Client video gallery.

[Enquiries]

I teach an on camera acting class in New York. Currently edit and edit encode all the footage. From there I upload it to my website which has a video gallery directory for my clients to view or download. This is time very time consuming as I have to export and then upload.

I bought an asustor lockerstor 4 gen 2. My goal is if I export the video directly to a folder in the NAS I can send a link of that folder for my students to view and download their videos. This is possible. I’ve got a certificate and everything but the webpage has no thumbnail so my clients can see which video is there’s like it is on my website.

I’m trying to find an app or plugin to allow the videos to be presented in medium or large icon as they would in say windows explorer. If I don’t, my students will be overwhelmed trying to find their clips.

I’ve been researching and researching and I’ve run out of patience. This seems like kinda old fashioned tech that doesn’t seem to exist.

[TribalHound]

I wonder if there is a way you can setup a folder with thumbnail images for them to view that uploads to your website - to each image you embed a video link, so when they click on it , it downloads ?
So instead of currently uploading all the videos you're actually only uploading still images with urls and creating a catalogue. Not sure how many people / how often the watch the clips, so hard to determine the impact on your upload speed. Perhaps the popular one's you upload to your site and the link behind the image points to that instead.

I doubt the solution is as simple as changing the view settings on the NAS folder you're exporting to.

QNAP file station has an option in your 'share link management' folder to Support multimedia playback, steaming and thumbnail display. There might be similar on your Asustor - but I'm guessing that means every video plays on your device and they're just watching it. That could be a huge demand on your NAS.

[TribalHound]

I’ve been researching and researching and I’ve run out of patience. This seems like kinda old fashioned tech that doesn’t seem to exist.

Reviewing your website & the portfolio sample, it looks like the solution you need is an online shop and your samples / examples are just stills or mini clips. 

So users would click to see the sample and download the full package once purchased. It's possibly more than an out of the box NAS solution can deliver, but your NAS could be the storage for an online shop when you find one. However, whatever is stored on your NAS - it's your single upload speed (with anything else you're uploading) that determines the sum of all customers download experience.


1. Would Video Station be a solution for charging individual playlists of my video creations with a thumbnail preview?

2. If not and I stick with this nas for the performance benefits, is there a way to connect two cat6 cables from the two 2.5gbe ports so that I can plug them into a single multi gig port? My switch has two 10gbe ports and 8 gbe ports. I’d want one port to run to my workstation and the other to the Nas. If i can get 5gb that would be plenty for now.

NAS have the ability to host web sites through Web Station - but that's not going to help your user experience as they'll all depend on your upload speed. But you can't add a 'buy now' or 'add to basket' from Photo or Video station. It could be a solution for hosting all your free samples as even with a lot of customers, they're only downloading smaller files. But each page loaded by an end user still has to upload all the thumbnails.

Any NAS with multiple ethernet ports (no matter what the speed of each socket) tends not to turn them into one big channel, but instead splits requests across the multiple channels. So with 4 ports at 2.5GBe and link aggregation you have 4 possible requests that con run concurrently, each as 2.5GBe and not 1 10GBe pipe.

If you want to combine them, well that's port bonding as opposed to any other terminology.

First consideration should be your own access and the performance of your NAS - for that you can use 'bindings' - so say you have 1 x 2.5GBe port (or 2x 2.5GBe link aggregated) for you - bind all the basic NAS functions to it and give the NAS it's own IP address on that port (using virtual switches inside your NAS Network settings) - For the remaining ports link them together (in pairs or multiples of 2) & bind them to the different uses. You'll nead to assign a new IP address to each binding cluster and manage this through Network settings in the NAS and Virtual Switches.

With PCIe expansion cards, you can get a 10GBe or dual 5GBe running off the motherboard of your NAS. Only once a single pipe exceeds 1GBe do you need to look at Cat6 (or higher) cabling - but remember to make sure all devices on that pipe meet the same high speed. That includes your router.... there's no point running 4 x 10GBe link aggregated ports from your NAS, through a switch and onto your router if your router only has 1GBe or your upload speed in only 10MB.

So in short - network link aggregation really only benefits your internal network speed until your upload ISP speed exceeds 2500MB.
Final thought, with all that data travelling faster than the speed of sound round your network, make sure you have some SSD caching (NVMe or SSD) capabilities else these old 5400 RPM discs will be your bottleneck.

Hope that helps