Out of the 'ripped movie' loop, what's needed?

harsaphes

harsaphes

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Hey all. So I have shelves full of dvd's sitting in a closet, and I would love to free up this much needed space by ripping my movies and getting rid of the disks.

What kind of setup am I looking for? Should I use my current system..see sig spec... with an added drive, or do I need to build a whole new box?

I assume from reading here I would be using PLEX and MakeMKV. Is that correct?

Any help greatly appreciated.
 
For DVDs you could use DVD shrink/MakeMKV to make ISO's(Rip out crap you don't want etc..) and then handbrake to convert them into .mkv files. Your system is fine. Any DVD+RW drive will work. Since you did not mention blu-rays, those are bit more tough
 
MakeMKV will make then into .mkv, then use Handbrake if you want to make them into say mp4. Frees up a lot of space and you don't need to transcode at the NAS/server.
 
Should I just add an external drive to my setup to store the files in? Seems like that's the easiest solution.
Or I probably have room in the case for a laptop drive.
 
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I put all my movies on a NAS. If you leave them as .mkv, you'll be surprised how fast a 500GB drive will fill up. My NAS is currently 4TB and I'm upping that to 12TB shortly. My HTPC only has a 250GB drive, but I don't use it for the rips, just HDMI capture and then off to the NAS.
 
Dullard said:
I put all my movies on a NAS. If you leave them as .mkv, you'll be surprised how fast a 500GB drive will fill up. My NAS is currently 4TB and I'm upping that to 12TB shortly. My HTPC only has a 250GB drive, but I don't use it for the rips, just HDMI capture and then off to the NAS.
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How many films do you have stored so far?
 
Best probably methodology: use MakeMKV to rip 'em into single mkv files that contain everything (or just set it to rip main movie + audio + captions/subs if so desired leaving out all the extras) then batch feed the MKV files to HandBrake to crank out compressed single file encodes in mass quantities or just leave them in their native format (not very space efficient as a compressed file would be). As you're dealing with DVDs expect the physical ripping with MakeMKV to take 10-20 minutes per disc (if you have access to multiple optical drives make use of 'em and run a separate instance of MakeMKV per drive if needed to make things go faster), then once you've got a lot of them ripped to the hard drive/storage server/etc either leave them there in that native format (4-8GB per file) or as noted feed 'em to HandBrake and choose a preset to crunch 'em down to maybe 1-2GB per movie depending on length.

You're dealing with DVD quality material which is MPEG2 in nature at a max of 12Mbps and 854x480 (assuming you're using NTSC based DVD and not PAL material) per aspect ratio so there's no need to go batshit crazy insane with HandBrake's highest quality encoding settings. Using something as simplistic as the iPad preset will still end up giving you good/great quality encodes that are much smaller than the originals you'd be starting with.

That i7-6700K you have supports Intel QuickSync HEVC h.265 (as well as the older h.264 too, even faster to encode with QuickSync) which could (potentially) encode those DVD rips using HandBrake (which can make use of QuickSync HEVC x265 encoding) and get things done incredibly fast by comparison as well as having smaller encodes when you're done (sometimes half the size of an h.264 encode), on the order or (potentially) a few hundred frames per second speeds. In fact if you set things up correctly you could encode the DVDs directly from the optical drive straight to HEVC encoded MKV files in real-time, that's how fast that QuickSync can get things done so it could actually end up being a 1 step process with the ripping/encoding happening at the same time per disc, almost like ripping an audio CD and converting it to MP3/AAC/Vorbis/etc in real-time and you're done when you eject the disc.

A little more to the process but because you have that Skylake CPU this is an option to be considered which would be incredibly efficient start to finish.
 
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Disk space is fairly inexpensive.. I wouldn't feed ripped DVD's into Handbrake... BR's is a different story though lol
 
jlbenedict said:
Disk space is fairly inexpensive.. I wouldn't feed ripped DVD's into Handbrake... BR's is a different story though lol
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The one advantage is, for me anyway, is that pretty much everything I own will play an mp4. Stream to a Roku, load up a SDXC for a tablet on a trip, any of that sort of thing. Plus, my (current) NAS doesn't have the horsepower to transcode on the fly.
 
Dullard said:
I put all my movies on a NAS. If you leave them as .mkv, you'll be surprised how fast a 500GB drive will fill up. My NAS is currently 4TB and I'm upping that to 12TB shortly. My HTPC only has a 250GB drive, but I don't use it for the rips, just HDMI capture and then off to the NAS.
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.mkv is a container format. not a compression format. it has nothing to do with the size. the compression used inside the .mkv format detemins the size/quality.
 
SvenBent said:
.mkv is a container format. not a compression format. it has nothing to do with the size. the compression used inside the .mkv format detemins the size/quality.
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Right, but I rip the DVD with MakeMKV, so I get an .mkv of some sort - and most of my stuff can't deal with it. But I can run the .mkv through Hand Brake and convert it to .mp4 and everything I have can play it. So format/container/whatever is great and cool, that's just what works for me.
 
Dullard said:
Right, but I rip the DVD with MakeMKV, so I get an .mkv of some sort - and most of my stuff can't deal with it. But I can run the .mkv through Hand Brake and convert it to .mp4 and everything I have can play it. So format/container/whatever is great and cool, that's just what works for me.
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Yes. but its noy because its MKV that its big. It because its mpeg2 with a high bitrate in a .mkv container. you can have h.264 compresion in a .mkv file as well and you will have the same size (except for some difference in header/container tags) as your /mp4 file which contains h.264 compression as well.

They way you worded it you implied it was because it was a .mkv file that it was big., which is a wrong statement. moving the goalpost to compatibile with your devices is something complete else.
 
I use AnyDVD to break encryption. I then rip DIRECTLY from the disc using handbrake. No copying required. Copying from disc to drive first just takes extra time and there is no advantage. You will be bound by the encoding speed long before being the bandwidth of the optical drive comes into play.

Whether using CPU encoding or QuickSync I set to Constant Quality which results in about 6-8GB for 1080P and around 2GB for DVD. That's for live action. Animations will be lower, and older movies with film grain will be higher (both sides can swing wildly).

QuickSync is specific to Intel and gives excellent speed regardless of processor. Even a 6 or 8 core CPU can't hold a candle to QuickSync. Highly recommend it, EXCEPT, when trying to make small file size movies. Then you must use CPU.

When using Handbrake I set Audio stream 1 to 256kb/s AAC and Audio stream 2 to Dolby Digital 5.1 640kb/s. That is very high quality Dolby Digital. You can also set Audio stream 3 to DTS-HD pass through if the source has it.
 
You can use ffmpeg to transfer the contents of any MKV container into an MP4 container quite easily (note this is NOT transcoding that requires a lot of CPU time to get it done, this is a simple copy operation from one container format to another, that's it):

Code: 
ffmpeg -i input_filename.mkv -vcodec copy -acodec copy target_filename.mp4

Doesn't get much simpler than that if you need to do it. If there's a lot more "stuff' in the MKV file, the captions/subs/multiple audio tracks/etc then yes it's more complicated but it can be as simple as that one command and it doesn't take long at all since it's primarily just a file copy operation more than anything else.

If you've got movies in MKV containers and want them for other devices, sure you can spend time transcoding them but if you want to keep the quality as it is in the MKV container I'd say just use ffmpeg on a per file as required basis.
 
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