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Old 11-24-2018, 11:34 AM   #21
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nm...already answered
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Old 11-25-2018, 01:40 PM   #22
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how long does it take to rip a single DVD/BD? If you have 14, no problem, but dozens, hundreds? that seems like a ton of work
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Old 11-25-2018, 02:06 PM   #23
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sr. Mints View Post
how long does it take to rip a single DVD/BD? If you have 14, no problem, but dozens, hundreds? that seems like a ton of work

It would be faster to just download everything, but I would highly advise using a VPN before doing that
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Old 11-27-2018, 07:29 AM   #24
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how long does it take to rip a single DVD/BD? If you have 14, no problem, but dozens, hundreds? that seems like a ton of work
10-15 minutes depending on what you're stripping out and if you're re-encoding.

I've done my entire collection (DVD, not BD), just set one up before heading off to bed or while I'm watching TV or something. Pretty easy to do in the background. Had them all done within a couple months.
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Old 12-01-2018, 08:52 PM   #25
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this thread has inspired me to finally do something with my dvd collection. I have got all of the tools suggested: MakeMKV, Handbrake, and Plex.

What would you guys suggest for conversion settings on Handbrake? When I ripped a test movie with MakeMKV, it gave me a 6gb file. I would like to get that down some so that I can have my whole collection on a decent sized hard drive. I am just testing out my first conversion in Handbrake, but since they do take some time, I figured I would see what you guys suggest. Trying to keep as high as quality as possible but maybe get the file size down to 1gb for a normal movie.

Suggestions?
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Old 12-02-2018, 09:55 AM   #26
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I mean I convert all my stuff using x265 to get files that small, but that requires Plex to do a lot of intense transcoding during playback. Direct play compatibility depends on what kind of device you're playing your content on (PC, Chromecast, Smart TV, Apple TV, etc.) and what video, audio, and container formats it supports natively.
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Old 12-02-2018, 12:55 PM   #27
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The server will be on a decently beefy desktop computer, and will be displayed using chromecasts. What would you suggest for that setup?
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Old 12-02-2018, 08:13 PM   #28
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A little Googling suggests Plex updated it's Chromecast app in 2018 so that behaves like the PC interface. This article lists a lot of formats that should play without transcoding - but as your Plex server is on the beefy desktop, transcoding shouldn't pose a problem.

When I encode 1080p content using x265, I use handbrake with the video set at Constant Quality: 21 (the lower the number, the higher the video quality/less compressed) and with audio encoded to 5.1 AAC at a 224 bitrate. That would get a file that began around 5 GB down close to 1 GB, give or take 100 MB. The settings I've described look fairly good to me, but videophiles and audiophiles would have opinions on that for sure.

I'd suggest playing around with the settings until you get a result you can live with, both in terms of encoding time (if you choose to convert content using x265) and file size.

EDIT: Oh, one thing in addition to subtitles that can cause constant transcoding is bit depth. Most media has been in 8 bit on PCs and TVs for years and years, but with 4K and HDR you're getting 10 and maybe 12 bit color gradients. Last I checked Plex only natively supports 8 bit depth - or will support 10 bit and 12 bit if your GPU does? I dunno the details on a lot of this, it's not a rabbit hole I've spent a lot of time down.

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Old 12-03-2018, 09:26 AM   #29
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I built an unraid media server using a used supermicro motherboard with a Xeon E5620 + 24GB ram in a mid-tower atx case with a few hard drives.

I use emby server as my backend instead of plex (same idea, but I preferred how emby handles subtitles). It manages all of my movies, tv shows, music, and OTA recordings (using a hdhomerun tuner). Clients for my tvs are nvidia shields and mi boxes. All of my boxes are hooked up to my network via ethernet.


All of my dvds and blurays were backed up using makemkv. It takes a while but it's handy when it's done. Makemkv will let you pick and choose what you want to back up off the dvd. I strip out all the menus and extras, and just keep the movie, audio track(s), and english subtitles. Some people will also compress the mkvs with handbrake to get the size down, but you sacrifice some video and/or audio quality to achieve this.
I use Emby as well and run a server with over 10 people actively using it. I also have an HDHomeRun CC that works really well and I get all my cable TV channels on all my Android TV boxes at home. It works much much better for live TV, TV recording and post-processing than Plex did when I tried both out before.

You can get the video/audio quality and save a lot of space by using Handbrake. I tend to use the H265 profiles now, even at the same quality, it's less than a quarter of the size.
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Old 12-03-2018, 02:16 PM   #30
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If you're using Plex, can you still send sound to a 5.1 or 7.1 receiver?
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Old 05-06-2019, 12:23 PM   #31
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Hoping a few of you Plex users can help me out. Got a good rig up and running with Plex but have some questions regarding software you use for ripping Blu-Rays:

Make MKV:
What are you guys copying off of this? I watched a tutorial where the guy basically said to deselect everything in the list and just select the one that has the largest file. When you open the tree on that, there are a ton of other languages and subtitles in there that I don't think I need?

