Video Playback
Video Station comes with an embedded player which allows you to play videos with once the package is installed on your Synology NAS.
In addition to playing videos on your local computer, you can also stream multimedia contents to DLNA/UPnP-compliant DMAs or AirPlay compatible devices for video playback. Before you start, please make sure you have been granted the AirPlay/DLNA Renderer privilege.
Term Explanations:
- DLNA: Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is a cross-industry organization of consumer electronics, computing industry, and mobile electronics manufacturers. DLNA actively promotes wired and wireless networks of consumer electronics products, personal computers, and mobile devices, in the home and on the road, for sharing new digital media and content services. Examples include home devices, such as TVs/stereo systems and Sony PlayStation3/Xbox 360.
- UPnP: Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a collaboration of protocols that allows a wide range of devices to be interconnected, both wired and wireless, and to work seamlessly with one another by establishing network services, of which media streaming is the most popular in that media files can be directly streamed to TV and no transfer of files is required for playback. UPnP supports zero configuration networking. In other words, it spares users the trouble of setting up networking configurations as it is automatically completed once UPnP devices are connected to a network, which exhibits the concept of “plug-n-play” technology.
- DMA: DMA, commonly known as digital media adapter, is a home entertainment device that can connect to a home network to retrieve digital media files (such as music, photos, or video) from a personal computer or other networked media server and play them back on DLNA/UPnP-enabled devices.
Play Videos
Playing videos with Video Station is fun and intuitive. For better viewing quality and faster transcoding speed, it is recommended you install VLC media player (Windows, Linux) on your local computer for video playback.
To play videos:
- Select any video clip you want to play, and do either of the following to open the Video Player window:
- Click the play icon at the bottom-right corner of the video image.
- Click the Action drop-down menu, and click Play.
- The video should start playing right away. If not, please make sure you have installed VLC media player on your local computer.
- At the bottom of Video Player, do the following to control video playback:
- Click Play/Pause to play or pause the video.
- Click Next or Previous to play the next or previous video episode (if available).
- Click Stop to stop playback.
- Use the Progress bar to skip to any point you want.
- Click the Repeat icon to repeat all videos or currently playing video in your collection.
- Use the Volume bar to adjust the volume.
- Click Settings to select a video playback quality and audio track.
- Click Subtitles to choose whether you want to play videos with subtitles.
- If you have a subtitle file (in .srt format) with the same name as the video and both are located in the same folder, you can choose External subtitles.
- If your video contains embedded subtitles, you should be able to see the subtitles during video playback. Select the embedded subtitles appearing with its language code onscreen.
- You can also click Search for subtitles to find subtitles from online sources. Before doing so, go to Settings > Advanced to configure subtitle auto search. This allows Video Station to search for subtitles automatically from online databases.
- Select No subtitles if you do not want the video to display subtitles.
- Select Sync subtitles and synchronize a video with its subtitles by clicking + (forwarding the subtitle by 0.25 second) or - (backwarding the subtitle by 0.25 second). Click OK to apply the setting, or Reset to cancel the setting.
Note:
- Synology NAS supports subtitle files whose character encoding is UTF-8. If your files are not saved in this proper Unicode format, please make sure the language you have selected at Main Menu > Control Panel > Regional Options > Language > Codepage is the same as that from the subtitle menu on your device to prevent garbled text. Otherwise, subtitles will not display correctly whether you play videos via Video Station or any third-party players installed on mobile devices via DS video.
- Signing in to OpenSubtitles.org at Settings > Advanced allows you to download more than 200 subtitle files per day. If you have not signed in to OpenSubtitles.org, you can still search and download subtitles from it, but with a daily download limit of 200 subtitle files.
- Click Player to select a device to stream videos to.
Note:
HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) support is required if you want to stream videos to Apple TV for playback.
- Click Fullscreen to play videos in the full-screen mode.
- You can use keyboard hot keys for basic video playback operations:
- Press the space key to play or pause a video.
- Press the up or down arrow key to adjust video volume:
| |
Arrow only |
Ctrl + Arrow |
Shift + Arrow |
| Up |
+10% |
+25% |
+50% |
| Down |
-10% |
-25% |
-50% |
- Press the left or right arrow key to forward or backward a video:
| |
Arrow only |
Ctrl + Arrow |
Shift + Arrow |
| Right |
+10 seconds |
+30 seconds |
+60 seconds |
| Left |
-10 seconds |
-30 seconds |
-60 seconds |
Note:
If a video is being streamed from Video Station to an external device through DLNA, the audio and subtitle options will not be available.
Transcoding Settings
While playing videos, transcoding capability is a must when the video format is not supported by the client device. Most Synology NAS are equipped with the capability in software, able to detect whether transcoding is required or not and perform transcoding for playback if necessary. To learn more about video transcoding, please visit Synology website.
To enable hardware acceleration:
In addition to software decoding, hardware acceleration*, the use of computer hardware to perform some functions faster than is possible in software, leads to higher performance in transcoding. For models which support hardware-accelerated transcoding, this option is enabled by default to allow for faster transcoding. If you want to disable the setting, go to Settings > Advanced to untick the checkbox.
To enable AC3 passthrough on Apple TV:
While playing videos on your Apple TV, you can enable this option at Settings > Advanced to enjoy better audio quality. Once the option is enabled, Video Station will leave 5.1 channel AC3 soundtrack within your videos untouched for playback and will not downsample it to 2-channel audio. With this support, audios will be output with high quality when the videos are streamed to Apple TV. Please make sure your TV connected to the Apple TV supports AC3 with 5.1 channels.
More Information:
- While installing VLC Player, make sure you have ticked Mozilla plugin and ActiveX plugin.
- VLC is supported by the following browsers:
- Windows: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome
- VLC does not support HTTPS streaming.
- If VLC is not installed on your local computer, Video Player will play videos supported by HTML5. Please refer to here for HTML5 videos supported by different web browsers.
- If VLC is installed on your computer, and you are connecting to DSM with a supported web browser, Video Player supports the following formats:
avi, dat, mkv, vob, asf, wmv, mov, qt, divx, flv, swf, rm, rmvb, mpg, mpeg, mpeg1, m1v, mpeg2, m2v, mp2, dvr-ms, m2ts, mts, m2t, ts, tp, trp, mpeg4, m4v, mp4, 3g2, 3gp, 3gp2, mpe, xvid
- Following formats are not supported by VLC plugin for video seeking: avi, ts, trp, tp, m2t, m2ts, mts
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* Applies to specific models only.