Using HD200 with a Synology DS409 NAS

[HeadHodge]

Hi,

I am currently using an old pc with VISTA on it and several USB drives connected to it to act as a sort of NAS device on my home network.

I decided to buy and replace it with a Synology DS409 NAS box. http://www.synology.com/enu/products/DS409/index.php

As part of it's features it claims:
3rd-Party Application Integration

Following "Synology Disk Station 3rd-Party Apps Integration Guide" on Synology website, users can customize their Synology Disk Station by installing their favorite applications.

There appears to be some sort of Unix OS contained in the NAS.

Does anyone know if I could get a SageTV server to run on it, to serve movies to my HD200?

I'm pretty sure I should be able to access the movies from my HD200 in standalone mode using the Directory Browser and making shares on my NAS box. But it seems that it would be nice to be able to get a Sage Server running on it, if possible. That way I could also try using PlaceShifter mode from a remote location.

Thanks for any replies.

[brewston]

Hi

I've got a Qnap NAS which sounds similar. It runs a cut down Linux. I can see 2 potential problems with Sage server for Linux :

o The supported distros for Sage is pretty tight (last time I checked)
o That NAS is unlikely to have an x86 CPU (mine doesn't) so any binaries would have to be recompiled

That said, if you want to run the HD200 in standalone mode, it will play any movies shared out under SMB by the NAS

Tim

[HeadHodge]

Originally Posted by brewston

Hi

I've got a Qnap NAS which sounds similar. It runs a cut down Linux. I can see 2 potential problems with Sage server for Linux :

o The supported distros for Sage is pretty tight (last time I checked)
o That NAS is unlikely to have an x86 CPU (mine doesn't) so any binaries would have to be recompiled

That said, if you want to run the HD200 in standalone mode, it will play any movies shared out under SMB by the NAS

Tim

It sounds like your pretty much on the money. My experience is mostly Windows, so I'm not too up on the Unix/Linux stuff. But their 3rd party app guide makes it sound like it's fairly easy to recompile your code. But I guess it depends what the source is written in and what, if any, special hardware features the code utilitzes to do its thing.

I wasn't absolutely sure if the HD200 was going to work with SMB, but I took the best educated guess I could that it would when I bought the NAS. So it's good to know that you are able to verify that it should work ok. I'll find out when I get it delivered this week.

From the short time I've owned and used my HD200, the biggest drawback for me. is the lack of 1080p24 support when running in standalone mode. I'm able to get it to work well when connectiing to a Sage Server running on a my VISTA pc.

One other thing I discoverd is that you can properly play a DVD movie directly from browsing a share on the network by playing the movies VIDEO_TS.VOB file directly. But you cannot play a BluRay properly unless you first create an Import Directory for it on the HD200.

The other problem that has been causing me grief using the HD200, is the inconsistent way it Browses network files. Sometimes the shared network files show up and are accessable, sometimes I get "Invalid Directory", sometimes I get "Enter Authorization User and Password". There is no clear feedback from the UI what's going on, so it's hard to pinpoint what the problem is. The latest firmware release for the HD200 seemed to have helped resolve this problem a great deal, but not totally.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to have problems setting up the shares properly on the NAS to make the HD200 happy.

Here's an excerpt from their 3rd party app (http://download.synology.com/download/ds/userguide/Synology%20NAS%20Server%203rd-Party%20Apps%20Integration%20Guide.pdf):

The table below lists the CPU, architecture, endianness, and Linux kernel version of each Synology NAS Server model. The information will help you determine the correct way to proceed.

DS508, RS408, RS408-RP

Freescale 8543

PowerPC

Big Endian

2.6

To compile an application for the Synology NAS Server, a compiler that runs on a Linux PC is needed in order to generate an executable file for the Synology NAS Server. The process is called "cross compiling", and the set of compiling tools (compiler, linker, etc) is called "toolchain".