How do you store your Blu Ray rips?

For Plex and other media players, really needs to be a single file. So my recommendation is to rip to a single media file.

But, in all fairness, those files are going to be huge. So, I generally only store a compressed (to whatever level you think you can handle) version and consider the Blu-ray the "original". Again, mainly to save space.

So, unless your library is very small, I recommend that. Otherwise, you'll have a very large NAS full of data for just a few things that is difficult to play effectively over many networks.

 

MKVs. I remove all subtitles (PGS) and language tracks I don't need prior to rip. You're left with the Original Quality video file. Most 2 Hr BD movies will average 25-35 GB in size depending on the bit rate and the codec used. (standard def DVDs (2 hrs) will be 4-7 GB in size ripped to MKV)

I have a 10 TB NAS, after 116 movies and 17 TV shows (mixed SD/HD)- I'm at 4 TB consumed. After a while I'll probably either expand the NAS, or transcode some of the movies to smaller bit rate versions to conserve space. But I prefer to keep the Original Quality file, even if it is a ton of space.

BTW, don't call it uncompressed. Technically all digital video is compressed using lossy codecs, even blu rays. It's simply the largest bit rate video available to the consumer.

 

Use MakeMKV. It's pretty easy to use, just checkbox what you want to keep.


I think you only need anydvd to transcode to smaller bitrates or mp4.

 

MakeMKV to rip, then Handbrake to encode to mk4 (right?) I have about 60 movies done this way- about 250gb I think.
Looks pretty good on Plex.

 

Mkv 1080p dts 5.1 and target a size of 10 to 12gb per movie

 

I use a separate disc extractor (DVDFab, main movie only), then Handbrake for encodes. After getting my hands on so many raw videos, I only have one thing to say:

1080p is so wasteful for most movies. Even on my 65" 4k tv!

For CGI popcorn flicks, I really can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p with quality factor 19. The action onscreen is just too fast-paced.

Period-style movies are purposefully lower-resolution. They use digital filters to make it look WORSE. Hidden Figures falls into this category, where the 720p looks exactly the same as 1080p.

So that leaves you slower-paced NEW movies that can actually give you that 1080p quality. Atomic Blonde comes to mind as one of the few from last year that really kicks-ass at 1080p.

Animation looks the same at 720p as it does at 1080p. There just isn't enough detail put into most of these to justify the higher resolution.

As for older movies (1990s and earlier), if they were stored correctly, AND filmed with high-end equipment, you MIGHT get something with more than 720p of ACTUAL resolution. But the vast majority are 720p or less (the rest of that picture being blur and film grain). If you down-sample the video to it's ACTUAL resolution, you stop wasting space, while it looks the same.

35mm film is CAPABLE of 4k resolution. But how you CAPTURE that onto the film determines how crappy the final result is. High-quality cameras and lenses used to be way more expensive then they now are, and real-time digital processing in the camera has fixed a lot of poor exposures/focus you see in 1990s-and-earlier films.

The Handbrake x265 encoder is so much faster than it used to be, that I encode two settings, and just choose the best:

720p and 1080p for new slower-paced movies. 20 quality level usually works.

720p and 600p (1000 horizontal resolution) for popcorn flicks and everything older, I use 19 for fast-action, and 20 for slower.

Multi-pass encoding is old and pointless. Handbrake Constant-quality single-pass gives me better compression, and takes half the time. You just have to take the time to see the results of a few sample runs, and chose your favorite settings. In my experience, 19 is exactly the same as-source, even for fast-motion movies. 20 is nearly the same as source for slower movies.

If you're picky like me (and can use h.265), you can store an entire move library on 1TB or less (average of 3GB per-title). Or, even if you let Handbrake keep the original quality 1080p at 19 constant quality (average 5GB per-title), it will still give you hundreds of movie s on a 2TB drive. This is compared to the raw Blue-Ray rips, which use around 25GB each.

 

So here's a question: what about HDR UHD?

 

Can you even decrypt/rip 4k BluRay yet? I didn't think it was possible.

 

I've no idea- just got my first UHD TV and UHD Blu-ray player (the Philips one that does Dolby Vision, have an LG OLED), and that'd be the standard for deploying such a setup, for me.

 

Yes and no. There is no universal crack for all UHD content, but some BluRay drives can read the disks despite not being "UHD" drives, and there are some leaked keys that will allow you to extract from them. There is a discussion about this in the RedFox AnyDVD forums.