Handbrake:
What settings are you guys using? Hoping it's one of the available pre-selects? I tried one of them out and it reduced at 34 Gig file down to 4. Quality has to take a massive hit being reduced that much?

Lastly, and I think this is a common issue. Sound volume is very low on the first couple of movies I've ripped. I realize with mixed equipment, this may be a bit hit and miss. Primarily I'm watching shows on a TV with no HDMI ARC. Only digital optical feeding a Vizio soundbar. One TV upstairs does have HDMI ARC but don't have a media extender to stream to yet.

Is there anyway to fix this? I don't have a true quality receiver in my house as of yet.

Any tips/tricks for the above?
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Old 05-06-2019, 04:23 PM   #32
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay View Post
Hoping a few of you Plex users can help me out. Got a good rig up and running with Plex but have some questions regarding software you use for ripping Blu-Rays:

Make MKV:
What are you guys copying off of this? I watched a tutorial where the guy basically said to deselect everything in the list and just select the one that has the largest file. When you open the tree on that, there are a ton of other languages and subtitles in there that I don't think I need?
The movie is usually the largest file, but after some trial and error you should quickly figure out what to choose. I keep the English subs and any commentary audio and uncheck everything else. TV shows are more difficult because there are separate files for each episode and they're often not numbered in the correct order.

Quote:
Handbrake:
What settings are you guys using? Hoping it's one of the available pre-selects? I tried one of them out and it reduced at 34 Gig file down to 4. Quality has to take a massive hit being reduced that much?

I don't use presets but H.264 MKV 1080p30 is a good one to try. I like to get to around 12-15GB per movie, or more if it's a movie with lots of special effects and action.

Quote:
Lastly, and I think this is a common issue. Sound volume is very low on the first couple of movies I've ripped. I realize with mixed equipment, this may be a bit hit and miss. Primarily I'm watching shows on a TV with no HDMI ARC. Only digital optical feeding a Vizio soundbar. One TV upstairs does have HDMI ARC but don't have a media extender to stream to yet.

Is there anyway to fix this? I don't have a true quality receiver in my house as of yet.

Any tips/tricks for the above?
For audio I choose Auto Passthru so it stays the same as on the disc. I have a decent audio setup so I like taking advantage of the best possible source. I'm not sure what is causing your issue but I'd guess it's using a crappy codec.
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Old 05-07-2019, 08:27 AM   #33
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay View Post
Hoping a few of you Plex users can help me out. Got a good rig up and running with Plex but have some questions regarding software you use for ripping Blu-Rays:

Make MKV:
What are you guys copying off of this? I watched a tutorial where the guy basically said to deselect everything in the list and just select the one that has the largest file. When you open the tree on that, there are a ton of other languages and subtitles in there that I don't think I need?

Handbrake:
What settings are you guys using? Hoping it's one of the available pre-selects? I tried one of them out and it reduced at 34 Gig file down to 4. Quality has to take a massive hit being reduced that much?

Lastly, and I think this is a common issue. Sound volume is very low on the first couple of movies I've ripped. I realize with mixed equipment, this may be a bit hit and miss. Primarily I'm watching shows on a TV with no HDMI ARC. Only digital optical feeding a Vizio soundbar. One TV upstairs does have HDMI ARC but don't have a media extender to stream to yet.

Is there anyway to fix this? I don't have a true quality receiver in my house as of yet.

Any tips/tricks for the above?
For MKV, I have been doing what you mentioned to minimize file size and keep things simple. for movies it is pretty cut and dry and you pick the largest file. The smaller ones are generally previews, extras, or commentaries. In addition to raw file size, you can keep an eye on the number of chapters. Rarely will a full length movie only have 5 chapters, so that helps. As DiF mentions, with series it gets a bit more complicated. I haven't done a ton because of the headache of it all, but in addition to single episodes, the discs will often include files that have multiple, if not all, of the discs episodes as a single file. My understanding from reading online is that if you name the files properly "s1-ep01-04" that plex will still figure out what the files are and can find specific episodes. But have not tried that too thoroughly yet.

With handbrake I have not yet settled on final settings. DVDs were easy as the quality was limited to begin with. But I have been struggling to find the best combination of file size and quality. I was doing some tests with Saving Private Ryan and when I had my file size down to the range you describe, I could see noticeable difference than the original MKV file. This was using a chromecast on my 10 year old TV that has nothing fancy like 4k. It is 60" so that does give a lot of real estate to see potential issues. If you happen to find anything that works post back as I would be happy to try. (also it could be my TV is the problem in that it can't handle this new fangled technology!)
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Old 05-07-2019, 10:07 AM   #34
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Thanks guys. Think I'm making some progress here.

