PhotoStream . I have enabled access to my PC on Home Sharing but Apple TV cannot find. Nothing happens when I click "Sync" button. Is this because I have no iPhone or iMac yet?

Question

Background:
I left my iPhone4 on  atrain and it promptly vanished off the face of the Earth despite my locking it online.
I intend to replace it with an iPhone 5S.
I also intend to purchase an iMac and Airport Time Capsule.
Meantime, I have bought an Apple TV and have configured it successfully to work wirelessly with my iTunes music and videos libraries on myToshiba laptop.
I have enabled Photostreaming of all my photo library folders to Apple TV within File/Home Sharing on iTunes but, cannot get it to synch. But what is it trying to synch with? My lost iPhone??The Apple TV Screensaver/Settings says that I have no images in my PhotoStream - although it seems it has found the folder - I think!
Query: Do I need an IOS device and not just wireless access to iTunes for this to work? (I thought that the Apple TV would work as a bridge to my PC Photo Library pro tem).
Grateful for all assistance and apologies if I am displaying my ignorance!

Answer 1

Are these now in the cloud or just wirelessly loading from PC (and do they do that each time?) Can I view them only when connected to the wireless network? [I will need to change my folder structure with more top-level folders as Apple TV lumps all my sub-folders together into one and seems to sort only by date image was taken...]
These photos are neither in the cloud or synced to the Apple TV. When the Apple TV connects to your computer it will load a small database which is essentially just a list of everything in iTunes. When you select photos to view, they will be streamed from iTunes. So yes in order to see your photos, you need your computer on, iTunes active and both devices connected to the network.
As for oganisation, you will find you can only use one level of nested folders for homesharing photos. I'm not all that familiar with photo ordering from a PC, I don't think you have all the options you have if you were using a Mac.
Also, I am still a bit worried about synchronising my photos after I replace my lost 4S with a 5S and restore the backup from the lost phone. I lost it so long ago that there have been many changes to my photo library since.
Once you have restored your phone, you should be able to transfer the photos in your camera roll to the PC without any problems. If you have any albums on the phone that were synced previously to the 4S and you no longer have those photos on your PC, you should transfer them to your camera roll and import them to the PC before syncing the phone with iTunes.
Re Photostream, is there any benefit to using that? As I have no Apple device other than my Apple TV 3 at present (just a backup of my lost iPhone 4S), can I add to the Apple TV cloud via iTunes?
Photostream may still have it's uses even though you don't have a phone as yet. If you add photos to photo stream from your PC, they will be synced to the cloud and therefore available on your Apple TV, even when your computer isn't running. Take a little time to familiarise yourself with how photo stream works. Photos in the cloud are only kept for 30 days, but if they sync to a device such as your Apple TV during that time, they will stay there until the photo count reaches a thousand. It will then delete the oldest photo when adding a new one. Photo stream shared albums are slightly different in that photos don't get automatically deleted from them. Of course once you do get a phone, photo stream will become much more useful, even if all you use it for is syncing new photos to your PC in the background, without having to get involved with manually importing them.
i) Any suggestions for sorting video files that have somehow lost their soundtrack upon imported to my iTunes library?
That depends on what has happened. I suspect the soundtrack isn't lost but rather just in a format that iTunes doesn't understand. Open the files in QuickTime and let me know what file types they are.
ii) Ditto for videos files that are seen as if lying side on or totally inverted. Is there an equivalent to 'image rotate' for videos? BTW, do Apple also reduce the stored image sizes if you rotate images? (My PC warns me to make a copy before rotating or risk the loss of image quality.)
To change the orientation of a video, you will need to use an editing application, unfortunately I don't know what to suggest for the PC, I'm not sure whether 'Movie Maker' has the export settings to create Apple TV compatible content.
I'm not sure how applications handle photo manipulation on the PC. iPhoto on the Mac doesn't really rotate anything, it just applies a flag to tell the application which way to view the original which remains unaltered.
iii) Can you help with my other query in Classic iPods? [...had to ask ;-) ]
I'm not sure what that is.