Per-Plexing Synology

Demise of Video Station

For those of you who don’t know (why are you reading this post…), Synology’s Video Station package provides a graphical front end to any video content you store on your Synology NAS. This post primarily came about because Synology, with its latest update to DSM (DiskStation Manager v7.2.2 onwards), dropped support of the Video Station package.

NAS Upgrade

The second driver for this post was that my previous Synology NAS, a DS213+, was limited to upgrading only as far as DSM 6.2.4; Synology announced EoL for this version would be October 1, 2024. This forced me to upgrade my NAS Q2 2024 to a DS423+. Thus, with an increase from 2 to 4 bays, and the purchase of larger capacity drives (the MTTF of the decades old drives in the DS213+ was foreseeable!), I now had a great deal more storage available.

‘Plexed

So what to do if, like me, you used Video Station but wanted to ensure you can continue to be up-to-date with the DSM – you might as well because it is inevitable that Synology will drop support for v7.2.1 at some point in the future.

There are a number of packages out there that can be installed on DSM which will give you equivalent functionality to Video Station. I decided to opt for Plex. In part, because it is readily available on all the LG televisions we have at home, and also on Android devices.

Best practice configuration of your video library under Plex is discussed later.

Up to the Job

The last piece of the “lets rip my whole video collection” puzzle was the purchase of a high spec gaming PC earlier this year which, once the disc has been decrypted to a file, reduced the whole ripping process from some 8+ hours per disc on an aging laptop to … no more than 15minutes. Which is just insane and a testament to the march of technology!

With these jigsaw pieces in place, I now had everything to hand to create the big picture, namely ripping my entire video collection and have it available to play, on any device, anywhere.

To do so, three more pieces were required:

A Blu-ray player
MakeMKV
Handbrake

Blu-ray Player

A list of Blu-ray players that are ideally suited to the task of ripping, and which can also be leveraged to rip 4K UHD discs, is listed in the MakeMKV forums.

Pioneer seem to be the most highly regarded brand. Alas, I have a decades old Samsung Blu-ray with a micro USB v1 connector. I’m sure a newer drive would be quicker, but I’m not sure I can justify the cost of a new one given that I don’t believe it would be night & day quicker. In addition, since I currently only have a HD Blu-ray collection, there is no driver to upgrade due to 4K requirements.

Obviously, things would change if I decide to go down the 4K UHD route which, given my ownership of OLED UHD televisions, is likely… But, for the time being I’ll stick with what I’ve got.

MakeMKV

MakeMKV reads the contents of discs, decrypts them, and then writes the various titles out to your storage device.

It’s a fairly easy tool to use, but a great deal of tedious grunt work can be removed from the ripping process by editing your preferences to ensure that only English tracks (audio and subtitles) are selected.

If you don’t do so, you will have to laboriously deselect the French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese etc tracks either in MakeMKV or later in Handbrake. Human error in this manual process will inevitably creep in and the processing of this extra data just gobbles up more CPU cycles, storage and, when streamed, your available bandwidth. You know it makes sense…

Handbrake

Handbrake is a tool that digests the MKV file output of MakeMKV and converts it into whatever type of file your heart desires. Most of the time this will use some form of compression algorithm to greatly reduce the size of the resulting file.

In my case, I wish to retain the visual and audio integrity of the media; otherwise I might as well use an online streaming service to watch them.

Audio Selection Behaviour

When creating my own preset, for the audio Selection Behaviour, use of Passthru retains the high quality of soundtracks; with anything else being encoded in AAC stereo.

Subtitles

Note that the Selection Behavior for Subtitles is configured to only select English, but since we weeded out only the English versions when ripping the disc with MakeMKV, you may think specifying it again is somewhat superfluous.

However, if a foreign language is spoken at some point in the film, HandBrake can perform a scan of the source title to try and detect if portions of the title are in a foreign language. If it detects this, it will add the appropriate (English) subtitle track automatically.

Video Encoding

Finally, the Video Encoder used is the H264 format. The newer H265 standard would result in a reduced file size, but it’s not as widely supported, hence the use of H264 for the time being.

The Quality slider is set at a value recommended for 1080p Blu-ray. Since this is a logarithmic scale, the higher the quality setting, the significantly bigger the file. The consensus is that, from this value (23) onwards, it’s a case of diminishing returns. Obviously, this would require tweaking for lower quality DVDs and higher quality UHD discs.

Lastly, since my PC has an NVidia graphics card, I configure the Video Preferences to use the associated driver to encode the files. Doing this greatly reduces the time taken to encode the files.

Handbrake Preferences window: selection of Nvidia NVENC driver

Once the discs are ripped and the resulting files are ready to be moved over to the NAS, the configuration of the media library have to be considered.

Plex Configuration

Due to the simplicity of installation of any package on DSM, there’s not a lot to say about Plex installation and configuration, but here are a handful:

When initially opening Plex from DSM to configure it, the URL might be incorrect. Read this Synology Community forum post for details.
To ensure the correct collection of online data by Plex, ensure that the file for the title is spelt correctly and includes the year of release in brackets i.e. Alien (1979).mkv
If there are multiple editions of a title, retain the year of the original release for both editions, and ensure the title name is suffixed with edition metadata, as per the example below:

/Alien (1979) Alien (1979) {edition-Theatrical Version}.mkv Alien (1979) {edition-Director's Cut}.mkv

Additional Info
Follow the Plex recommended method of organising your video collection by using a directory structure. See the Alien example below. After that, ensure that “Special Features” tracks are renamed to some meaningful title and then copy them into the appropriate directory.

