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, Sony PlayStation3/PlayStation4, and 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) 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.
- Playback Quality:
- Original: Available only when you are using streaming mode. Video Player starts playing the original files without transcoding if the VLC plugin, HTML5, and Flash are supported. If any of them is not supported, the files will be transcoded automatically for playback.
- High/Medium/Low: Depending on the individual model and transcoding capabilities of your Synology NAS, the actual playback quality may slightly vary. Generally, the higher the quality is, the more system resources are occupied and the more bandwidth is taken up when video files are being transcoded. In this case, if you are not located in the local area network, it is suggested you choose medium or low quality for faster file transmission and transcoding. However, you may select high quality if you want to enjoy high-definition video.
Note:
Not all quality options are available for selection because of different transcoding capabilities of your Synology NAS. If none is available, Video Player can play videos still.
- Audio Track: Available audio tracks for the video will be displayed on the menu. Select your preferred language to play. If the video has no audio tracks, no options will appear.
- 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 the settings in the Subtitle Auto Search section. This allows Video Station to search for subtitles automatically from online databases.
- Tick Enable OpenSubtitles.org support and/or Enable Shooter.cn support checkboxes to start using these subtitle sources.
- If you have enabled both sources, the search results obtained from "Shooter.cn" will have a priority over the others.
Note:
- To automatically search for subtitles and download suitable ones upon playing a video without subtitles, go to Settings > Options to tick the Enable auto subtitle download checkbox. The subtitle setting will then be switched to Auto download subtitles in the Video Player.
- Unlike manually searching for subtitles, the automatically downloaded subtitles will not be saved in the same folder with the video.
- 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.
- Internet Explorer 10 (or later) may not support the full-screen mode on Video Player. We suggest you switch to other web browsers for full-screen playback.
Transcoding Settings
While playing videos, transcoding capability is a must when the video format is not supported by the client device. Most Synology products 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.
Offline Transcoding before Playback
With offline transcoding, you can transcode videos to .mp4 format (supported by most mobile devices) in advance with setting up those videos’ profile. Once the transcoding is completed, you can download the transcoded videos to your mobile device and play them without limitations of network connectivity.
To start an offline transcoding:
- Hover your pointer over the video that you wish to transcode, and click the Offline Transcoding button at its lower right corner.
- Select the video files, video profile, and audio track that you wish to become the profile of the newly transcoded video.
- Click OK to start transcoding.
To check the offline transcoding status:
- Click Offline Transcoding button at the upper right corner of your Video Station.
- You can view, stop, or clear the transcoding tasks in the Offline Transcoding tab.
Note:
- The naming rule of transcoded videos is [original video file name + (quality)]. The transcoded videos will be stored in the same folder with the original videos, and will also be indexed by Video Station. However, the transcoded videos cannot be transcoded again.
- The ability of online/offline transcoding depends on the model of your Synology product. For more information, please refer to the FAQ articles about transcoding and 4K video transcoding.
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
- 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
Parental Control
With the feature of Parental Control, you can set up a 4-digit PIN per user account to restrict video playback according to video classifications and protect the privacy of specific videos. This feature can be especially helpful if you share a user account with your family, since there might be some videos, such as R-rated movies, that you would like to keep away from your kids.
To set up a parental control rule:
- Go to Settings > Parental Control and click + to create a parental control rule.
- Select a user account that you want to apply parental control to.
- Create a whitelist by video classification for each video category. Videos belonging to the specified classifications in the whitelist can be viewed by anyone using this account without restriction.
- Set up a 4-digit PIN. Whenever someone using this account wants to play videos that are not included in the whitelist, they will need to enter this PIN, whether in Video Station or DS video.
- Click OK.
Note:
- In addition to the classification information fetched by online databases, you can customize your classification when you edit video info and use this classification to set up a whitelist.
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* Applies to specific models only.