If you are accessing your files through dolphin on your Linux device this change has no effect on you. In that case Synology is just sharing files and it doesn’t know or care what kind of files they are.

This change is mostly for people who were using the Synology videos app to stream videos. I assume Plex is much more common on Synology and I don’t believe anything changed with Plex’s h265 support.

If you were using the built in Synology videos app and have objections to Plex give Jellyfin a try. It should handle h265 and doesn’t require a purchase like Plex does to unlock features like mobile apps.

Linux isn’t dropping any codecs and should be able to handle almost any media you throw at it. Codec support depends on what app you are using, and most Linux apps use ffmpeg to do that decoding. As far as I know Debian hasn’t dropped support for h265, but even if they did you could always compile your own ffmpeg libraries with it re-enabled.

How can I most easily search my NAS for files needing the removed codecs

The mediainfo command is one of the easiest ways to do this on the command line. It can tell you what video/audio codecs are used in a file.

With Linux and Synology DSM both dropping codecs, I am considering just taking the storage hit to convert to h.264 or another format. What would you recommend?

To answer this you need to know the least common denominator of supported codecs on everything you want to play back on. If you are only worried about playing this back on your Linux machine with your 1080s then you fully support h265 already and you should not convert anything. Any conversion between codecs is lossy so it is best to leave them as they are or else you will lose quality.

If you have other hardware that can’t support h265, h264 is probably the next best. Almost any hardware in the last 15 years should easily handle h264.

When it comes to thumbnails for a remote filesystem like this are they generated and stored on my PC or will the PC save them to the folder on the NAS where other programs could use them.

Yes they are generated locally, and Dolphin stores them in ~/.cache/thumbnails on your local system.

In any KDE app you can connect with SFTP in the open file dialog. Just type sftp://user@server/path and you can browse/open/edit files the remote server. ssh keys+agent make things a lot easier here obviously.

I believe so. The package descriptions for most of the ZFS packages in Ubuntu mention OpenZFS, so it certainly appears that way.

You can still create pools that are compatible with Oracle Solaris, you just have to set the pool version to 28 or older when you create it and obviously don’t update it. That will prevent you from using any of the newer features that have been added since the fork.

Well worse than that, Oracle closed sourced ZFS, so OpenZFS was forced to become a fork, and they are no longer compatible with each other.

As for GPL the CDDL license that ZFS uses made sure that code contributions attribute copyright to the project owners, which means they can change the license as they please without having to track down contributors.

You would think with their investments in Oracle Linux and btrfs they would welcome that license change, but apparently they need excuses to keep putting money into Solaris, and their Oracle ZFS appliances instead.

August 15th. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-schedule/35649