install on the NAS, no account anywhere, nothing exposed to the internet. The app speaks SMB directly — the same file sharing your Mac already does. Credentials stay in the tvOS Keychain, and the connection never leaves your local network.
Tag it once, on any screen
Tags and posters are written into a .FolderVideoPlayer folder on your own share. The TV reads every tag file it finds there and merges them — each person's tags in their own file, so writers never overwrite each other. What you labelled on the Mac is on the TV when you sit down.
Where a big library gets managed
FolderVideoPlayer for macOS is free, and it reads the same shares your Apple TV does. Tag in bulk from a keyboard, clear out the duplicates eating your disk, let it suggest tags and find people by face, and pre-build the thumbnails the TV shows — everything lands on the share, so both screens agree.
Plays a whole folder — QuickTime won't even play two
Open New… → pick a folder → it starts playing — every video in it, in order, subfolders included, looping until you stop it. Apple's built-in player can't even queue two files in a row; here the folder is the queue — no playlist to build, nothing to drag.
Tag from the Mac, see it on the TV
Type a tag and it is applied — no save step. Tags publish into the .FolderVideoPlayer folder on your share, so the Apple TV, a second Mac or an iPhone pointed at the same share sees them too.
Thumbnails made once, for every screen
The Mac writes the poster frames a library needs onto the share — and the Apple TV reads those same pictures instead of generating them over Wi-Fi. One library scanned on the Mac, instant browsing on the TV.
Tags itself: date, camera, place, quality
Point it at a folder and the tag suggestions come from what is already true — the folders you made, the date it was shot, which camera, 4K or 720p or Slow-mo, and the place for clips that carry GPS. It shows you what it would add before you apply it, and everything is computed on your Mac.
Finds duplicates in a huge library
Every video you play is fingerprinted as you watch — copies are then grouped with the keeper already chosen and the reason shown. Preview before you decide, tags from a discarded copy move to the one you keep, and nothing is ever deleted: duplicates go to the Trash, or to a folder you name on a share that has none.
Learns your tags, and finds people by face
Optional add-ons you download from inside the app: it suggests tags and learns from your yes and no, finds more videos that look like a tag you already use, and puts a name to a face across the whole library. All of it runs on your Mac — nothing is uploaded. How the AI works →
FolderVideoPlayer for Mac
Download for MacFree — no account, no ads, nothing uploaded. Signed and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it without the "unidentified developer" warning.
Not on a Mac? The app you watch on is on the App Store. View on the App StoreIt learns your library. On your Mac.
The Mac app can watch your videos for you and suggest what to call them — and it learns from the tags you use, not from anybody else's. Everything is worked out on your own Mac with Apple's own Core ML: no server, no account, no upload, and no Python or extra tools to install.
Suggests tags, then learns from your yes and no
Open the tag panel while something plays and the app offers what it thinks fits. Click a suggestion to accept it, or its ✕ to say it isn't that. Once a tag has four examples of what it is and four of what it isn't, you can train it — from then on that tag is offered by a model fitted to your taste, not a generic guess. The ✕s matter: a tag with no rejections can't learn.
“Find more like this” for any tag
Pick a tag with a couple of videos in it and turn on Look-alikes. The app goes through the rest of the library, watches the ones it hasn't read yet, and brings back the videos that look like the ones you already tagged — each with its own frame, so you can see it before you accept it.
People, by face
Name a face once and the app finds that person across the library — the People window shows how many videos and how many faces it has for each person, and lets you pick a better portrait for anyone. Face recognition is off until you switch it on, and the faces never leave the Mac.
Safe / not-safe, quietly and privately
A separate download marks what's adult and what isn't, and corrects itself from the marks you make — useful when a family archive and everything else share one drive. Like the rest of it, the verdict is worked out on this Mac and stays in your profile: nothing is reported anywhere, and nothing is uploaded.
The AI is a download, not part of the app
None of it ships inside the .dmg. Playing, tags, stars and the duplicate finder need no model at all, so the app works the moment you install it. Turn on what you want from Settings → AI and it fetches only that:
| Add-on | What it gives you | Download |
|---|---|---|
| Tag suggestions | Suggested tags, look-alikes and your own trained tags | ≈171 MB |
| Safe / not-safe | The adult-content verdict, corrected by your own marks | ≈159 MB |
| Face recognition | Finding faces, and the people you name | ≈18 MB |
Which model, exactly: Settings → AI names the files each feature is running on, so you can check for yourself rather than take our word. The tag model is SigLIP 2 B/16 — Apache-2.0 end to end. It replaced an earlier one whose licence covered code but not the trained weights, which is the kind of thing worth being picky about in an app you keep on your own machine.
Every download is checked against its published SHA-256 before any of it is installed — a half-installed model that claims to be ready is worse than none. Each tag profile keeps its own trained tags, its own accept/reject history, its own marks and its own named people, so two people sharing a Mac never train over each other. Videos you've hidden are left out of all of it.
Real screens, full screen
Captured from FolderVideoPlayer running on an Apple TV 4K — this is what your living room sees.
Your TV meets your files. Nothing else.
Open the app on Apple TV
No login, no sign-up, no account to create. Open it and the app looks for shares on your network.
0 accountsPick your SMB share
Choose it from the list Bonjour discovers, or type the address. Credentials live only in the tvOS Keychain — and they need read & write rights on the share for tags and thumbnails to be saved.
SMB + KeychainBrowse. Play. Enjoy.
The whole library — folders, tags, thumbnails — streams straight from your share over your local network.
nothing leaves homePrivacy by construction
FolderVideoPlayer collects nothing — no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising SDKs, no cloud of any kind. The only thing it talks to is the file share you point it at, on your own network. Even the Mac app's AI runs on your Mac: the one-off model download is the only thing it ever fetches, and nothing about your library goes with it.
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