Best way to remote access à Synology NAS with a Vero 4K+

Help and Support
1

Hi all,

With the arrival of the Vero V I am now looking into using the 4K+ as a remote multimedia player that could find files on my Synology NAS.
There seem to be a few ways to go about this and would love your thoughts on those:

  • VPN : tunnel through a VPN to the NAS drive via OpenVPN or WireGuard. This could be a nice way to connect to the LAN : NFS or plain webDAV ? I could use either a router based VPN or a synology NAS VPN

  • WebDAV : I read somewhere that the protocol was fast and that it worked well for remote devices. Could port forward and use a secure WebDAV directly?

Any other thoughts would be helpful. Obviously concerns are ressources (Vero4K+ handling a VPN on top) and speed (protocols - could not find a lot of user cases with WebDAV).

Videos would be 720p / 1080p tops, nothing too nasty and FTTH all around. MySQL db sharing would be the icing on the cake but not my primary objective for now!

Many thanks for the advice you may have.

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I have such setup here already with couple of Vero IV devices. Havn’t connected the V yet :wink: Waiting to go down to my summer residence for that.

  • For VPN, use wireguard. Fastest and easiest to setup. It is bound to the IP of the interface and requires the least resourdes.
  • For remove access, I used NFS straight and simple, because we don’t yet have the WebDav around running (https://kodi.wiki/view/File_sharing#WebDAV). Most of the time, it is Ok. On some very bad days, I can have issues, but that is because my summer residence only has a 30Mbps downlink and when the kids also watch a 4K movie on their phone screens :angry:

The remote DB access does not make sense. As the DB requests are not optimized, the network induced I/O is soo high that the entire system acts very slugish and is really very slow.

Note that I also have a NAS at my remote location, and sometimes just sync some files over. Kind of keeping me occupied.

But, what also works very nice, is using the builtin browser and play back on local browser.
I mostly do that when on work-travel. Wireguard VPN and I can watch whatever is on the NAS :}

2 Likes
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Tailscale?

4

Thanks for the tips.
WebDAV runs fine on the NAS and is easy to configure on osmc, it works fine, just have no idea about speeds. Currently it runs directly and without a VPN: simple port forwarding does it. Just dubious about security and HTTPS becomes complicated with certificates.

So the idea would be to set up wireguard, and then access files via NFS? It’s this missing link I cannot comprehend: once my Vero is connected on the VPN how does it “get” a LAN IP address (192.168.x.x) and similarly how would it track the NAS IP?

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If you configure the VPN correctly (whichever VPN), there will be a VPN network interface showing an IP of the remote LAN. VON is just a tunnel that connets 2 LAN’s through the “bad” internat.
That’s how you can connect directly to the remote location.
The NAS IP would be its “regular” IP. Simple as that.

6

Thank you for your responses.
I’ve figured out the issue : the NAS firewall…
That and possibly the fact that WireGuard is easier to configure than OpenVPN (I haven’t retested with the latter).

To sum up the process :

In my case a temporary disabling of the firewall is what gave the game away.
Next time I’ll be on vacation I should now be able to use my Vero4K+ for remote content… Happy days.

Of course very variable with bitrate but 720p seems fine on an LTE connection, not so much 1080p. I’m hoping with FTTH it should be fine. If not, I may go via the direct webdav route (not wireguard in between) but it doesn’t seem as secure.

Thanks again for the help.

7

Or install Plex on your NAS which can transcode when your don’t have the bandwidth.