/Movies
  /Alien (1979) {edition-Theatrical Version}
    /Behind The Scenes
    /Deleted Scenes
    /Featurettes
    /Interviews
    /Other
    /Scenes
    /Shorts
    /Trailers
    Alien (1979) {edition-Theatrical Version}.mkv
  /Alien (1979) {edition-Director's Cut}¹
    Alien (1979) {edition-Director's Cut}.mkv

This approach saves the hassle of having to rename a title and suffixing it with identifying metadata i.e.

Alien Deleted Scenes.mkv
to
Alien Deleted Scenes-deleted.mkv

A tedious task no matter how large or small your video collection! It’s a great deal easier to ensure a sensibly named file is moved into the appropriate directory.

Additional Info

Note that different editions of a title should be stored in their own uniquely identified directory ↩︎

McIntosh 812

0-6-0 Steam Locomotive

CR 812, BR 57566

BR Black Late Crest

18pin DCC Sound

Wiki info

828 Blog

Preserved British Steam Locomotives

The locomotives were produced during the time that John McIntosh was Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Caledonian Railway (1895 -1914). The first 17 locomotives were built at the Caledonian’s St. Rollox works during 1899 (Nos. 812 – 828). A further 12 were built at St. Rollox later that year.

At the turn of the last century the Caledonian found itself to be short of engines suitable for mineral traffic. With St. Rollox fully committed to other work, it turned to three outside contractors (Neilson Reid, Sharp Stewart and Dübs) to build 50 more engines between them using the Class 812 drawings, orders being placed on December 29th 1898. The engines from the outside contractors differed from the original batch only in having Drummond style number plates (the originals having the McIntosh type) and three link couplings.

The first 17 locomotives were officially mixed traffic locomotives but were turned out in the distinctive Caledonian blue livery. Some had Westinghouse pumps and screw link couplings to enable them to be used on passenger services. The remaining members of the class spent much of their time working coal and other mineral trains around Scotland. Under LMS ownership after 1923, the class were painted in black livery and lost their Westinghouse pumps.

The first of the class was withdrawn in 1946 and the last in 1963. No.828 is the sole survivor having been earmarked for preservation by the Caledonian Railway 828 Trust for display at the Glasgow Museum of Transport then located in a former Glasgow Corporation Tram Depot. It was restored at Cowlairs Works during 1966 and painted in Caledonian Railway blue.

It was the long-term ambition of the owners to restore the locomotive to full working order and in October 1980 it was moved to the Strathspey Railway where it was rebuilt. Returning to steam in 1992 and to operational traffic in 1993 where it is currently in use.

The locomotive is due major works attention in 2020. Bachmann and Rails of Sheffield would like to thank The Caledonian Railway 828 Trust, the owners of No. 828, for providing facilities and encouragement to turn this project into reality.

Scottish Class Locomotives

Until this sentence is removed, consider this page to be a work in progress.

In attempting to meddle with model rail, I’ve realised that it can be quite a task to keep track of what locomotives and rolling stock were in use north of the border in the Scottish Region (ScR). Sure, typical of nerds providing information for nerds and not being mindful of newcomers, there are online resources which will provide the lower level detail of what loco number was assigned to what region/shed between what dates. However, at this point in the journey, I only require the higher level view of what type of loco was ever present in the ScR region before I get down to the lower level of details and make a purchase decision!

This is my attempt at an aide memoir (when gawping at adverts, web sites etc!) of what I could utilise in any semi-realistic ScR based layout.

Class	ScR	Notes
21	✔️	See Class 29
22	❌	Western Region, nicknamed Baby Warships due to the similarities with the D600 Warship which would eventually usurp them.
24	✔️	This class was largely concentrated in ScR between 1960-76. For detailed info about this class is available @ www.derbysulzers.com
25	✔️	Nicknamed Rats due to them being spotted almost everywhere on the network
26	✔️	Info about all the class histories etc is available @ https://6lda.wordpress.com/
27	✔️	By the end of the 60s, the entire class had become concentrated in Scotland
28	❌	Banished to north England, based at Carnforth and Carlisle Upperby
29	✔️	Originally these were class 21. In attempt to address reliability issues modifications were carried out between 1963 and 1965, mainly at the Polmadie Traction & Rolling Stock Depot in Glasgow to install Paxman engines.
31
33	❌	Southern Region (SR) designed locomotive.
35	❌	Western Region. The non-standard hydraulic transmission meant they were withdrawn from service by 1975

A list of locomotive classes applicable to ScR layouts

Rolling Stock

Not suitable Blood & Custard Maunsell – these were SR region

Classification of UK Trains

Below is a table of the different classification of operational trains, and their speed limits.

Note that whilst postal trains are technically freight (unless carrying Royal Mail staff on board) they tend to be class “1” trains, which are signalled as Express Passenger.

The full classification of trains in the UK is…….

Class	Type	Max MPH
0	Light engine	60 _{Unless line speed 90mph or more, in which case 75mph}
1	Express passenger or Postal
2	Local Passenger
3	Parcels train
4	Fully fitted freight train	75
5	Empty coaching stock
6	Fully fitted freight train	60
7	Fully fitted freight train	45
8	Fully fitted freight train	35
9a	Partially fitted freight train	35
9b	Unfitted Freight Train	25

Table of UK Train Classifications

In the modern era, Class 9 trains do not run anymore (e.g. every freight train is fully fitted), and with very few, if any vacuum braked wagons around, class 8’s may now only exist in the history books.

I only drive 1’s, 2’s and 5’s these days, but i have driven them all throughout my career, and i can say that on a class 9b, 25mph seems very fast indeed when approching a red signal downhill with 1500 tons pushing you, with only the locomotive brakes!