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18 thoughts on “Plex Media Server vs Synology Video Station for NAS

  1. Thanks for your Vs !! You have resolved a different problem I was having with Plex on Synology using Nvidia Shield Pro; not being able to have separate profiles. I’ll shortly achieve this by using Plex as one “profile” and VS for the other “profile”. Maybe even get the Firestick as for VideoStation and keep Plex Player on the Nvidia, unplug the Firestick too restrict access..

    Cheers! Thanks for your awesome channel!

    Looking forward to DSM 7.2 and seeing how to install DSM and Plex Media Server on Synology with 2.5″ SSDs as Volume 1 and then Volume 2 a seperate RAID array of HDDs (and maybe some M.2 filled slots for SSD cache at the same time?!????????)
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  2. I use plex for a couple of years and i’m frustrated because i have constant HDD activity on it. I stoped all the logging, background activity services and still, it has activity. If i stop plex, the HDDs stop,
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  3. I have found that if you name your video media with the {imdb-tt…..} tag (for Plex) and the {tmdb-…} tag (for VS), both seem to perform equally well. What Plex does that VS doesn’t do, is allow for tagging auxiliary media, like -scene, -behindthescenes, etc. VS will treat those as distinct files, and there’s usually no good poster art for those.
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  4. I’ve used Video Station for years, both on an older (413j) model and a newer (920+) model. Generally I love it for the media organization and auto-downloading of metadata. It can generally handle playing of all formats in-app and when streaming to the DSvideo app on a phone.

    However, VS seems to be frustratingly hobbled when streaming video to Chromecast ultra. It doesn’t seem to support transcoding x265 to a format the CCu understands at all, and there are some audio formats that aren’t supoprted as well – DTS among them. Whether this is a limitation of VS or of the CCu, I’ve never been able to get a straight answer for – both devices *should* support these formats, but VS doesn’t seem to .

    Anyone have any suggestions (other than “use Plex”) for this setup?
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  5. I am using Video Station with my Chromecast with Google TV. Many of my videos are encoded as AVI. MP4s and others work fine. I have used VLC to convert a few AVI videos to MP4 but I have a lot of them. My preference would be to have Chromecast recognize VLC as my default video player. I do prefer Video Station. It works fine on all my other devices. Has anyone with the Chromecast solved this?
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  6. Hello! I let me share my experience/questions both at the same time. I have a DS1618+ and lots of movies on it and a couple of smart TVs. Most of the times I am able to browse the DS folders from the TV directly or just stream on the TV via the DS app on my iPhone/iPad. Problem however is with some mkv or mp4s that have DTS audio. It just won’t stream at all or won’t have a sound. So I bought Apple TV thinking this £170 worth of gadget will sort it out for me (with the annoyance of the home screen offering me things/media I bloody don’t want). However much to my disappointment the Apple TV is just as useless. Despite downloading the DS app on it and browsing the videos on the NAS it failed to play most of the movies, even after fiddling with all settings in the DS itself and Apple TV too. So I am returning this useless gadget.
    Back to the problem. If I play movies from the DS on my mobile/iPad I can use the VLC and although it’s an average software, it does work though! But that’s a solution only for the mobile devices.
    I had Plex too. But for gods sake. Adding/sorting libraries was freeking pain in the a**! I was astonished how annoying and difficult to use the Plex is, absolutely ridiculous. So I stopped the subscription and gave it the finger. I can’t understand what’s the rave about this stupid service.
    Back to the question. Has anyone found an easy and convenient way to stream movies (including DTS formats) on the TV via/from your DS whether streaming it with the mobile or with the help of something like android box or whatever.
    Much appreciated in advance.
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  7. Great help for a first time user. Quick Q: I’m able to manually add an SRT subtitle track for a movie but this does not equate when I mirror it to my television, nor when I access the movie through the DS Video app on a Firestick. Is there a work around that you know of?
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  8. Plex may have not pulled the metadata, but unlike Video station you can manually match metadata to a file. New to Video Station, but there is no apparent way to search for or fix unmatched movie/TV Show files, like there is in Plex. Plus the only “Live TV” it seems to allow is online streaming services. Plex automatically picked up, scanned channels, and was ready to go with my HDHomeRun tuner. Video Station is still “Indexing” everything I added as “Others”. Can’t even see the files listed yet.

    Update: Found how to match metadata: Click on 3 dots bottom right/Click “Search Internet”/ Then “Search”. The rest should be obvious I think. But I really don’t like the multiple pages. Plex puts them all on one (Long if need be) page so you just have to keep scrolling down.

    2nd Update: The only 4k I have here is DJI drone video, and it don’t like it at all. It’ll play 10 or 20 seconds and then just freeze. Whereas Plex may pause once in a while, but most times it plays it fine. Update B: It don’t like 1080p drone video either… whereas once again, Plex has had zero problems with.

    Also, I like the “Click on screen” play/pause thing, which Plex has, and apparently YS does not.
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  9. Awesome article, thank you very much, i just wished it covered a bit on what are the supported media files/formats. I have tried DS video but found that it couldnt play some of the files from my library, mkv for example, i looked it up and found many having similar issues where moving to Plex solved it. Is this a limitation?

  10. *** When I use Video Station to link to an external USB on the synology, it copies it to my NAS. I just want it to use the external USB as a source, not back it up. I just now play directly from the folder until I find a solution. Great video!!!
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