I know you're already using MakeMKV,

But Handbrake can rip and compress in one step. There are plenty of quality presets included that will optimize for your playback device. It would save you beaucoup disk space.

You will need a little library file called libdvdcss.dll in order to rip with handbrake. That file can be found via a search, and there are instructions on how to use it in the Handbrake forums.

Here are my Chuck stats for the Blu-ray complete series:
Full disk backups total 560GB
The conversions using H265 10-bit with a Constant Quality setting of 22 is 262GB
It takes ~30 minutes per episode to convert them using Intel Quick Sync Video on an i5-10500T

I'm working on Parks and Recreation now....just about finished backing up Season 4.

Parks and Recreation stats for the Blu-ray complete series:
Full disk backups total 788GB
The conversions using H265 10-bit with a Constant Quality setting of 22 is 202GB
It takes ~15 minutes per episode to convert them using Intel Quick Sync Video on an i5-10500T since they're only 30min episodes (22min in reality)

Now on to Friends...I don't watch it but it's the most popular show on my server by far.

MakeMKV is free and does a good job.  Just remember, it's a free utility, so they must be making money somehow.

Do it on a PC where you have nothing that you wouldn't want to be retrieved from the internet by a stranger.

I been using imgburn for as long as I can remember to burn iso to DVD. Surely they can do it in reverse

Learning is what makes it fun 😁

MakeMKV is free if you re-enter the trial key once a month. They post it on their forums.

You can pay for a perpetual license, as I have.

Some of y'all are too paranoid.  Its a free trial.
There's mofos using winrar/winzip on their 25th year in a row now of the free trial.

MakeMKV is Russian. Nope.

Fire it up in a VM or docker container if you dont trust it enough to let it rawdog your computer.


https://github.com/jlesage/docker-makemkv
Looks like it even has the auto-disc ripper and auto-eject mode.  Just stick in a disc, it gets ripped and ejected, insert another disc, rinse and repeat.

Did you order a drive yet? Make sure it can rip with the default firmware. I doubt you wan to mess with flashing a drive with compatible firmware.

The MakeMKV forums offer pre-flashed drives for a decent price. I bought mine from a user called Billycar11.

It's very easy to downgrade with the DVDFab link that I posted earlier.

So, I've got another question related to this thread.  I've heard al three mentioned so far, but what's everyone's consensus on Plex vs Jellyfin vs Kodi?  I started out on Kodi because that's all I knew, but the more I've read about Jellyfin, the more impressed I am.  Watched a video the other night about building a dedicated Jellyfin server out of an old HP small desktop and I'm about ready to dive into that, unless someone can convince me that one of the other options is better.  I'll probably struggle with the actual server software part, because as soon as they start with all the damn acronyms, containers, SSH'ing into shit and PUtTY and stuff, they might as well be speaking Latin, but I'll get through it somehow.

So what's your opinion and why?

Nobody has an opinion?  Bueller?  Bueller?

Timely thread, I'm just about to (finally) start working on my own server. I have an old server I got free from work and threw a few hundred dollars at upgrading. It still has pretty old specs by today's standards though. I'm planning to use it for a media server, learning lab (I've used PCs for years but never delved into the server / networking side of things), and maybe some game servers or something. Like most of you I refuse to rely on "buying" digital movies or streaming services that can alter or remove content at any time. I've been able to amass several hundred movies and shows from my childhood to today (mostly Blurays) at only a dollar or two each via Marketplace.

Some specs:
Lenovo x3550 M5
2x Intel E5-2699v3 (total 36 cores / 72 threads)
8x 16GB DDR4-2133 ECC RAM (total 128GB)
8x 5TB HDDs Seagate BarraCuda
SD card daughter board w/ 2x 32GB cards
PCIe board w/ 2x 512GB m.2 NVME
Nvidia Quadro 600 GPU

EMC KTN-STL3 15x 3.5" bay DAS enclosure for future drive expansion, with PCIe 9200-8e HBA (may upgrade to PCIe 3.0 9207-8e if speeds are needed)

