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Geek Culture / Solution for an all digital movie library?

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Phaelax
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Posted: 11th Sep 2016 03:46
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I'm considering moving all my DVDs to digital format. Anyone recommend any software to organize it all? Something that let's me sort movies by name and genre? What codec should I rip them all to? I'd like to maintain as much as the original quality I can but compress it down from the 4-8GB vob size.

"I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended." - Linus Torvalds
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Ortu
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Posted: 11th Sep 2016 05:28
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I use Plex for organizing/serving. Great presentation like your own personal Netflix, managed users and sharing, easy streaming and apps for a variety of devices. It's free to set up for browser/html5 playback, or you can do a $5/month sub to use apps on any number of devices, or you can do 1 time purchase per device.

.mp4 / H.264 will usually get it under a gig and keep a decent quality.

I use MakeMKV to rip then Handbrake to convert.



A single player RPG featuring a branching, player driven storyline of meaningful choices and multiple endings alongside challenging active combat and intelligent AI.

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Ortu
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Posted: 11th Sep 2016 05:28 Edited at: 11th Sep 2016 05:29
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I use Plex for organizing/serving. Great presentation like your own personal Netflix, managed users and sharing, easy streaming and apps for a variety of devices. Lot's of different sort, filter, and tag options.

It's free to set up for browser/html5 playback, or you can do a $5/month sub to use apps on any number of devices, or you can do 1 time purchase per device.

.mp4 / H.264 will usually get it under a gig and keep a decent quality.

I use MakeMKV to rip then Handbrake to convert.




hrmm.. dunno why that double posted instead of edited.


A single player RPG featuring a branching, player driven storyline of meaningful choices and multiple endings alongside challenging active combat and intelligent AI.
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Phaelax
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Posted: 11th Sep 2016 18:04
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Sounds interesting, I like the idea of a web interface. I'll check it out.

Suggestions on storage? Right now I'm using a NAS with raid 1, 2x2TB. I was thinking about upgrading to a raid 5 system so I could do striping for more storage but still have some level of data protection in case of a failure. But I was just reading about the "write hole" problem associated with raid 5.

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Ortu
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Posted: 11th Sep 2016 20:52 Edited at: 11th Sep 2016 20:55
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As I understand it, write hole can affect any mirror or parity type arrays, which is most of them.

RAID 5 is always tempting as it preserves the most space while providing for a disk failure. I've read a lot of reports that the risk of a second disk failing while a replacement is being rebuilt is significant, though some of that depends on how a given RAID controller handles bad sectors on an otherwise good disk. That said, I've recently had to replace a disk on a raid 5 at work, the array was around 8 years old, and it rebuilt over a new disk without any issues.

I'm working on putting together a 4x4TB RAID 10 NAS myself, which is a striped set of 2 mirrored pairs. You can lose a disk in each pair and still recover assuming nothing fails during a rebuild, and it gives some extra read/write speed gains over a flat raid 5. It does cut into your usable disk space a bit more though. I expect to end up with around 5.3 TB available with 4x read and 2x write.

Doesn't seem like much considering 16 TB going in to it, and it is probably more redundancy than I will ever need, but that is always the balancing act with RAID: space vs performance vs resiliency.


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Phaelax
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Posted: 12th Sep 2016 18:19
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So if one disk fails in the raid 5, it causes an increased chance of another failing?

I'm still debating whether or not to get a dedicated nas box, or build my own from a linux tower.

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Ortu
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Posted: 12th Sep 2016 22:21
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Check out this article, particularly the section why do drive failures come in pairs. It gives a good explanation on why there is a larger than expected risk of a second drive failing during a rebuild.

http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/linux-nas-raid.html


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NotKyon
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Posted: 15th Sep 2016 01:04
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I'm not sure if it meets your criteria, but there's also Kodi (formerly XBMC). I used to use it extensively for my own library. It was nice as I could stream to all of my devices, and if something was wrong I could look through the code to see what was going on. (I never really had much of a need for that though, but it was still vaguely interesting.)

As a result of using it, I've now got the majority of my digital library following a fairly consistent naming scheme so their "scraper" could pull information about them.

