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Wanting a way to rip/store our DVD collection to a central machine & have it accessible to 2, eventually 4 TVs. What software are you using to rip media to storage? What to use for 'hosting' it all? How do you access it on the user end TVs? Minimum computer requirements? Does the host machine hardware drive the ability to play on other devices? I currently have a Dell Optiplex with a 1TB storage IIRC, been a while since I've booted it up, Win10, Intel i5, maybe 16gb ram, Dell on board graphics. The Enemy's gate is down. | ||
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quarter MOA visionary |
My media server is pure audio but many of the same principles exist. Your hardware for the server is fine but storage is low.
NO, it just has to serve the data not process. I would start looking at Plex. https://www.plex.tv/your-media/ If you have a smart TV and Wi-Fi (or wired) you can view on the TV's via their app. I'll let others chime in with their experiences. | |||
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| Member |
Cool, that looks fairly simple. Now to find a good DVD rip software & figure out how much storage I need. The Enemy's gate is down. | |||
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| Raised Hands Surround Us Three Nails To Protect Us  |
Plex is what I plan to use again. I used it years ago and it worked well. That computer died and was not watching my own media much so I never bothered to set it up again. Been using my own media a bunch now the boys are older. Actually just left the local used/refurb computer place and took and at age of their 33% off BF sale and left with an i7 unit with 24GB of RAM. ———————————————— The world's not perfect, but it's not that bad. If we got each other, and that's all we have. I will be your brother, and I'll hold your hand. You should know I'll be there for you! | |||
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Optimistic Cynic |
"Server" hardware requirements are minimal, biggest thing is to have enough disk for your media. I have Plex installed on a Raspberry Pi 4B with one or another 4GB USB disk attached. As far as the total storage you will need goes, much depends on the format and encoding you require. Lower res needs less disk. Figure about 1-2 GB for a typical two hour movie in 1080 mp4 format, and 8-10MB for CD quality songs (compressed). Another option for display other than a smart TV are any number of TV gateway boxes like the Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, or a Raspberry Pi. I think most gaming consoles can also play network-streamed media. | |||
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Member |
The host hardware does affect the ability to playback if there’s transcoding. However, your hardware is plenty sufficient for anything you’re trying to do. SD video is not hardware intensive. I use Plex as well with a lifetime Plexpass. Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well. -Epictetus | |||
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| Member |
Thanks gents. Need to dust off the desktop & give it a look-over. That or re-do my RPi for Plex. Anyone recommend a DVD rip software? The Enemy's gate is down. | |||
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| Optimistic Cynic |
Should have mentioned that there is a download for the Pi that is a complete media server package, I think it is called LibreELEC. WRT ripping software, you fail to specify the OS that you want use this on, but Google will probably point out one or another package. | |||
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| Member |
Likely Windows on the OP Optiplex. The Enemy's gate is down. | |||
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| Member |
makeMKV ripped 100s (1000s?) of DVDs & Blurays for me easily. I've used a few different rippers, makeMKV is the one I recommend. DVDs are usually 2-3GB each (4.7GB max). I compressed all mine with handbrake to ~1GB each when I migrated to new server hardware. Probably took about the same amount of time vs trying to copy multiple terabytes over 1Gb ethernet. Plex is the software I've settled on after Windows Media Center, Emby, XBMC/Kodi & Boxee were tried. It's feature-rich, stable & family approved (5 year old can turn on scooby doo movies...) The lifetime pass has been worth it multiple times over. LibreElec was mentioned above - it is a Kodi implementation with a Pi OS. It's a cheap starter to play with. Get a USB-IR receiver for the Pi & hook it to a TV. | |||
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Member |
I use AnyDVD to rip a DVD/Blu-ray disc to an ISO disc image file. I then mount the ISO file as a DVD/Blu-ray disc and use HandBrake Nightly to write the disc image down to digital format. I write the files to an ASUStor NAS that consists of two (2) 20TB mirrored HDD's. As others mentioned, Plex is the interface that plays the movie/tv files from my NAS. Be careful with ripping TV shows, though. In order to be displayed properly, Plex requires a very specific file naming format. For example: When creating a file for each episode of The Office, you would need to create the following folders: /The Office/Season 01 /The Office/Season 02 . . . /The Office/Season 09 Then each episode in each season is named: The Office (2005) - s01e01 - Pilot.m4v(mp4) The Office (2005) - s01e02 - Diversity Day.m4v(mp4) . . . I get that information from IMDB. It is a little tedious to do TV files, but it's actually a good system and all the "software" is freeware. "If you’re a leader, you lead the way. Not just on the easy ones; you take the tough ones too…” – MAJ Richard D. Winters (1918-2011), E Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil... Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw and as dry grass sinks down in the flames, so their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel." - Isaiah 5:20,24 | |||
