Hi folks, I know many of you are elite system admins running custom built NAS solutions networked together with servers tucked in every spare closet and space in your home, which is awesome. Having said that, I am still newer in my self hosted journey and my existing knowledge is more from running Linux as an daily driver OS since 2005 rather than actually hosting anything. For this reason, even though it’s not ideologically pure, I opted for a SynologyNAS for simplicity of management. This was the next step for me after dipping my toes into self hosting after messing around with some VMs and an old laptop.
With the new DSM update, Synology removes several apps and codec support, most notably h.256. I experienced something similar on Linux where I cannot view videos recorded on my action cam. I don’t know how many of these photos and videos I have in my file system, but my NAS is local network only and basically contains my photos, videos, ebooks, documents, etc. in separate shares containing a hierarchical folder structure.
My questions:
- How can I most easily search my NAS for files needing the removed codecs so I can gauge how much this will actually effect me? I want to approach the problem in a simple way that I can understand.
- With Linux and Synology DSM both dropping codecs, I am considering just taking the storage hit to convert to h.264 or another format. What would you recommend? I havent recoded video in ages so I’m learning from scratch, but I do have a desktop with dual 1080s that should be up to the task.
- I access my shares via dolphin on KDE. When it comes to thumbnails for a remote filesystem like this are they generated and stored on my PC or will the PC save them to the folder on the NAS where other programs could use them. I just want to make sure I can visually browse the videos and photos on my NAS and have them show up appropriately.
I’m a bit frustrated and kind of favoring just moving things to a different format. I bought a Synology device for an easier experience, and having said that, even if I built a custom solution, didn’t Debian remove h.265 as well? I will probably do a TrueNAS or whatever at some point, but I’ve had way to many family events in the last few years and have to take an easier path right now.
My Linux knowledge is intermediate and my self-hosting knowledge is still fairly basic.
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If you are accessing your files through dolphin on your Linux device this change has no effect on you. In that case Synology is just sharing files and it doesn’t know or care what kind of files they are.
This change is mostly for people who were using the Synology videos app to stream videos. I assume Plex is much more common on Synology and I don’t believe anything changed with Plex’s h265 support.
If you were using the built in Synology videos app and have objections to Plex give Jellyfin a try. It should handle h265 and doesn’t require a purchase like Plex does to unlock features like mobile apps.
Linux isn’t dropping any codecs and should be able to handle almost any media you throw at it. Codec support depends on what app you are using, and most Linux apps use ffmpeg to do that decoding. As far as I know Debian hasn’t dropped support for h265, but even if they did you could always compile your own ffmpeg libraries with it re-enabled.
How can I most easily search my NAS for files needing the removed codecs
The mediainfo command is one of the easiest ways to do this on the command line. It can tell you what video/audio codecs are used in a file.
With Linux and Synology DSM both dropping codecs, I am considering just taking the storage hit to convert to h.264 or another format. What would you recommend?
To answer this you need to know the least common denominator of supported codecs on everything you want to play back on. If you are only worried about playing this back on your Linux machine with your 1080s then you fully support h265 already and you should not convert anything. Any conversion between codecs is lossy so it is best to leave them as they are or else you will lose quality.
If you have other hardware that can’t support h265, h264 is probably the next best. Almost any hardware in the last 15 years should easily handle h264.
When it comes to thumbnails for a remote filesystem like this are they generated and stored on my PC or will the PC save them to the folder on the NAS where other programs could use them.
Yes they are generated locally, and Dolphin stores them in ~/.cache/thumbnails on your local system.
Thank you for the incredibly detailed and patient reply. I will try some additional applications like Jellyfin and Immich instead of the built in synology stuff. It was always my intention to have docker images running on a separate server but stress went up and free time went down and I settled for using the built in applications. Luckily, I havent significantly invested in video center as I just used it to preview files while sorting in DSM.
I had some issues with copying files over SMB. I can write fine, I can delete, but copying seems to fail. My guess is because the local user on my laptop is different than the user on the SMB share. In any case, I was using the file explorer in DSM in Firefox to sort through old media by hand. I’ll have to use NFS and continue to sort via Dolphin.
I’m glad to hear the situation isn’t as dire as I had initially imagined. Perhaps I’m a bit shell shocked from all the enshittification that I jumped to worst case scenarios.
Recode to AV1, free and open codec with a better compression and quality than 265.
Its future proof and more and more supported out of the box everywhere.
Either go tdarr, or check https://github.com/gardiol/media_fixer for a neat bash script capable of find and convert your videos automatically