Plex was something I also looked into, though I don't recall why I didn't go with that.

Regarding codecs, I'm rather partial to HEVC (H.265). I highly prefer MKV to MP4 as well, though maybe that's just me.
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CJB
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Posted: 15th Sep 2016 09:22
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Kodi on a Raspberry Pi 3 is good. I often find my NAS is too slow to stream 1080p so always consider speed when making a purchase.
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Seppuku Arts
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Posted: 15th Sep 2016 20:33 Edited at: 15th Sep 2016 20:33
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Quote: "I use MakeMKV to rip then Handbrake to convert."


Do you know if this will work with BluRays too? I figure BluRays have more security protection on them? I was looking for a way to rip BluRays a while ago for a similar purpose and because I wanted to watch films on my PC with frame interpolation used, which modern TV's have built in, but nothing on a PC that works with a BluRay, there is software that'll use it if you stick a DVD in or use a movie file, but I've never found a BluRay friendly solution.

Of course, I am also looking for a legal solution to the problem.
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Ortu
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Posted: 15th Sep 2016 22:33
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I know people do use them for Bluray, but I have not myself.


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Phaelax
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Posted: 16th Sep 2016 05:56 Edited at: 16th Sep 2016 06:09
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When something tells me it transcodes media files, is that something that happens on demand when a user requests to watch a movie? Or is it simply to create and keep multiple codec and different resolution versions stored?

I'm pretty sure I've ripped a bluray before. Possibly with DVD-Decrypt. I'd have to go look, it's been awhile.

Quote: "I often find my NAS is too slow to stream 1080p so always consider speed when making a purchase."

Why would the NAS be unable to supply the stream fast enough? I've had no trouble with my current Buffalo, Raid 1 over gigabit.

I've only mildly played with Kodi so far, it's on my Pi2. I barely use it because I haven't been able to get a controller to work with it. (I use retroPi)

One issue I see with Kodi (or anything else really), is managing a consistent library on multiple devices. Unless the library meta data was stored centrally and each installed shared that file, but that sounds dangerous. Plex can be installed on several types of NASs and with its web interface I think that'll make management way easier. So I think I'm going to build my own linux NAS and install Plex on it unless I find a plex-compatible nas I like.

It's been awhile since I bought harddrives. Checked out newegg and saw 10TB drives! I'd like to get some kind of nas-rated SSDs, but price for a 4TB is still way pricey.

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CJB
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Posted: 16th Sep 2016 11:13
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Quote: " I've had no trouble with my current Buffalo, Raid 1 over gigabit."
Cool. I have an older 2Tb Seagate and I'm streaming to my Pi over Wi-Fi, and it is SLOW (but ok for anything up to 720p). For the Kodi, I just use the latest OpenElec ready-made image which has WiiMote support built in. You just need to navigate to the bluetooth page in settings and select the wiimote device to pair it. Once paired, you can connect it at any time by pressing any button on the controller.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 18th Sep 2016 16:04
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This is slightly off topic, but does anyone know if the old issue of SSDs being destroyed by Linux has been fixed? I remember awhile back something about Linux writing to them constantly would cause them to prematurely fail or something like that. I'll use WD red for my storage but was considering a 60gb ssd for the system drive.

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Phaelax
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Posted: 19th Sep 2016 01:25
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So I've installed Plex on my windows computer, just to at least play around with it. And so far, I HATE it! First of all, I shouldn't need to create an account on their site to manage and stream my content locally. Secondly, unless there's a way to control access that isn't very apparent, every device I access the plex library from gives that device complete access and control to all the settings.

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CJB
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Posted: 19th Sep 2016 11:11
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I could never get on with Plex.
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Ortu
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Posted: 20th Sep 2016 00:21
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Under system > users, you can setup plex home, which enables you to set up managed users secured with a PIN. This locks non admin users from changing settings, deleting content etc. you can also set sharing filters to control what a user can access.


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Phaelax
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Posted: 20th Sep 2016 23:59
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I must have to be logged in with an account to see that option, which I still don't see the purpose of having to make an online account with their site to use something locally. In any case, I started working on my own web-based media center. Only thing I can't do is have it transcode media, which isn't a huge issue to me.

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