Background
Recently, I set up my home network for digital content sharing. I will take some notes here for future reference.
Devices
- Router: Netgear Nighthawk AX8 AX6000
- Supports Wifi 6, MU-MIMO, link aggregation (802.3ad).
- Cost: $327.
- NAS: Synology DS418play
- 4-bay, 2GB RAM, supports 4K transcoding.
- Cost: $402.
- Ethernet cable: 2xCAT 8
- Not quite necessary since DS418play ports are 1k Mbps.
- Cost: $12.
- HDD: WD Red 4TB
- Cost: $88 each.
- UPS: APC Back-UPS 650VA UPS
Setup
- Router and NAS setup are pretty straightforward.
- Link aggregation
- Needs to configure this on both router and NAS.
- Synology doc
- Time machine backup for macOS
- The default file transfer protocol between macOS and NAS is SMB. Here are some tips to optimize it.
- Apple support doc
- Turn off packet signing
- Result: Read speed of a 1.48GB file increased from 58 MB/s to 95 MB/s.
- UPS: just connect then enable it in Hardware settings.
Synology NAS
- I tried to manually configure DNS server to
8.8.8.8
in Control Panel -> Network for external access. But this setting seemed to cause some interruptions for DSM connection. Also, transmission jobs experienced frequent 0-speed time. It may not be a good idea. - Move installed packages between volume: unofficial tricks.
BT
I found the official Download station package in DSM is not quite optimized for BT downloading. Transmission is a better choice. Here are steps to install and setup in Synology DSM.
- Add “synocommunity” in Package Center -> Settings -> Package Sources.
- Location: http://packages.synocommunity.com
- Set Trust Level to “Synology Inc. and trusted publishers” in Package Center -> Settings -> General.
- Install “Transmission” in Package Center -> Community.
- Create folders to be used.
- “download” for completed downloads.
- “watch”: Transmission will start a download task automatically once a torrent file is added here.
- “incomplete” for downloading files.
- Start the installation in Package Center; fill in all the folder information and credentials.
- Set up Read/Write permission for Group “sc-download” for those folders in Control Panel -> Group -> sc-download -> edit -> Permissions.
- All done! View the web UI at http://your_nas_ip:9091
- The package can be started or stopped in the Package Center.
- Available GUI: transgui.
Kodi & Emby
- Use Kodi native play mode instead of add-on mode:
- Set up optional shared network folder in emby.
- e.g., map
volume1/video
tosmb://ds918/video
thus network devices can recognize the path.
- e.g., map
- Input your credentials at kodi: File manager -> Add source -> Add a network location.
- Change the emby settings in kodi.
- Need to turn off forced HTTP playback as well.
- Set up optional shared network folder in emby.
- Cannot import external subtitles
- Make sure the subtitle file has the same name as the video file.
- Garbled Chinese subtitles
- Settings -> Player -> Language -> Subtitles: Change the language, font and the Character set.
- Download subtitles automatically
- Settings -> Player -> Language -> Download services: Use OpenSubtitles.org for both default services. Input your credentials for it.
- If weird things happened (e.g., no playback), you may wanna reset local database.
M
is the shortcut for subtitle menu, etc.