 

For the record, I rip my BluRays using AnyDVD HD and EAC3TO (ripping/converting audio to AC3 640 - audio system is only DD 5.1) and then use MeGUI x264 to re-encode the videos to smaller bitrates (2 stage, usually @ 3500 - nearly indistinguishable on most films on my 4K TV, will re-encode again at a higher bitrate for those where there is a noticeable difference in quality). Note that I use custom-tweaked profiles on my videos to enhance visual quality at these lower bitrates. Why x264 instead of x265? Pretty much everything hardware decodes x264, including the cheap Amazon FireTV stick.

If the video itself is 2.35 or greater aspect ratio, I'll use BDSUP2SUB to "move" all of the subtitles out of the frame, so that they appear above or below the actual picture (this works very well when using Kodi - Media Player Classic ignores this.

Movie is reconstructed as an .MKV using MKVToolNix. Average file size is anywhere from 2 to 5 GB per film (~1 GB for most hour long TV episodes) and is stored on a 5x4TB (HGST ReadyNAS drives) RAID 5 external drive array (for 12 TB of storage) connected via a Highpoint RocketRAID 644 to an FX-8350 (stock) w/16G of RAM and a Radeon R7 270x running Kodi and Netflix for local video on the 4K TV (using display port to HDMI adapter for 60Hz 4K) and Plex Server for remote video (other TVs in house using Amazon FireTV sticks, tablet/phone when away from house). The RocketRAID card is to keep the array easily portable should I switch processor architectures.

The FX-8350 is something of a wonder processor for Plex Server, and the only time the CPU is really doing anything substantive is when Plex is being used - video card handles all x264 decode duties locally. Video is ripped and re-encoded on my Ryzen R7 1700 (@ 3.8 GHz) desktop with 16G of RAM (@ 3200). Average encode for typical 2 hour Progressive Scan movie is ~1.5 hours (BluRay) or 20 minutes (DVD). These are CPU encodes, naturally (slower, but better quality than video card accelerated encodes).

Interlaced encodes though........ Interlaced DVD's using the QTGMC filter at "Slower" preset with multi-threading take ~3 hours or so per movie. Interlaced BluRays can take a couple of days per film (!!!). Thankfully Interlaced BluRays are pretty rare (usually only find these for BBC shows like early seasons of Downton Abby or all of Torchwood).

I keep an offsite (stored at a friend's house) backup of my media on an 8TB (WD) external USB drive. (Got a little bit over 1 TB of space left on this)

You did not ask specifically about it, but Live TV is provided courtesy of a Silicon Dust HDHomeurn Prime cablecard network box and all TV's can get Live TV (complete with DVR services) either via Kodi (with HDHomeRun plugin) or Plex. I have no cable boxes at all (just the single cablecard) and am using the Verizon FiOS TV and Internet service. The HDHomeRun Prime can simultaneously stream 3 different TV channels, and I have never had a case where this has not been sufficient to cover all TVs in the house. Plex will now even allow me to watch Live TV when away from home should I so wish. I got the coveted 50% off Lifetime Plex coupon 3 months after trialing it and jumped on that

Fun fact: some DVD's don't come with subtitles, but do come with Closed Captions. Ripping Closed Captions using CCRIP and then adding them into your .MKV as a .SRT subtitle will then give you "subtitles" for these films (I'm looking at you, Highlander TV series)

 

I do have this interlaced DVD movie I just can't get to encode well using x264 and QTGMC, and so I used Handbrake to decomb the picure. A Tale of Two Sisters (Korean horror film, excellent if you haven't seen it. American remake, also good, was The Uninvited). The way they encoded this movie is all sorts of jankey - I feel like I'd have to break it up into chunks and re-encode them separately with different settings to make this work, and also perform some frame decimations. It is a MESS. The Handbrake decomb is good enough for now, though I am seriously considering buying the BluRay. Reviews say that the video quality on that is actually WORSE than the DVD though. Sad this film can't get a good home video release...

 

I backup my discs using makemkv and output a 24-32GB file. Gets stored on a NAS that also runs plex.

I used to do a directory rip and then use mkvmerge but now do the one step process with the new version of makemkv.

The UHD discs are starting to pile up waiting for an effective/applicable backup method.

 

I compress most of my movies down to 5gigs

 

This ultimately boils down to what's more important: saving space or preserving quality? The answer is subjective, personal and is neither right or wrong.