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| Raised Hands Surround Us Three Nails To Protect Us |
I use Make MKV and and Handbrake for video and Exact Audio Copy for audio ———————————————— The world's not perfect, but it's not that bad. If we got each other, and that's all we have. I will be your brother, and I'll hold your hand. You should know I'll be there for you! | |||
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makeMKV works fine and is free. Handbrake if you really want to get into the weeds, but HandBrake won’t break the encryption. VLC as an all purpose video playback and conversion tool. With these three programs you can do everything you need, and they are all open source. You will see adverts for many different video utilities, but they are all essentially a front end for the ffmpeg libraries, particularly libavcodec. You could actually do what you need from the command line with the ffmpeg utilities, but that is way nerdier than you need. Just use makeMKV. Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well. -Epictetus | |||
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| Member |
This is very important. Plex will fill all your metadata according to the data the agent finds, so the file name is the key. If you have any data in the file name that you wish the agent to ignore, put that in brackets. I have found that the best way to name a file is -name -year -episode -episode name -anything else. For example: /Video/TV/The Dukes of Hazzard (1979)/Season 01/The Dukes of Hazzard (1979) -S01E01 -One Armed Bandits [sigcrazy7 br rip,1080p,x265,10 kbps,AAC,5.1] /Video/TV/The Dukes of Hazzard (1979)/Season 01/The Dukes of Hazzard (1979) -S01E02 -Daisys Song [sigcrazy7 br rip,1080p,x265,10 kbps,AAC,5.1] Often, the episode order on the DVD will be different than the aired order. This will cause Plex to misidentify episodes, so you will need to check the relevant database when naming your files. I have found that the best place to lookup media information is: www.thetvdb.com This is where Plex will be looking, so that’s where I go. Good for movies and television. Very comprehensive. Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well. -Epictetus | |||
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It's a lot easier to DL already-named TV shows vs ripping them & you don't break the law by bypassing the DVD encryption.... check out sonarr and radarr. Use a VPN. I don't DL much, but I can get specific release groups for quality/subtitle consistency. I would recommend mediacentermaster to get metadata & rename Movie/TV files, but theTVdb changed their $$ & MCM hasn't fixed TV metadata yet. Still works for auto-renaming movies The only naming advice I'd add to Sigcrazy's is be careful with long file names/paths and (spaces) - some clients will choke on file paths that are really long or have spaces in them. I do Show(year)/Season/Show-S01E01-Episode.mkv Plex should auto-transcode anything a client player can't handle, but if you are running the server on a Pi, you don't really want to transcode. If you have kids, get a kindle fire, headphones, a microSD card & use the Plex download feature. You'll thank me on the 1st car ride. | |||
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McNoob |
Make MKV to rip Handbrake to convert to MP4 I use a Synology DS920+ and Plex to serve. Just started ripping UHD Blu Rays. Some day I'll get enough space to just keep the MKV files and not bother to convert them. "We've done four already, but now we're steady..." | |||
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| quarter MOA visionary |
Like I said earlier I only do audio but storage is something to be considered more with video. The space can get quite high especially if you store UHD Blu Ray or other high res product. I would make sure you have a way either to expand (JBOD) or figure it out the best way you can in advance. Additionally, double that for a reliable backup. The last thing you want is to have to re-rip a ton of stuff with some kind of permanent failure. I know because my QNAP NAS had such a failure in the RAID array and when I replaced the disk it lost it's configuration. I just restored from my backup with minimal delay. It took many hours to rip 800+ audio CD's. https://proactivecreative.com/...ace-size-calculator/ https://www.filecatalyst.com/b...big-are-movie-files/ Storage size and the fact that I don't like to re-watch movies all that much is why I don't archive this type. Audio is not a problem for me though either for space or listening over and over to the same material. YMMV | |||
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| Member |
Part of the driver for looking into this is that we massively downsized our house this year & don't have a large storage space for the large DVD collection. Convert to digital & able to watch on any TV would be nice. May rip a few on the 1TB I have now just to trial it a bit. Will need to run some networking around the house, so I don't have to find a place for the full tower in the living room & can stash it in the office or master closet. The Enemy's gate is down. | |||
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| Member |
The ability to watch your media anywhere in the world, on any of your devices. That’s a huge plus. Also, the ability to lay in bed and just use the remote to immediately watch any of your movies. I love having my own server. The Synology DS920+ is the perfect server for this. The newer DS923+, not so much. Demand not that events should happen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well. -Epictetus | |||
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| Raised Hands Surround Us Three Nails To Protect Us |
Care to expand on this a little more? ———————————————— The world's not perfect, but it's not that bad. If we got each other, and that's all we have. I will be your brother, and I'll hold your hand. You should know I'll be there for you! | |||
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