Mrs. R, for some reason, has decided that it would be great if all our DVDs (1385 titles) were on a hard drive somewhere and she could just call them up on the TV, like she can Netflix (we use a Roku).
I was looking at a program called Plex that seems to be the ticket; the plan would be to install Plex on one of our Macs, buy a monstrous external hard drive (2Tb), rip all our DVDs (much tedium), use Plex to catalog them, and install a Plex client on the Roku as a “private channel”.
Anybody out there have experience with Plex? Is this a good plan?
Any other comments also welcome.
Unless Plex is going to decrypt encrypted content, I don’t see how you’re going to be able to playback the video from those DVD’s that are encrypted - and I’m guessing a good chunk if not the vast majority are.
Aside from that, I think the law is still a bit murky on ripping DVD’s - i.e., making de-crypted iso file images, which it sounds like you need in order for this to work.
Another problem is that even for straight iso image files that are unencrypted, you still have to deal with the lead-ins and other crap that you can’t skip over just as if you’d popped a dvd in the player. I find that a much better solution is to convert the entire disk to an avi, mp4 or other playable video file using something like freemake. This will let you convert just the main movie plus any other video on the disc you think is worthwhile into one or more standalone files.
I’m about halfway through my movie collection; when I’m done, I’ll start doing my other DVDs such as all five seasons of Babylon 5 and other non-movie disks.
I’ve got a 500Gig external drive and since I’m not too particular about quality (I rip 'em at about 320x240 or something) it should do quite nicely.
Takes about half an hour for each disk, which I spend on the other computer watching movies I’ve already ripped, playing back on my old CRT television.
If you don’t get the answers you’re looking for here, note that there are a number of resident Plex experts on Roku’s forum. Someone there may be able to help you.
Ditto for one of the more active GooglePlus communities dedicated to Roku. I see lots of talk about Plex there, too.
I’ve played around with it on Roku, but have never really gotten the hang of Plex. Need to do precisely what you’ve mentioned, though, as this DVD “collection” mostly collects dust. Haven’t used a DVD player in a couple of years, so having the ability to play them on Roku would be convenient.
I’ve tried all the video streamers and I really prefer TVersity to Plex–I think Tversity costs a little more, but it plays almost anything, transcodes without stuttering, etc. Also, it allows you to set up your own file/folder structure–Plex seemed much more rigid about how files had to be named.
What you’re describing requires some actions that are technically illegal in the USA (bypassing disc encryption to enable playback without the physical disk), even though most people consider them perfectly reasonable in certain circumstances. (Your scenario is one of those acceptable circumstances.) I’d recommend a site like videohelp.com or Doom9.org for more in-depth answers. (doom9’s info tends to be somewhat outdated and geared towards linux and cli enthusiasts).
However, for the content that is NOT encrypted, I’d recommend a tool called dvdshrink. Not only can it rip dvd movies as iso’s or copy the folder structure, it has a bunch of handy features too make dvd’s less annoying, including:[ol]
[li]remove PUO’s (prohibited user operations, the thing that keeps you from fast-forwarding through thde “piracy is a crime” logos),[/li][li] replace or remove video streams (get rid of trailers for other movies, those pesky legal logos, etc.)[/li][li]remove unwanted audio streams or subtitle streams (do you really need spanish audio, or german subtitles)[/li][li]resample video streams (to reduce their size) in a way that works with all-but-the-earliest dvd players[/li][/ol]
This seems like a whole lot of trouble to go through just to avoid having to put the DVD in a player. Now I can understand wanting to have a catalog so you can browse the collection and search for actors, titles & directors (is there an app that will do that for you?).
In the OP’s defense, it IS over 1300 DVD’s. Even if you allow for multiple disks per box for things like tv serials, that eats up a lot of shelf space and can be a little annoying to manage.
It depends on the software and how good your hardware is. If you have a fairly decent video card with say 500+ shaders and use software that uses hardware acceleration, the amount of time required can be cut down to a fraction of the time it take for CPU-only ripping - a small fraction at that.
edit: You can also usually multitask if you have more than one optical drive.
Just take a vacation to some place with more forgiving copyright laws and fast internet (Japan? The Netherlands?) and download all the movies from the Pirate Bay or similar. It’s likely going to be faster than ripping them yourself, and the quality is likely to be better for any given target filesize because the professionals know what they’re doing and use sensible ripping settings.
Even at half an hour per DVD encoded (which would be lightning fast if you care about saving disk space at all, and you probably would with that many), that’s almost 700 hours of your life wasted, or 87 full days of work.
I use Plex with Roku over a 300 Mbps wifi setup and it’s as easy as can be and the quality is wonderful and there’s no stuttering, even when you’re using the computer for something else. After the initial indexing, the Plex server just sits in the background and “just works” when you need it to. Pretty impressive, actually.
The one minor issue I noticed with it is that if you don’t have a whole lot of good metadata for your files, sometimes it’ll pull up the wrong title (such as thinking a TV show is a movie, etc.) and sort it uncorrectly.
Yes, but you don’t have to sit through those 700 hours. Just start a movie encoding and when you remember, check if it’s finished. If it did, start another movie.
Handbrake converts whichever file on the disk you tell it to, so no legal warnings or trailers or bonus content. Just the movie file. You do need to be aware of subtitles, as in non-english dialogue and english subtitles. You usually have to manually specify the subtitle option.
As to time, of course it is going to take a while. But it is not like you have to sit there. Plus the better the computer, the faster it will go. I have a newer iMac and can convert a movie in about half an hour. Send the kid to the computer to switch the disk out and start the conversion from my ipad.
I don’t use roku though. Imported all of my movies and tv shows into itunes and play them through an apple tv. Works fine. It is very fast and convenient.
As to the legalitity, I will let others delve into that. But I only do this with disks I have purchased and retain possession of. Most physical dvd’s now come with a digital copy anyways, and I am pretty close to making the switch to just buying downloaded movies.
I love Plex, but I had my “Computer Geek” load all the files and do conversions. The only problem I have had is it needs frequent updating. Easy Peasy have more than a TB in video files
Another thing to keep in mind, that for DVDs of TV series it will by default rip whichever video track is longest-- a lot of the time that’s the special feature documentary!
It can be quite time consuming it to find which tracks are what you want (episodes, and not special features or what-not) and add them all to the Handbrake queue. The good news is that Handbrake has a queue (the old version I ripped my Futurama DVDs with did not, that was an extremely long process. Then three years later, Futurama lands on Netflix and I just trashed all the video files. C’est la vie.)
For tv shows I actually find that Handbrake will actually find the “play all” track and set that one to convert by default. It is a simple matter, if a little time consuming, to choose each show length chapter and add it to the queue. When I do this quickly I have occasionally ended up with the bonus feature or some such. But thus are easy to trash.
The real problem I have with Handbrake, or almost any of the applications, is the naming conventions and the names that come up for discs automatically. Sometimes they are duplicates, especially if doing tv series, or they are just gibberish. All of that has to be corrected manually and gets very tedious. But I am done with that project now so I can enjoy the fruits of my labor.
I’ve done this with my DVD/Blu rays Using a combination of handbrake and DVDFab. MP4 with a discreet 5.1 channel sound track and a dolby encoded one works best for me, but you have to take your sound setup into account.
DVD files are pretty small at full resolution and almost perfect quality. Blu rays can vary from 2 gigs to up to 12 gigs, depending on the content.
Also, you don’t want to ever lose your movies once you’ve done all the work, so I would suggest you invest in an HD enclosure. I’ve got one that supports up to 4 3TB drives in RAID 5 which equals 9 Terrabytes of space which is fairly well protected from a drive failure.