How do you watch MP4 files on your TV?

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I’m unable to watch my mp4 movies ( burns of DVDs) on my TV through Apple TV.

I’ve done all the things you should do — In the Apple TV app on the computer, the files are in the “Home Video” folder, home sharing is on, apps are up to date, files are converted to “Apple TV version.” Even tried the trick of tagging them as TV Shows but nothing I do will make them appear in the Library on the Apple TV app on the Apple TV device.

Searching websites I see that there seems to be a consensus that it’s not an easy thing to do, which is why I opened this post with the more general question for those of you who watch mp4 movies on your TV, what method do you use.

What apps do you use? Do you bypass the whole Apple TV architecture?

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I use Infuse, installed on Apple TV connected to share on my iMac.
Plays pretty much anything and everything.

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Another vote for Infuse. While I don’t typically use Infuse on my Apple TV (mainly on Mac and iPad), it’s nice to have that option.

On a side note, with Infuse Pro you can, among other things, sync your playback progress across all of your devices. So you could start watching something on an Apple TV and continue watching it on an iPad.

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I gave up on Apple’s “solutions” back in the iTunes days when the got serious about selling video. It was clear that they were not supporting playback of video outside their system.

Now I use Plex. I have it running on a Mac Mini where all my rips are stored, and then I use the Plex app on the Apple TV.

It works, but it’s a brittle system. That is, if I go without connecting for a while, usually the Mac Mini won’t wake up and thus the Plex app can’t find my library. That means I have to open Screens Connect on my phone and wake it up (if I’m too lazy to get up and walk to my office to physically poke the Mac Mini). I spent a lot of time troubleshooting why the Mac Mini won’t respond to the wake-on-LAN or whatever the heck Plex is supposed to do but could never solve it.

I’ve been hearing good things about Infuse (I used it years ago, but found it was also quite brittle), so I may check that out. I don’t care about all the bells and whistles that Plex offers – I just need playback!

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Same here. I purchased a Lifetime Plex Pass in 2017 but I don’t use it as much as I once did. Most of the movies in my collection are usually streaming for free on someone’s service. So I only fire up the plex server as needed, and occasionally watch a movie on one of the free streaming services they offer.

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+1 for Plex, I find it to be robust. It will handle most formats including MP4, M4V and MKV natively.

You can also then easily download video to a phone or iPad if you wish for travelling.

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I’m not completely positive about this but don’t files in “Home Videos” have to be .mov? Which could explain why ripped video doesn’t want to play.