Don't even remember what I was planning to use the SD cards for. Also not sure if the GPU will support or even be beneficial for hardware transcoding. Initial thought was to have the two m.2 drives in raid 1 act as cache space for the slower HDDs but that will depend on what software I go with. I'm still trying to determine if I should go with TrueNAS (Core / Scale) or unraid. Leaning towards unraid due to being able to add disks one at a time in the future and only spinning up the disk with information actually needed at any moment vs the whole array (power / noise savings). Downside seems to be slower transfer rates since you aren't hitting all the disks at once. Any suggestions either way? I'm not planning on more than 1 or 2 users at a time so hopefully read speeds will keep up with 1080p and occasional 4k content. The HDDs are probably not the best for NAS use but they were relatively inexpensive and I can buy better stuff as they fail.

As for the media server software I'm also stuck between Jellyfin and Plex. Plex seems better if you want the paid features like live TV streaming and don't mind some features being paywalled like hardware transcoding, while Jellyfin seems better if you want free software and only care about locally stored content. I'm definitely in the latter category but I am worried about playback options on existing TVs and such. Will I need to pick up some dongles like chrome casts, fire sticks, etc?

This is why I switched to Emby years ago.  Emby is the same level of difficulty to install has mobil and roku support.  Frankly for Roku use either will do and I haven't looked at Plex's interface in years so they may have improved.  The data collection is a question of what you can live with.

Similar story here.  I've been on plex for maybe 8 years.  Before that, I had the "WDTV" appliance from bestbuy, and all different flavors of setups like OUYA, odroid, and even plugging a HDD into the very first generation of TVs that supported USB storage.  Before that was kodi, but it wasn't called kodi, it was called XBMC because we were running it on the original xbox that had IDE hard drives in them.

As new things have come out, I have given them a spin.  I believe what put me off of emby was it is written in c#.  Thats an automatic performance hit right off the top.  But then the fact that you need to run the knock-off c# MONO to run emby on anything thats not a windows box, like every nas and raspberry pi.

I have some fellow nerds in my family who are happy with jellyfin.  But the consensus among them is if you wait for a sale on the plexpass and buy that, then its better than jellyfin.  I wanna say I got my lifetime membership for $80 on the St Patrick's day sale.

KODI/XBMC is powerful.  But the UI is too busy.  There are too many configuration options for the average user.  There are a number of things you can do from plex with 3 clicks that would take you a day to setup in kodi.

Thanks for the input on the different servers, guys.  I've still got a long way to go with ripping all my junk so I've got plenty of time to play with them and see which I like the best.  Any other input will certainly be welcomed!

Friends stats for the Blu-ray complete series:
Full disk backups total 706GB
The conversions using H265 10-bit with a Constant Quality setting of 22 are 261GB

I'm working on Person of Interest now.  The copying of discs is done, however, the conversion is going to take ~30hrs.

I believe Big Bang Theory is the last series I have to work on which will be here on Friday.  That's probably a good thing as I've spent way too much money on box sets as well as used lots of drive space (3 copies of everything with 2 being onsite and 1 offsite).

When the Monk complete series is available on Blu-ray I'll buy it though as it's a great series.

DVDs? Not blu rays? I’d advise seeking blu ray sourced content. Much of it is out there. Often uncompressed.

I have plex with a plex pass in a docker container on unraid.   Plex works great but has been slowing down as they switch to a full on streaming service.
And Plex still adds random movie to your collection evan with the option unchecked. Bug they havent fixed yet. Its a bug that really bugs me.


I have Jellyfin in another container, and its menus and is very fast, plus jellyfin has most of the plugins your likely to need. Like the one for poster art.

Since my tv's are LG and android jellyfin is available. Samsung not so much without sideloading the app.

So many bad life choices in one post.  
40hr and a TB of data wasted on a show like friends.  And then big bang theory?
And to top it off, 3 copies including offsite.  So 3TB of space wasted for a show which you already own on blueray?

This is going beyond just backing up a show.  This is over the top and self inflicted.  Somebody fire up the meme of the guy sticking the stick in his own bicycle wheel and blaming somebody else.  

