All my DVDs on a drive; Plex questions

Factual Questions
21

I have downloaded and used VLCplayer, a very flexible program. What I like about it, it can even play ISO files as if they were a DVD. I use DVDshrink which can crunch most DVD’s down to 4.5GB iso, the size of a single-layer DVD write. (The real DVDshrink 3.2 is hard to find nowadays)

I have used AirParrot to play what’s on teh screen to an Apple TV (using AirPlay protocol).
Unfortunately, probably due to Apple TV limitations, the video “skips” every few seconds, a slight drop-out; so it’s good for TV series and comedy, but for fast-action movies not so great.

Also, I have no remote control or ability to pause without getting quite technical.

22

If this is only reason you need to do this I’d say try and talk her out of it. Or consider a divorce. :smiley:

Seriously, this will be a long, huge, tedious undertaking for what I see as not very much gain.

About ten years ago I ripped all my compact discs (about 300 or so) into MP3s, first for a hard drive based MP3 player, now they’re on my iPhone (I originally ripped them onto my PC and have kept an online backup of all the MP3 files so I don’t have to ever re-rip them). But that’s music CDs. Not only are they much faster & simpler to rip, but I listen to them everyday, mostly in my car, and each song is only a few minutes so having all of them constantly available for random access everywhere I go is extremely practical in terms of how I listen to music.

But DVDs are a very different thing. I don’t just mean because they take longer to rip, but because I don’t see much advantage to having them slightly more accessible via a hard drive vs. just taking one off a shelf (albeit a very **big **shelf) and playing it. IOW you don’t watch movies or even TV shows like you listen to music, do you? Movies are 90 mins minimum, TV series 30 but you’ll usually watch multiple episodes. And unlike listening to music, movies are ‘active’, i.e. you sit and ‘watch’ them, you don’t just let them play. So is the extra minute or two it takes to grab & load a disc really that big a deal?

If you’re doing it for the ‘geekiness’ challenge, hey more power to you! But I think that you should maybe try to convince the wife that on-demand streaming has simply made DVD ownership obsolete and you should instead start pawning your disc collection on eBay before they’re worthless!

23

There are other advantages to the OP’s plan besides the geekiness challenge.

For example, if I have a DVD server set up a la the idea the OP has, I can run it headless and access it from other devices on my network via remote desktop. This would allow me to start watching, say, disk 4 of season 6 of 24 in the living room when I get home from work, then pause it, switch to the Braves when they come on at 7, then pick up on the DVD where I left off in the bedroom after the game.

24

Long ago I did this with CDs. I had 2 7 disc changers and ran batch programs from the command line to cycle through each of the discs. Something like that should still be an option since a lot of programs, especially open source let you run them from the command line with full control. Formatting the commands can take some time but you only have to do it once. Of course I don’t think I’ve ever seen a DVD changer for a PC but I’m sure that they’re out there.

25

Hey, hey! Yes! Persuasive! :D:D:D

Whaaaaaat?!?!?? :eek: :wink:

26

+1 :slight_smile: Don’t let it become a 1385 disc collection of 8 tracks and cassette tapes, sell the ones worth something now.

27

Out of curiosity, I tried this last night. Here’s what my experience was like:

Downloaded Freemake. Luckily I caught the check boxes during instalallation that wanted to install a new toolbar and make AVG my home page. But apparently I missed something, because along with Freemake it installed something called ‘TuneUp’ that constantly tried to warn me about how slow my computer was, and how by ‘clicking here’ I could speed it up. I didn’t click, I just uninstalled, but it was really annoying and unexpected.

So now I’ve got Freemake installed. I have a DVD that I ripped with DVD Shrink, which worked fine. When I try to open the video file with Freemake now, it gives me the spinning circle for a looooong time. And then goes ‘not responding’. Tried it three times and quit. Not a good experience at all.

28

As I said upthread, I like HandBrake. It’s open source and free. The only limitation is that it won’t decrypt a commercial DVD. But here is a webpage explaining how to copy a DLL file into the HandBrake installation folder. The DLL will let you decrypt a DVD. After reading this thread, I was prompted to try digitizing my DVD collection and I tried this successfully last night.

29

I go to my apple tv, browse my movies, and click to play what I want to watch. With a disc I have to go to where the discs are, browse them (hoping they are in some sort of order and nobody has missed shelved anything), pull out the case, pull out the disc, load the disc in the player, wait for the player to spin up and load the disc, get past legal and piracy warnings, skip or endure trailers, navigate a menu full of options I will never use, and then the movie starts. Yes, it is far easier to have movies on disc. My young kids can do it and they will never scratch a disc. Sure sometimes it makes it too easy for them to watch something, but that is a parenting issue.

Yes, the initial investment of time is high but it is a very nice thing to have. Plus, as digital distribution has grown, I don’t even have to convert the discs anymore.

