Tong Family

OK, I have a Synology and I have to admit I use about 1% of the applications that are there, you can run docker containers, they have all sorts of dedicated applications, but to reduce the attack surface area for various SmartHome devices, I like to have purpose devices since the cost is relatively low. So for my Homebridge, I use a Raspberry Pi and the Synology is just for storing files.

Still, there are two applications I do use on the thing:

1. Hyperbackup to Google Drive. If you buy a $10/month Google Workspace, you get their Gmail, but also 2PB of storage. So I’ve been pushing end to end encrypted backups of the Synology up there. This used to work horribly because the old Google Backup and Sync choked on these files, but the new Google Drive works way better, it doesn’t load or read directories that are not synced, so you can have TBs of data up there and you can still use it to store small files. This thing also supports backups to the more traditional AWS S3 and other places, but for a home server, this is not a bad hack 🙂
2. Media Server and Indexing Service and Video Station. This is actually sort of crazy complicated, but there are two services, the first is Media Server which is a fancy way of saying that instead of just file protocols, the Synology supports DDLNA and UPnP, so that specific devices like say an LG OLED TV (hint hint) can browse and load video files. This is how HD Homerun works to public cable signals. The confusing thing is that when you enable it nothing happens. That is because you have to start their Control Panel > Indexing Service. And yes, I’m not quite sure why one is a Control Panel thing and the other a separate application, but that’s the way it is organized. and tell it where your video files are. There is a default which is /videos but otherwise it doesn’t search them out. This also Video Station which provides a web interface to your music collection which is kind of cool if you just want to access it from a browser. Basically, the Synology taxonomy seems to be that a service is in the operating system, a Server is a utility that runs as a separate application and a Station is an end-user application 🙂

Now, what quality are you actually getting from these various settings? Specifically, can you really get 4K with HDR output from them. Well, with the Video Station when you click play, it says that it can play in original resolution but with the Media Server on an LG C1, yes you get the full 4K with HDR stream and you get the digital bits so Atmos seems to work. Nice job LG and Synology!