Option C: Usenet. Hear me out before you all jump on me for being a filthy pirate. A while ago I decided to start archiving our DVDs & blurays to hard disk and put the originals away in a cupboard. It saves on space in the lounge and keeps the discs in good nick. I still want the originals, because the quality is better and there's a lot of stuff like extra features and the like, but it's more convenient to have a fully digital library. I started ripping every disc one by one and after about a day I totally gave up on it. So I got my server set up with Sonarr, Couch Potato, SABnzbd, and fed in the names of all our TV series & films that we have on disc. A few days later and it was all done (minus a few stragglers here and there, and the occasional glitchy download that had to be re-done). SO much easier than manually ripping/converting and manually importing metadata. Of course, should I be so inclined it does make it extremely easy to pirate films & TV shows, but the main draw for me was that there was no way in hell I was ripping all our discs myself. We don't even have that big a library and I was sick of doing after just one day.
Yah I don't run a server at home, so a raspi-Kodi and a NAS works great. This, the kids damage their DVD's when manually loading so I ripped them using MakeMKV and play them via Kodi. So far I haven't compressed them, as 4-5GB per film (DVD) is okay. When I start with Blurays, I'll need to compress. Handbrake: I haven't found convenient Presets, my convenient preset would be fullHD (1080) and "no visible compressin artifacts". I used to get DVD's down to ~600mb from 4 GB, I'd be happy if I can compress a Bluray to ~5GB. I actually wouldn't care about getting them as small as possible, but at 50GB a movie even Terabytesize drives fill up quickly, so around 5GB would be great. Ah, so: 4) MakeMKV Pro No Compression Easy to use (just pick what you want ripped) No Menu (don't need it, I just want the movies) Con No Compression No Menu Extra's come as seperate films Cannot cut ending titles to save space Does not auto-name the output files As you see, some of the Con's are Pro's for me. I don't care about the extra's (unless they're short movies like is often the case with Pixar for instance) and I think menu's are a waste of time.
My main concern with errr, stuff I didnt rip myself, was the quality is often abysmal. Many different exotic codecs are used as pirates people appearently pride themselves with compressing stuff to the absolute max. Someone "lent" me their copy of GoT, where peopel's faces are made up out of a handfull of artifact-blocks. What do these peple do, watch it on the phone? I'll wait for the Bluray-release thank you.
Option D: MakeMKV Pros: No transcoding, you've bought the blu-ray, so why not watch the blu-ray instead of a compressed version Cons: Storage space, but storage is cheap these days.
Never gonna happen. Compressing a blu-ray down to 5GB will almost always end up with a poor quality output. Try 10-15GB for a near lossless visual. This. I've just set up a plex server and MakeMKV is doing a stellar job of ripping my discs losslessly. I did used to compress them down with handbrake (Fast preset with an RF of 15) but even then certain films ended up with banding in dark scenes and the sheer amount of time to compress them made it all a needlessly time consuming task. Buy big hard drives and save yourself the hassle
Wouldn't the larger file size put a bit of extra stress on the server if they're uncompressed? But I'm all for getting rid of physical media. Yes there's drive failure as a potential problem, but my kids absolutely ruin their library of DVDs so setting up a box or chromecast to stream from the server up in their room or something would be a better solution.
Not really, unless it's having to transcode for a device attempting to stream something in a format it doesn't understand.
Okay, 10-15GB is a lot better than 50GB Now go tell that to all the people that think they're streaming in UHD
Direct BD rips aren't anywhere near 50GB if you're only pulling the main movie and HD soundtrack - they're usually somewhere between 15 and 35GB
Not if your quality profiles are set up correctly in Couch Potato/Sonarr. And pretty much everything I've downloaded uses the x264 video codec - nothing strange or exotic there. Besides, both Plex and Kodi are based on ffmpeg (iirc) which will handle anything your computer is powerful enough to decode.
Thanks for the recommendations guys. I decided to go through the DIY route, more fun I think. I've got an old Inspiron with a G33m motherboard that i'm planning to install FreeNas on. Once I know it works, I'm also going to use the 771 to 775 modification to install a Xeon into it for more power when Transcoding. I may need to buy a cheap powerline socket as well since I've got two that are being used already so I can leave the NAS in the Garage and I don't need to look at it really. The 500GB Hard drive should be okay for most of their DVDs, but I'll definitely need to expand the storage if I want to put all of my Anime on it as well as TV shows.
Thread revival / Update As recommended by several members I tried MakeMKV. I tested for a few factors 1) estimated space, 2) visual quality, and 3) performance. Following my brief testing I decided to continue to transcode my collection. Space, I did some estimates and determined that I probably could fit my collection without transcoding onto my modest file server. But then I wouldn't have space for my files and primary backups from my computers. If space is my only issue I can also expand right? Visual quality, while some blu-rays had better quality with the raw versus the tanscoded, this very minor and not a major concern to me. My use of Plex is to provide me with convenience not necessarily optimal quality. If I want the best quality I can always grab the original disk. The same goes for the extras (except for animated shorts, the kids love those and it is more convenient to have them on Plex). Performance, surprised me and was the main factor in my decision. I had no issue with raw DVD files; however, raw blu-rays would not stream continuously over wifi. Not sure if that was the NAS or my wireless network, but as I want convenience this is no good. My experiment with MakeMKV was not a complete loss, I found that using it first with Blu-rays to be faster and resolved my previously mentioned issue with some blu-ray discs coming out with distorted images. It also mean I can queue Handbrake with more than two titles (two optical drives). So I can now do a little prep work and walk away for a day.