But +1 on Monk.  I've watched that one a few times through on my peasant quality 720p rips.  And the movie that came out a week or so ago.

It's been quite a while now but this was what I used too.

Multiple people can't watch the same Blu-ray at the same time though especially when they aren't at the same physical location.

I don't care to watch Friends, however, Big Bang Theory is amusing.  Psych is also a great show.

I also don't want to every have to handle the Blu-ray's again so backing them up to my primary, backup, and offsite NAS'es is the price I pay to not have to do that.  Also, with some series like Warehouse 13 the organization of the Blu-ray discs is all sorts of fucked up which makes it takes forever to get them ready to convert to H265 and I don't want to do it again so they get backed up as well.

I'm also a glutton for punishment and it gives me something to do

I think it was just before blue ray I bought a software called DVD X- copy to burn DVDs.  

   Back then I was wanted to digitize, but hard drive space was smaller than what it is today .  
 
 About then is when I got a head injury and all that was forgotten about.   Just saw the box the other day and reminded me of this thread.  
   

My offsite backup is magnet links.  

They aren’t reliable as they can go away or be slow AF to download.

While I greatly appreciate the input, there sure a lot of words in there that I don't know anything about.  When I was a kid, Dockers were a line of pants that your mom would buy for you at Sears or JC Penney.  Boy, I got a lot to learn...  

When I hear something like "containers", my mind automatically thinks something like partitions on a hard drive.  The "Docker" part still puzzles me, but I'll eventually get it figured out.

Makemkv is still working for me, with dvds to 4k blue rays with a modded blue ray reader.

Person of Interest stats for the Blu-ray complete series:
Full disk backups total 663GB
The conversions using H265 10-bit with a Constant Quality setting of 22 total 210GB

Now I just have to get Big Bang Theory done when it arrives.

Good deal!!!

I used Plex initially but wasn't happy with it.  My NAS is Synology and has the option to install the Plex server and my Samsung TV also had a Plex client.  It was terribly sluggish and sometimes would freeze.

I then decided to try Synology's own media server with a little streaming client using OSMC OS and Kodi in a dedicated box called Vero 4K+ (they just released the Vero 5) and never looked back.  Night and day in terms of versatility, compatibility and perfect streaming experience.  The UI is similar to Plex' but a lot faster to browse and load the movies.  And no Plex bs licensing.

So, for me Synology's media server + Kodi client were the best solution.   I haven't tried this Jellyfin system yet so cannot talk about it.

The only extra thing I do is use TMM (TinyMediaManager) to edit or create the NFO files, scrap metadata and organize my collection.  It lets me preview the movies' information and make correction to descriptions, tags, actors names, producers, and anything else related to the titles.  Many websites where the scrappers pull the info from sometimes misspell names and it confuses the database.   Some of my media isn't mainstream and does not have all info so I have to so some websearch and fill or correct the info, hence TMM is great for that.

ETA: the installation was very straightforward.  Synology's media server is native and it was just clicking a button in its web interface to install it,  Setting Kodi in the Vero 4K+ was also very straightforward.  Just need to add the paths to the movies and series in the NAS (with passwords if you use them) and Kodi does the rest.   I only use my PC to add new media to the server and then tell Kodi to update it's database.  Since I use TMM to create the NFO files there are no surprises and everything looks exactly as I want.

My next project is ripping and organizing my 1000+ CD collection, which Synology's media server and Kodi also do.  

I've found the built in TV apps to be less than desirable.  They're slow to begin with and not updated as often.  All my TV's  are connected to Roku's.  Like Plex you have to ignore the data privacy issues but the Roku's just work.  All future TV purchases will be dumb TV's

Yes, I also considered privacy and security when choosing the new streaming system.  The advantage of Kodi and OSMC is that both are open source and the Vero boxes are designed and made by the same guys who make the OSMC distro.

I also tried the Western Digital and Sony streaming boxes.  However, their UIs weren't as developed and well built as Kodi's.  Kodi's default UI is similar to Plex's.  However, there are many skins and customizable options for it.  

I'm not sure we can still find a "dumb TV".  However, if we do not plug them to the Internet they should be as dumb as one gets.