QNAP TAS-268 QTS and Android Combo NAS Review

Media, File, Download, and Backup Stations

The Station apps add a lot of functionality to your NAS that helps you organize and enjoy all the content you are storing on the device.

Video Station

The video station is as the name suggest an application to sort all your videos into easy to recognize groups and collections. When you launch the app the first time, you’ll be welcomed with a small introduction how it all works. You can either click your way through it or close the popup box to get started right away.

Within the settings, you can add folders and define what type of content that have in order to get it listed properly. In this case, I have copied some of my TV show collection onto the NAS in order to showcase this feature.

Besides content filter and social network binding, the app also supports openSubtitle settings for your videos.

Once you have defined your folders and refresh the view, you’re presented with a list of all your content, easy to find and shown with thumbnails who’s size can be adjusted smaller and larger.

The list view will give you more details than the thumbnail view and also tell you the resolution, codec, and container format besides the title and length.

Photo Station

The photo station will most likely be the most used Station app and just as with the Video Station, you’re greeted with a welcome guide the first time you open up the app.

While it is called a Photo Station, it can also handle videos as seen below. Importing new photos into your collections is as easy as hitting a button and selecting the files. The app will do the rest.

There’s a similar settings system again with content filter, social network binding, and backup.

There are two main views in the Photo Station where one lets you manage your content with ease and the other one lets you watch it in various ways, including full-screen slideshow modes.

File Station

The File Station helps with the local file system and also comes with the ability to connect to networked resources. This was a very easy way for me to connect directly to my own NAS and copy over the files I wanted on this one – all without the use of my PCs resources. There isn’t much to say to this as is – it’s a file manager, but running on your NAS and with background operations.

Download Station

While the photo and video station are amazing apps, the download station might be one of the most used features ever. Your NAS is running all the time anyway, so why not let it take care of all your downloads for you. Most of the time you’ll end up copying the downloaded files onto the NAS anyway, so you might as well download there directly.

You can schedule download times so it doesn’t hog your bandwidth while you use it for something else, which is a very useful feature.

You can download from HTTP, FTP, and BitTorrent locations, have it search RSS feeds, and install additional add-ons too.

Backup Station

The backup station is the centralized place to set up your backup jobs – no matter what they might, what direction they should go. It’s everything collected in one place for your convenience.