Video Category

DSM admin or users belonging to the administrators group can categorize videos into movie, TV show, home video, and TV recording as shown on the left panel of Video Station. Of all the categories, Video Station provides default libraries in which videos of these types can be stored for movie, TV show, and home video. Videos can also be placed in libraries customized by DSM's administrators with the rights to set access permissions on both default and custom libraries.

Before organizing your video files, you need to add video folders for each category and library. Afterwards, you can browse the videos by different classifications, and manage the videos by adding them to favorites, watchlist, or custom collections for quick access.

Create Custom Libraries

Unlike the three systems' default libraries which can be accessed by anyone by default, you as DSM admin or users belonging to the administrators group can create custom libraries and assign access rights to certain users.

Custom libraries will appear on the left panel of Video Station in parallel with system's default libraries in alphabetical order of video type: Movie, TV Show, and Others.

To create, edit, and delete custom libraries:

  1. Go to Settings > Library, and click Create > Create library.
  2. Do the following and click OK.
  3. If you want to modify settings of the library or delete the library, click Edit > Edit library or double-click the library on the library list, or click Delete > Delete library to remove it. Please note that by removing the library all indexed metadata of the videos in this library will also be deleted.

Add Video Folders

You as DSM admin or users belonging to the administrators group need to create video folders for default libraries (movie, TV show, home video), TV recording, and custom libraries first to store your videos before managing files with Video Station. While placing video files, please make sure they are stored by corresponding type.

To add video folders:

  1. Go to Settings > Library (for movie/TV show/home video) or Settings > DTV (for TV recording). If this is your first time using Video Station, a prompt will appear taking you to the setup page once the application is launched. Click OK to continue.
  2. Depending on which type of video folder you want to create, do the following:
  3. If you have selected a correct library to which the folder will be added, click OK; otherwise, you can click the Library drop-down menu to choose another existing library from the list.
  4. Select a display language for video info. As the name suggests, the selected language only applies to the metadata of the type of videos stored in the video folder in question. The default language is English. If you change the language setting, the video info of the original language will be replaced with that of the selected language only if the metadata of the later selected language is available over the Internet.
  5. Click OK.

Tips for naming video files:

When placing videos in respective folders, it is recommended you follow the distinctive naming rules for different types of video files in addition to storing them by type. In doing so, not only files can be properly indexed, metadata can also be correctly retrieved from the Internet to update the video info. Naming guidelines for movies and TV episodes are as below:

To edit and delete video folders (not applicable to the TV recording folder):

  1. Go to Settings > Library.
  2. Select the library whose video folders you want to edit or delete, click the folder on the right panel, and click Edit > Edit folder or Delete > Delete folder from library.
  3. Depending on which mode you have chosen, do the following:

Re-index Video Files

Video files within the specified video folders will be indexed by default, but if files in a folder matching search criterion somehow appear missing, you may need to perform re-index to re-construct the index structure of the files.

You can also re-index the video files to update their metadata periodically.

To re-index video files:

  1. Go to Settings > Library.
  2. Select the folder whose video files you want to re-index on the right panel, and do either of the following:

Browse Video Files

Videos of each category can be sorted by different criteria. You can do any of the following to quickly browse your video files.

Manage Video Collections

You can create your own video collections by adding videos to predefined favorites or watchlist, as well as to your custom collections for quick access.

To create your own video collections, do either of the following:

To add videos to favorites, watchlist, or your custom collections, do either of the following:

To view your favorites, watchlist, or custom collection:

Go to the Collection tab on the left panel, and click Favorites, Watchlist, or [Custom collection name] to see the videos added to the category in question.