Is Samba Oelek right for me?

A plain description of who the app is for and who should buy something else.

The app costs money and has no free trial, so this page is deliberately blunt.

Buy it if

• Your videos are your own: travel films, family recordings, GoPro and drone footage, ProRes exports from your edit.
• They live in folders on a share: a NAS, a Raspberry Pi with Samba, a Mac with File Sharing on, a Windows PC.
• You want network, folder, video and nothing in between. No library scan, no account, no server to keep alive.
• Some of the files are big. Single-file cuts above 4 GiB play and seek.

Buy something else if

• You have a movie and series collection and expect cover art, plot summaries, subtitles, audio track selection or watched status. Samba Oelek has none of that. A library player or a media server is the right tool, and Infuse is the usual recommendation on Apple TV.
• You rely on subtitles. There is no subtitle feature.
• You need Dolby Vision, Atmos or passthrough confirmed. They are not.
• Your server only speaks SMB 1, or you want to reach it over the internet. The app is built for the local network.
• You want to play music or browse photos. It plays videos.

What you get for the price

A native tvOS app, one-time purchase, no subscription, no ads, no analytics. Discovery via Bonjour, manual servers, saved passwords in the keychain, thumbnails generated from your files, playback with the Siri Remote. A built-in offline demo lets you try the interface without a server, but only after buying; the App Store offers no trial for this kind of app.

If you are unsure whether your files play, check the formats page first. If they are MOV or MP4 from a camera, phone or editor, they almost certainly do.