Videos

This might not be directly related to a Synology NAS but I thought I share it anyway. :) I store alot of homevideos on my NAS, captured with my old Canon videocamera HF-200. It could capture 1080i in 50fps (interlaced!). Just a word of warning. AVOID anything related to interlace these days, it's really a pain to maintain and edit. Computers are not really designed for interlaced-content and it's just to much crap you need to think of when dealing with interlaced video. So, if you're gonna buy a new videocamera, make sure it doesn't film in interlace (not sure if anyone does that these days, but still..)

Videostation Vs Plex

I have spent alot of time with Synologys Videostation and Plex, to decide which one that's the best for me, streaming to iOS devices. Plex was pretty much unusable on my old DS412+ unless I played Mp4 files. The problem is that Plex has to transcode the video (=requires lots of CPU power) most things if you need subtitles (and I do). If you don't need subtitles Plex would probably work alot better on any setup. Plex is slightly more useful on my DS415+, however 1080p content is still a bit of pain to transcode. Perhaps that can be fixed if they ever decide to compile a version optimized for the DS415+. Plex comes with a pretty nice interface, however some settings are really confusing and they really need to work on that. Plex has a nice "plex sync" option to be able to download videos to your devices for offline playback. This is nice, but you have to pay a monthly fee to be able to use this, which is a bit of a bummer.
Videostation has improved alot since it was released and can now play any h.264 content I've tried without transcoding, even with subtitles. Drawback is that DTS audio isn't supported but such audiotracks can be recoded in just a few minutes with a decent tool (like "Xmedia recode"). Videostation can only download mp4-files for offline-viewing at the moment, I really hope they implement other formats aswell.
So, which one to use? Well. Currently I must say that Videostation works better than Plex, with lower cost in terms of performance. Plex has a few useful features, but as mentioned, it's alot more CPU-hungry.

Cloudbackup your files

DSM comes with a few apps for Cloudbackup. HiDrive backup, Elephantdrive etc. I've tried a few but I wanted to try something else. With DSM 5.0 we got "Cloud Sync", that ables you to sync your cloudstorage (dropbox, googledrive etc.), and since GoogleDrive's priceplan was alot more attractive (and understandable) compared to many others I wanted to try this out. The drawback is that you only get a plain backup (no versions of files etc), but if you can live with that, keep reading. :)
Cloud Sync has a few annoying limitations. You can't sync different folders to your cloudstorage, you can only have one folder which are synced. To get around this limitation, there is a way, assuming you have some space on your harddrives.
Setup a backupjob on the NAS to copy all your desired folders to your syncfolder and this will get synced!
It's an easy way to do this, but not prety since you have to store your files twice.

The filesystem on the NAS (and Linux/Unix) supports something called "symbolic links" where you can "map" a folder to another location without having twice the amount of drivespace. Sadly, DSM doesn't come with proper functionality to support this (not for mortal users anyway). CloudSync ignores Symbolic Link-folders anyway even if you manage to do it so.

The DS415+

The DS415+ has just been released by Synology. Sadly it can't run DSM 5.1b yet but it can still run a few of the new DSM apps that are not usually available in the package-center. The problem is that the old apps are not adjusted for this new architecture yet, however, existing x86 apps (For example, DS412+) can still run on your DS415+ with some modifications.
This is how I do it on my Windows PC for the DS415+:
1) Install 7-zip
2) Download the latest x86-package(.spk) for your package you'd like to install.
3) Open the file in Windows Explorer using 7-zip (7-zip/Open)
4) Locate the file "INFO". Right click on it, select "edit".
5) INFO is a plain textfile. Locate a line where it says something similar like this:
arch="x86 bromolow cedarview"
manipulate it to look like this:
arch="x86 bromolow cedarview avoton"
Save it and make sure it updates the archive.
6) Pick "Manual installation" in the package center and pick your modified .spk-archive.
The .spk-file is just a TAR-file btw.
This method usually works. However, sometimes DSM complains about the fileformat. Then decompress the entire .spk-file to your harddrive and manually edit the "INFO"-file with "Wordpad" (Notepad fails for me sometimes), and then create a new tar archive with 7-zip and rename it to .spk instead of .tar.
This method works on several different packages I've tried that are not yet available for the DS415+ (Plex, CloudSync, Transmission (sort of), Proxy Server etc.) It has worked for me, but it's still a bit "hackish" so you do this on your own risk.

Welcome!

Welcome to my Synology fan-blog! I'm a huge Synology NAS-fan so I thought why not dedicate a blog to their nice stuff. :) I'll try to cover my own experiences here along with some hints for the average Synology NAS-user. I am not a Synology expert, but some kind of average-but-highly-interested user of their hardware. So, hope you'll enjoy it here! :) I live in Sweden so if you find my english a bit strange at times, I have warned you. :) Anyway, my current Synology NAS is the new DS415+ which I use for alot of things but more about that later.