Learn how to connect Kodi to my Synology NAS. The management of information in a world full of technology is quite important, as every day we find ourselves generating immense amounts of information that can be expressed in messages with friends, photos that we take at different times of the day or some audiovisual material such as short videos for our social networks.
To store all this information we have at our disposal a multitude of devices, either our smartphones, computers or folders in the cloud.
Although they are often preferred options may lack problems such as taking up much space in memory, be annoying to organize or be vulnerable to attacks by malicious software, so there are alternatives such as NAS.
Which works as an external memory that is connected to our Wi-Fi network and will be responsible for storing all the multimedia files that we indicate.
However, we must keep in mind that, although storing any type of information is the main function of the NAS, it is not limited to dedicate its functions only to this as it can have interactions with other multimedia content management software such as Kodi.
What are the benefits of using Kodi with Synology on your devices?
We must keep in mind that Kodi is an open source software, which is simply responsible for turning a computer into a multimedia manager, capable of managing all the series, videos or movies that are on that device.
Based on the above, if we have a large amount of multimedia content that we want to manage efficiently, Kodi will greatly facilitate the task, which, together with the great possibility of storage offered by NAS, give the possibility of having a quite nice entertainment system
What do we need to be able to use Kodi with Synology?
The first thing to keep in mind before installing the latest version of Kodi on our NAS, is that this device needs special permissions to accept other files on our device.
Therefore, it is mandatory to perform a special procedure in which Network Share Files or NFS must be enabled. This option allows us to share applications to the NAS and, therefore, will allow us to connect the device to Kodi.
What is the procedure to establish an effective connection between Kodi and Synology NAS?
Once we understand that we need requirements to achieve the installation of Kodi on mobile on our NAS device, it is important to highlight that this process is really simple and consists mainly of 3 steps that we will take into account to achieve to include the software that should not take us more than a few minutes of our time.
At first we will need to solve the problem we raised about enabling the NFS on the NAS, after it is confirmed that we have successfully created this rule on our device will be mandatory to create a new rule that will serve to include Kodi to the device, to finally perform the installation and inclusion of the software on NAS.
How to activate NFS on your device?
To perform the first part of the installation to activate your device we will have to follow this simple method:
- First we will go to the control panel of the NAS device.
- With the control panel window open, look for the File Services option.
- Next, look for the Enable NFS checkbox under the NFS Service tab and select it.
- Finally we will finish the NF activation by confirming our choice by clicking on the Apply button.
Correct way to create the NFS rule
Enabled the NFS option we will proceed to create the rule to include the Kodi software in the following way in a safe way:
- We will look for the control panel option again, where we will select the Shared Folder tab on the left.
- We will click on the folder where the multimedia files are located.
- Once this folder is selected, click on the Edit button.
- Now go to the Permissions tab and check the Read/Write for admin box.
- Next, we will need to assign the following settings in the NFS Permissions tab:
- Hostname or IP should be set to “*”, Privilege should be set to “Read/Write”.
- In the Squash section, we will have to select “Assign all users to admin”, while the Security option must have the “sys” option checked.
- We verify that the “Enable asynchronous”, “Allow connections from non-privileged ports” and “Allow users to access mounted subfolders” checkboxes are checked.
- Click OK
- Click OK once more to confirm.
Add the video source
For the last process we will have to follow the following methodology to add the video source step by step in detail:
- Start Kodi on your device.
- We select Files in the Kodi menu by selecting the add videos tab located in the left section.
- Pressing the Browse button, we select an NFS from the list and once the folder opens we proceed to select the IP address shown.
- Select the NAS shared folder to add the folder of your choice.
- Kodi will ask you to assign a name to the new source, so we will type one and follow with the accept button.
- Kodi will ask you a few questions to see what kind of files are stored in the selected folder. From all the options that appear we will select the one that best suits our folder. This data or information will help the Kodi program to find the subtitles of movies, programs, TV series, album covers and other data.
- Finally, it only remains to finish with an update that Kodi requires on the elements of the selected path, in which it will review each folder and will add the files that are in this one.
- When the process is finished, you will be able to see your new source added in the Kodi database and enjoy your streaming platforms as you want.