So I’ve had a Synology 1817+ NAS for a couple of months now and been using their package Video Station to index and sort the metadata of my movies and tv shows.

One of the great features of their indexing is that it utilizes some open source alternatives like TMDb and TheTVDB.

If we look at their own list of sources they claim to be using the following:



Problem is that you’re not able to choose which sources you’d like prioritized, so everything that’s automatically indexed is using the metadata of the first source that it can reach which isn’t always is never the preferred source.

A small example of the indexing gone wrong:



Which I then manually edited to use the right source:



The sources list for the particular episode looks like this:



The source that I would consider crap is one provided by Synology themselves and are chosen first by Video Station, as they are discovered before the results from TheTVDB.

So how can we fix this permanently? How can we make it so that we won’t have to manually fix the metadata for every single episode of every single tv show / movie?!

Well, I started looking into the config files for Video Station.

I found a file called plugin.conf located under: /volume1/@appstore/VideoStation/etc

In this file I found the following code:

"movie": {

"Movie":{

"prepare": [{"id":"com.synology.FileAssets", "enable":true}],

"metadata":[{"id":"com.synology.Synovideodb", "enable":true},

{"id":"com.synology.TheMovieDb", "enable":true}],

"similar": [{"id":"com.synology.TheMovieDb.Similar", "enable":true}],

"extra": []

}

},

"tvshow": {

"TV Show": {

"prepare": [{"id":"com.synology.FileAssets", "enable":true}],

"metadata":[{"id":"com.synology.Synovideodb", "enable":true},

{"id":"com.synology.TheTVDB", "enable":true}],

"similar": [],

"extra": []

}



It must have been my lucky day, I thought! I changed the value for com.synology.Synovideodb for both movie and tvshow from true to false and thought that it would solve all of my problems.

It didn’t… It was still utilizing the metadata provided by Synology, instead of data from TheTVDB. I even tried disabling and re-enabling the entire Video Station package in the hopes that it just had to reload the file, but I was still out of luck.

So I continued digging into the files of the Video Station package files via SSH and found a folder called syno_synovideodb under: /volume1/@appstore/VideoStation/plugins

I tried renaming this folder to syno_synovideodb_old to try and avoid loading the plugin used, but it had no effect.

Just for the fun of it, even though I had no expectation of it working, I tried to move the syno_synovideodb folder into another directory instead:

sudo mv /volume1/@appstore/VideoStation/plugins/syno_synovideodb /volume1/@appstore/VideoStation/plugins/temp/syno_synovideodb

I then tried to search for sources for the episode I was testing with previously:



Success!! It only found one source and it was from TheTVDB and all future episodes of any tv show added after this, was automatically indexed with metadata from TheTVDB only! Hurray!

I hope that this little hint can help anyone else tired of manually indexing all of their stuff in their Synology Video Station.