Think I've got the MakeMKV part sorted out. Where I was going wrong was the pre-select I was using with Handbrake. I noticed that that audio pre-set was ACC Stereo. Changed that to Pass Through and that has made a significant difference. Still have to turn the volume up a hair but nowhere near as much as I did before and the surround sound was very noticeable. Something still seems a bit off, center channel isn't "popping" as much as I'd like.

Dobbles:
Just before calling it a night last night, I did notice that there was a pre-select optimized for Chromecast. I think that is very much worth trying. My TV's aren't a hell of a lot newer but even with the 4gig file for Iron Man, I thought the picture looked pretty damn good but would rather the file size was closer to what DownInFlames is after. 10-15 Gig/movie would be ideal. With a 4TB NAS drive, that should be plenty for quite a large library of movies.

One thing I noticed last night that I absolutely geeked over was the data Plex downloads in the background. With movies for instance, all you have to do is get the films name and year right and the amount of info it downloads in the background is awesome. Like 9 different movie posters! That's extremely cool.

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Old 05-07-2019, 12:05 PM   #35
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I'm in the middle of transcoding a lot more my stuff.

Pass through audio, MP4, x264, keep the frame rate, bit rate of 22.

I don't have any 4k content though, and most of my stuff is rips that someone else did or old avi files.

Transcoding it that way seems to result in the most direct play streams on Plex though. At times the audio is being transcoded but that doesn't require much horse power.

Plex is amazing. Especially once you start organizing everything and share it with family & friends.
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Old 05-07-2019, 01:02 PM   #36
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Agreed, it is a very impressive system. Now that I've mostly sorted out my sound troubles I'm MUCH happier with it than I was over the weekend.

The other challenge was getting Win10 to install on a disk that is north of 2 TB, I didn't realize the drive had to be formatted a certain way before loading Win10 on to it. I was happily ripping numerous blu-rays on to it before I saw Windows reporting a drive size of 2TB on a 4TB drive. That was rather disappointing. Luckily it wasn't terribly hard to correct.
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Old 05-10-2019, 10:11 AM   #37
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The thing you learn in projects like this.....

I've ripped a few of my blu-rays to experiment with different settings in handbrake. Picture was always decent but wasn't all that happy with the sound. Either had good base but quieter dialogue or good dialogue but lacking "pop" in action scenes.

I have two Vizio sound bars. One on an older TV that only had Digital Optical and a somewhat newer one that had HDMI ARC. Did some research on Digital Optical and found it can't carry as many signals as HDMI.

Took the Chromcast I had bought but not setup yet to the TV upstairs with HDMI ARC. Started watching the same movie and BOOM! Thunderous sound with awesome dialogue and action scenes that blew hair back. Awesome!

I've been wanting to buy a newer TV for a while now and now have a hell of a good reason.

DownInFlames:
Are you able to save your handbrakes setting and send me a copy? I'm pretty sure you can save your own pre-sets to a text file I think? I've tried using the setting you mentioned in your above post but still can't generate a file larger than 6 gig. Would really like to get into the 10-15gig range.
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Old 05-10-2019, 04:14 PM   #38
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DownInFlames:
Are you able to save your handbrakes setting and send me a copy? I'm pretty sure you can save your own pre-sets to a text file I think? I've tried using the setting you mentioned in your above post but still can't generate a file larger than 6 gig. Would really like to get into the 10-15gig range.
I just opened it for the first time in a while and updated it. It looks like the new version saves the settings differently so I'm going to have to play around with it first.

Under the Video tab you can increase the quality by lowering the Constant Quality value or choosing a higher average bitrate. Some trial and error will let you find a good mix of quality and filesize that works best for you.
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Old 05-10-2019, 04:48 PM   #39
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Under the Video tab you can increase the quality by lowering the Constant Quality value or choosing a higher average bitrate.
Ah yes, I think the Constant Quality adjustment is a tab you move left or right? If that's what you're getting at, I did look at that. Seemed to suggest for HD having it between 20-23. Had it on 20 and it did increase file size by about a gig. Wasn't sure if going lower than 20 starts to screw things up. I'll give that and the bit rate a try.
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Old 05-10-2019, 05:57 PM   #40
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Ah yes, I think the Constant Quality adjustment is a tab you move left or right? If that's what you're getting at, I did look at that. Seemed to suggest for HD having it between 20-23. Had it on 20 and it did increase file size by about a gig. Wasn't sure if going lower than 20 starts to screw things up. I'll give that and the bit rate a try.
Yeah, that's it.
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