I keep all my MKVs at original quality. The exact same as on the bluray disc. The biggest reason (apart from *percieved* quality), is that I depend on the HW transcoding to all my platforms. And it's best if you're transcoding from the largest bit rate version available. So on the big TV and AVR- I'm sending the Rokus original quality and 5.1. On the bedroom TV, I'm transcoding a 12 Mb version and stereo. To the tablet- a 3 Mb 720p version, and so on. What you want to avoid is transcoding from a version that's already squashed down from Original Quality. (you're compressing it twice) The quality is not as consistent.

In the OTT/Streaming space; average bit rate for streaming 1080p is well under 8 Mb- and it's perfectly acceptable. You can make an argument that any thing over 12 Mb is unneeded bits. And I understand that argument. But transferring all these discs over the MKVs has opened my eyes as to how much we're missing.

 

Is there an advantage to ripping a disc with AnyDVD and then using Handbrake to encode to a MKV container? I just use Anydvd to decode the disc and let Handbrake rip\encode to MKV.

 

Your post sounds like you ALREADY do what you are asking about.


WTF MATE?

 

Vs doing what?

 

Well isn't it obvious? He wants to do A, but he's currently doing A.

Don't you get the issue?

 

It really depends on how you plan to play them back and what quality you prefer. I prefer uncompressed audio and video for my home playback and have built my environment to support that. My go to is Plex Media Server, as it is a very capable platform and can support any number of different playback scenarios.

Rip feature track from disc (including UHD) through MakeMKV with HD/Atmos audio (HDR on the UHD discs). The UHD copies have their own folder for reasons explained below.
Storage is an unRAID server, which is also the Plex Media Server (among several other things). It's currently got 3x 8TB drives, one of those is parity. I can easily expand this to 6 or more drives by just simply plugging them in.
Playback is primarily to Nvidia Shield TV's through of course, Plex. One is connected to a 4k HDR TV, the other a 1080.
I have two users created in Plex, one of which does not have access to the 4K movies folder since it would force a transcode from 4k to 1080 (requires a lot of CPU to accomplish) on the non-4k set. The Shield connected to the 1080 TV gets the "cut back" selections user.
The Shield TV's are set up to Direct Play so no transcoding is required or needed, meaning no/little CPU use. The Shield TV handles HDR10 and HD audio/Atmos very well.

I do understand that not everyone needs uncompressed video and audio, for those playing back on mobile devices it's not necessary. With the significant amount of time it takes to add content to the library, I only want to handle the media once, and I don't want to some day kick myself because playback is "dull" due to compression. This also leaves the option for anyone that wants to "back up" my library to compress to their preference, which anyone that ever obtained MP3's way back when knows all too well that some people just don't care or cannot tell any difference no matter what is being played.

 

That 30day countdown never starts, and I've literally ripped hundreds of MKVs; haven't paid a nickel.

 

MKVs on a replicated 128TB JBOD setup.

 

DVD Fab has a "30-day trial," but all you have to do to restart that trial is uninstall and download the latest copy. And their 64-bit version has added UHD Blu-Ray ripping.

I like their tool's GUI much better than MakeMKV.

 

I use makemkv, and then handbrake to encode. I keep original DTS-HD audio, and only do compression I can't see or notice. Typical Bluray ends up being around 9GB. I think I use 18 for compression on handbrake.

The encoding is needed for my wireless tv in my bedroom. Unencoded movies will buffer while streaming, encoded ones won't. I know I can just a lower streaming quality, but I prefer to just compress once, rather than every time the movie is played

 

I thought maybe some were copying the contents of the disc to the hard drive and then using Handbrake. Seemed like an extra and unnecessary step. But, I may just be confused on the terminology.

 

I don't even think tools like AnyDVD wlll work with a copied disc. I think they're searching for the raw disc or nothing.

But even if they did, it wouldn't save you any time. The slowest process is still copying the disc to the hard drive. The tool just does decryption at the same time.

 

1. I use MakeMKV like this.. and just select the main video and the highest quality audio available. Export to temp folder.
2. Handbrake to encode to .mp4 and put on Plex drive.
3. Refresh plex and enjoy.

I have four kids under 10 and they are not gentle with discs. Now they can watch their movie on plex instead. No disc shuffle, and no scratched/lost discs.

 

The no more disc changing/shuffling ever is probably the best thing about PLEX. It almost takes binge watching to a new level.

 

I've only had one error so far on MakeMKV (dirty dancing blu-ray). As far as UHD discs go.. I didn't think you could rip those yet.
AnyDVD/CloneDVD I have used going way far back. I had an issue with Cars 3 blu-ray, where I could ONLY get dolby stereo audio track with AnyDVD. Switch to MakeMKV and I could get the 7.1 HD audio track.