Other useful apps
PLEX AND DLNA COVER A LOT OF SINS, SO TO SPEAK, BUT THERE ARE SOME ADDITIONAL TOOLS YOU CAN INSTALL ON YOUR NAS AND MEDIA PLAYERS TO MAKE IT EVEN MORE AWESOME.
WEB GALLERIES AVAILABLE ON QNAP, SYNOLOGY, ASUSTOR AND THECUS
This is not an app per se. Rather, it’s a series of tools available on the above mentioned platforms for publishing your media through a web browser. They’re known as ‘Stations’: Photo Station, Video Station, Music Station. They come as part of the default apps selection on most NAS boxes from the above mentioned vendors. What they do is take the libraries you’ve configured in the media indexing/ media library setup (see the section on configuring DLNA back over the page) and publish them through a web browser.
For example, let’s say you’ve included a directory of photos in your NASs library/ media index. If you open up Photo Station from the NAS interface, your browser will open a window and you’ll see all your photos arranged in a web gallery. Your music and videos will be arranged in a similar gallery, with viewing/listening available in the browser itself. In some cases (on Synology and QNAP, for example), you can actually use these galleries to push media to players like DLNA media players and the Apple TV.
In order to see these galleries, you’ll generally need to be on the same LAN, though with the mobile apps from the various NAS providers, you may also be able to view your galleries remotely.
DOWNLOAD STATION AND TRANSMISSION AVAILABLE ON ALL MAJOR NAS PLATFORMS
If you’re a big BitTorrent user, you can actually get your NAS to do the downloading for you. A web-based BitTorrent client is available for nearly all the major platforms, allowing you to log on and start BitTorrent downloads from any web browser that can talk to your NAS. The downloads can be saved directly to a library folder on the NAS.
In the case of Synology, QNAP and Asustor, you have Download Station, which can be accessed from the App Centre/App drawer. It’s a basic BitTorrent client, letting you add torrents through the NAS admin interface.
Alternatively, there’s Transmission, which is available for most NAS platforms. Transmission is managed through its own web page, which can be bookmarked directly sparing you the need to log into your router admin.
Find Transmission in the App/Package centre of your NAS, then install and open it. The Transmission web page will pop-up, and you can log in with the NAS username and password (default: admin/admin). Then you’ll see the Transmission web interface, on which you can add new torrents and view current downloads.
RESILIO (BITTORRENT SYNC) AVAILABLE ON MOST NAS PLATFORMS
Resilio is not directly related to media streaming, but it can be a useful way to automatically share media between your various devices and your NAS. It basically just syncs folders between devices.
Install Resilio on both your PC and NAS. You’ll find it in your NAS box’s App/Package centre and the PC version at resilio.com.
Start it up on your PC, which will launch the web interface. This can be bookmarked for direct access (the NAS interface can also be bookmarked).
Create an account first, then click on Add Folder. This is a folder that will be available for syncing on other devices. Choose a folder. Next, click on the Key tab, then copy the string of letters and numbers under Read Only to the clipboard.
Now log into your NAS and launch Resilio on that (again, bookmark the page). Click on the arrow next to Add folder and select ‘Enter a Key or Link’. Paste the key in. The folder from your PC’s copy of Resilio will now appear on your NAS’s copy of Resilio. The NAS will start syncing that folder, making a copy of its contents on the NAS. As long as Resilio is running on both the PC and NAS, these will remain in sync.
SONARR AVAILABLE FOR MOST NAS PLATFORMS
Sonarr is an amazing tool for automated downloads of TV shows over BitTorrent and from Newsgroups. You can run it on your NAS, and it can be set up to automatically grab new episodes of TV shows as they appear and save them to the appropriate media folders.
Getting it installed on a NAS can be a little tricky, since it’s generally not available in most app stores. Instead, you can use Docker, or go to sonarr.tv and look for the guide to installing it on various NAS platforms. Just as it is on a PC, Sonarr on a NAS is managed through a web interface, which can be bookmarked.
Once you get it running, it’s relatively easy to use. Just click on Add Series and search for a TV series. Then you need to set up an indexer and download client in the settings (you can use Transmission or Download Station).
When new episodes of a selected TV show are available, it will then automatically send a request to the indexer to see if a download is available, then it will send a message to the download client to grab and download the episode at your selected quality level.
SICKRAGE AVAILABLE FOR MOST NAS PLATFORMS
Like Sonarr, SickRage is a tool that automates the monitoring and downloading of TV episodes from BitTorrent and Newsgroups. It’s available for most NAS platforms, though like Sonarr, it’s not necessarily to be found in the App section. Like as not, you’ll have to do a manual install by going to sickrage.github.io, look for the Download Ready Installers page and download the package for your particular model or NAS. Then you have to use the manual install/upload option in the App/ Package centre of your NAS.
It runs in a web interface, meaning that you can bookmark it and go to it directly when you want to update it. Once it’s installed, SickRage is even easier to get running than Sonarr since it doesn’t even require an external download app. You just add a new show, pick where you’d like to save it and then customise the download options like quality and whether you want all episodes to be listed as ‘wanted’. You can then go into the settings and add indexers — these are the sites that SickRage looks for new download links in.
Then in the show view, you can flag individual episodes as wanted or unwanted. If they’re listed as wanted, SickRage will do its best to find and download them.
KODI AND INFUSE AVAILABLE FOR NUMEROUS PLATFORMS (PCS, MOBILES, NAS)
Kodi and Infuse aren’t apps you install on your NAS — unless you have a NAS with an HDMI port, in which case you might use Kodi — but they’re the premium platforms for playing media stored on a NAS. They can play just about any media stored on a DLNA server.
Kodi can be grabbed from kodi.tv, and it’s also available for Android on Google Play. In Kodi, you configure ‘sources’ — these are the directories and network services from which you’ll be drawing media.
To add a DLNA media server as a source in Kodi, click on Videos (or pictures or music), then on Add Videos. You’ll see a window for browsing for sources. Click on Browse, then select UPnP devices. It will show you a list of all the DLNA servers it detects on the network. You can select a particular one, but you can also pick none of them and just click OK. If you choose none, the source that appears will be UPnP Media Servers (Auto Discover); selecting that in the future when browsing will show you all the DLNA servers on the network.
Kodi is not available for unjailbroken Apple platforms. If you have a 4th-gen Apple TV or iOS device, your best option is instead an app called Infuse ( firecore.com/infuse; you only need the free version). In Infuse, go to ‘Settings > Shares’ to add a DLNA server to its library.
MAKEMKV AND HANDBRAKE AVAILABLE FOR WINDOWS
This is another toolset for your PC rather than your NAS. If you’d like to put your own media on the NAS, you’ll need these.
MakeMKV ( makemkv.com) is the best app we’ve found for ripping your DVD and Blu-ray discs and converting them into MKV files that you can store on your media server. It keeps all subtitles and audio tracks intact. Its operation is very simple — just put the disc in you drive, and click on the ‘Disc > Disk’ button.
While it rips the video, it does not, however, transcode the video to reduce the file size. That means that your DVD rips can be up to 9GB and your Blu-ray rips can be up to 50GB in size. If you’d like to compress them a bit more effectively, Handbrake ( handbrake.fr) is your go-to application.
Handbrake can seem daunting at first, but with the presets and a little bit of time with the help documentation, you should be able to figure out how to reduce your disc rips down to a manageable size. After all, even on a NAS, space is not unlimited.