Putting the Features to Use
We have now gone through the potential capabilities of the QNAP TS-219P software. What about putting all (or some) of this into practice?
One of the first things I tried out was the Multimedia Station. This option will allow you to access the QNAP Multimedia folder on your local network.
Which leads me to a few items of interest. If you have a question on a particular feature, click on the question mark icon, which will open a browser window similar to the following.
As can be seen, the information presented is rather underwhelming. If you need to learn more about a particular feature, you have 2 paths to pursue. The first is put the resource CD in your drive and open the User Manual. Here you find more information about a particular subject.
You can also go straight to the QNAP forums.
A search on Multimedia Station brought up the following list/post.
I moved some pictures, and eventually some music, over to the Qmultimedia folder
enabled the UPnP Media Server, and checked the configuration settings.
I then copied over one of my ripped CD’s (in .flac format) and the QNAP service would not recognize flac files.
And I checked this over a few days time and still nothing. I went to the QNAP forums and the answer:
It’s up to the media receiver/players to decode the format and playback them as the QNAP NAS does not perform transcoding.
Therefore, if PS3 cannot play a type of file format natively, then it’s not supported.
Here are the media formats supported by TwonkyMedia (UPnP Server):
• .ASF – Windows Media Video (codecs: WMV video and WMA audio)
• .BMP – Bitmap Image
• .FLV, .F1V, .F4V – Standard Quality YouTube Video (codecs: Flash Video: Sorenson Spark H.263 video codec & MP3 audio codec)
• .GIF – Graphics Interchange Format
• .JPG, .JPEG, .JPE – Joint Photographic Experts Group image
• .MP3 – MPEG Audio Layer 3 (codec: MPEG Audio)
• .MP4 – High Quality YouTube Video (codecs: MP4: H.264 video & HE-AAC audio)
• .MP4 – MPEG-4 Video (codecs: Microsoft MPEG-4 v1, Microsoft MPEG-4 v2, Microsoft MPEG-4 v3 & ISO MPEG-4 v1
• .MPEG, .MPG, .MLV – MPEG-1 (codecs: MPEG-1 video & MP2 audio)
• .PNG – Portable Network Graphics
• .WAV – Linear Audio (codecs: Uncompressed PCM-encoded & ADPCM-encoded)
Quite disappointing. But as transcoding normally requires a significant amount of CPU horsepower, I find the lack of this feature understandable.
Moving on to the UPS settings, I plugged my APC UPS into a TS-219P USB port and turned on the option. Instant recognition!
Next, I plugged in my HP C6280 AIO printer. The result:
Nothing. I went to the HP website and HP apparently has Linux drivers, but I am not sure what flavor of Linux QNAP uses, so I did not proceed further.
I did return to the QNAP forums and found a post on printer support. It appears to be hit-and-miss on printers supported. For printers supported natively, check out the printer compatibility list on the QNAP website.
There were several other items of interest that I was not able to check out. Call me a snob, but I had no desire to infect my system with any iTunes stuff (that’s a joke, son!). Some of the other options, for example, I will investigate further when I look at the TS-410. There is a significant amount of remote access services that I did not investigate either. For example, I really was not interested in setting up a web server to publish a website. As this is an area that Linux excels in, I felt comfortable that this would not be a problem doing. As long as you understand what you are doing.