30

I don’t know about the spam or whatever you call it when you get unwanted installations, but I’m unusually cautious about that stuff and may have avoided a subtle hint that you missed somewhere.

Have you tried an actual, ya know, store-bought DVD? I’ve run about 100 through by now (I’m not going very fast, no hurry) and maybe two or three do the same thing for me. The vast majority take quite a bit of time, but it works eventually.

It’s also a bit tricky making sure you’ve got the right audio settings; I’ve got quite a few commentary tracks over movies that I had to go back and rip a second time.

Plus is that I haven’t seen a format it won’t rip into or out of, and it burns anything I want onto a DVD that plays out in the living room, which is nice.

Give it another try, maybe? I only suggest it because it works for me; maybe the other solutions would work better for you.

As to why rip DVDs you already own… aside from the convenience factor, try going to your public library and borrowing a relatively popular DVD from them. Look at all the scratches and general disrepair it has, and imagine that on all your own DVDs. :::Shudder::: I get upset enough when I get a thumbprint on one of mine… it’s a comfort knowing that, at least in some form, my investment is more or less permanent.

31

I do not envy anyone who has to transcode (“convert”) that many titles. You can’t just copy them, as you won’t have enough room. Nearly all movies on DVDs take up multiple gigabytes, but you have less than two per movie available.

Still, if you are in for the tedium, Plex would do what you want it to do, although you might not like the tedium of finding things on the Roku. Typing is definitely no fun.

32

Why are you ripping them in such a low quality? Honestly it would be much faster and probably more legal just to illegally download them (not that I’m saying you should do that but), from either usenet or a good ftp (not a torrent site, because from an ftp you can stream directly and usenet will give you speeds underheard of in torrents)

34

My personal experience is that this is spam.
Reported.

35

Use a decryption utility like any DVD to decrypt the disc (if the disc is encrypted). Then use handbrake to transcode just the movie file into a high quality mp4/mkv file.

A DVD movie should fit in a few hundred megabytes (depending on content).

This will be a several months long project though for 1,000 + DVD’s. Depending on how much you value your free time, you might be better off waiting for sales on Amazon and rebuilding your video library that way.

It’s what I ended up doing after spending weeks ripping blu-rays. One day I saw the last 5 blu-rays I spent a couple of weekends ripping, each for like $5 on Amazon instant video. Those several hours lost were easily worth $20-$25 to me, so I’ve been doing just that. Slowly building up my digital video collection on Amazon $5-$10 at a time. :slight_smile:

36

ah, update time…

I bought a new Mac Mini, recently hooked the old one up in the living room to my TV system.
I used DVDShrink to rip DVDs to 4.5GB ISO image files (which didn’t used to be illegal in Canada). However, you can calculate that a 1TB drive will only hold 200 DVDs this way. I currently have a 4TB drive.

The disc is hooked to my PC, but the Mac Mini can see the share, mount the ISO as a disc and play it on my big TV using Mac’s DVD player. There I an app now that can be used as a remote-control mouse and keyboard to control the Mac from my iPad or iPhone.

the obvious problem now is a program to organize and track the choices.

37

Seeing as I am presently ripping some dvds, as I type this, I thought I would throw in some comments.

I use a combination of programs to rip both blueray and dvd, as well as one to remove drm from itunes. One dvd drive and one BL drive (external). Due to legal reasons, the good folks who make handbrake cannot let you download the program with the means to decrypt the disk, at least on the windows version. You have to download that separately, but I dont recall if I had to do likewise on linux.

So now you have handbrake downloaded, and the needed driver installed. You pop the disk in and from there, you want to choose the quality of the rip. Now here, peoples opinions will vary according to their individual tastes. For me I keep the preset on normal, as opposed to one of the presets that will give you better quality, but bigger file. For my purposes, if it was made before the 90’s, a blue ray quality is too excessive. For the most part, my movies come out under a gig.

Danger Will Robinson

Some movies, no matter what, will not play nicely with handbrake. Do to the mastering of the disc when it was created, the file format,structure, no virgin tears, what ever. So the next step is to use the blueray drive, and hope that works. If not, then I have to use MakeMkv, which is a paid program, and you just look for the biggest file in the explorer pane, and it will rip the disc, but in an uncompressed file. If your fine with 40 gig files, which is what a blue ray movie will be, then cool, otherwise, you locate the ripped file and then compress it with handbrake.

Having said the above, movies are a joy to rip compared to television shows, when you are just learning. You only have to locate the biggest file in BR, as already stated. But as I noticed when I ripped the clone wars, there is no episode list on the disc. Add more fun to that, the folders are duplicated, most likely for foreign audiences as I noticed subtitles on vlc player.

Season 3 of the clone wars was more fun, as you had to rip actual chapters, instead of episodes, and then stitch them together, with another program called makemerge-gui.

Bottom line is that its not hard to do, but it does have a learning curve.

Declan

39

Reported. I was like, the hell, it’s 2017… who still has DVDs?