I don't know- $2 a movie is pretty convenient for a Ultraviolet digital locker you have access to anywhere. At that price it seems like the time converting each movie over and running your own server isn't worth the effort.
I ripped and converted my dvd collection on Plex, but deleted them as I upgraded to better blurays.
I don't really want to spend time ripping hundreds of discs again, and if I compress them to save space, might as well go with uv streaming really. Vudu doesn't have everything I have either though.
It requires a home address and it won't let you scan if your phone doesn't locate you at home. I don't know if the address has to match your billing address
It says 1874x820. Plex reads that as 720p apparently. Would it be because I have cropping set to auto?
I've used the same preset for nearly all of my other movies and almost all of them read as 1080p. The only other exception is Prometheus which reads as 720p, but PowerDVD shows at 1832x800.
Edit - Seven reads as 1920x800 on PowerDVD, but Plex shows it as 1080p. Maybe it's just a Plex thing?
Vudu offers the digital version through their ecosystem by scanning the barcode of the movie you own. There is a small fee associated but that saves to all that time of ripping the discs and the cost of the drives, not to mention you might want a cloud back up of the disc images if your HDDs fail.
Definitely this. Keep in mind that not all movies are supported (nothing from Disney), but having everything streamable so easily in the same place as my other purchases is amazing
It says 1874x820. Plex reads that as 720p apparently. Would it be because I have cropping set to auto?
I've used the same preset for nearly all of my other movies and almost all of them read as 1080p. The only other exception is Prometheus which reads as 720p, but PowerDVD shows at 1832x800.
Edit - Seven reads as 1920x800 on PowerDVD, but Plex shows it as 1080p. Maybe it's just a Plex thing?
Well, quite a number of 1080p movies are actually 800p but with black bars encoded in the video for letterboxing that add it up to 1080p. Mebe PowerDvd just autodetects blackbars.
As an aside, for anyone who's encoding their library after ripping I'd recommend StaxRip https://github.com/stax76/staxrip - far more options, easier to understand, and hardware accelerated encoding for Intel CPU's, AMD, Nvidia in both h264 and HEVC. If Handbrake works for you then so be it, but Staxrip is damned good.
Dear Hollywood, if you sold DRM free movies I'd buy all that shit digitally and avoid all this hassle. I watch all my movies digitally but buy physical discs because digital limits my options due to DRM. With bluray rips and plex I can watch pretty much anywhere
Buy from iTunes and then use the $40 Tuneskit to lossless remove the decryption and get DRM-Free files.
(Tuneskit looks mildly sketchy but I promise the video really is lossless; I'm paranoid about this stuff and I compared md5 hashes on a bunch of different videos to confirm.)
been ripping a bunch of TV shows lately, compressing them with x265, the compression is ridiculous. First season of the xfiles was ~230gb compressed down to ~60gb honestly looks indistinguishable from the source to me, thats on my 4k Dell XPS and a 106" 1080p projection screen. And thats with just auto by-passing Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master into the video.
PM me if you don't care about encoding time and want the best possible h.264 results at any size/bitrate. I will give you custom settings and notes about compatibility for various streaming boxes like an Apple TV, PS3, etc.
It doesn't. In fact there is a google doc out there that lists every movie and includes the barcode you can just scan right off your computer.
Still, they probably figure it's better than what they had before for several years, that didn't require any effort on the part of the user at all really. Unfortunately the price is now double though
I got most of my collection before the barcode system, but I just tried it for the first time on my phone and it worked like a charm.
It doesn't. In fact there is a google doc out there that lists every movie and includes the barcode you can just scan right off your computer.
Still, they probably figure it's better than what they had before for several years, that didn't require any effort on the part of the user at all really. Unfortunately the price is now double though
PM me if you don't care about encoding time and want the best possible h.264 results at any size/bitrate. I will give you custom settings and notes about compatibility for various streaming boxes like an Apple TV, PS3, etc.
been pretty happy with the results so far of h265/x265 at RF20 in handbrake. Takes about an hour and fifteen minutes for an hour tv show on my Dell but about 3+ hours on my old CPU that my server NAS is running. First 3 seasons of Sopranos was 389gb down to 100gb.
been pretty happy with the results so far of h265/x265 at RF20 in handbrake. Takes about an hour and fifteen minutes for an hour tv show on my Dell but about 3+ hours on my old CPU that my server NAS is running. First 3 seasons of Sopranos was 389gb down to 100gb.
been ripping a bunch of TV shows lately, compressing them with x265, the compression is ridiculous. First season of the xfiles was ~230gb compressed down to ~60gb honestly looks indistinguishable from the source to me, thats on my 4k Dell XPS and a 106" 1080p projection screen. And thats with just auto by-passing Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master into the video.
Been going with Nvidia's hardware based h265 encoder myself. It actually a lot of the time ends up looking nicer than x265 AND Intel's Quicksync HEVC hardware encoder on their newer chips (which both have very similar compression artifacts which look kind of like super enchanced noise but still losing details), which is odd.
And it can handle 150 frames per second with ease unlike x265, which can handle maybe 8 on a fast preset. Movies done in maybe half an hour, TV shows in minutes. (Typically hitting 10-15 GB a file, whilst also downmuxing Atmos or sticking to TrueHD audio streams because fuck 5GB+ audio streams with the hardware I have).
If you've got a newer Nvidia GPU, or even a newer Intel chip, it's worth checking out their hardware based encoders - you may be pleasantly surprised. (Not sure if Handbrake exposes them, don't use it).
Buy from iTunes and then use the $40 Tuneskit to lossless remove the decryption and get DRM-Free files.
(Tuneskit looks mildly sketchy but I promise the video really is lossless; I'm paranoid about this stuff and I compared md5 hashes on a bunch of different videos to confirm.)
I mean even then, iTune's 1080p videos hit around 4.8GB usually. Blu-Ray movies can be upto 40GB for the main movie, there's a big amount of quality difference for ripping yourself. (Of course, whether you'll notice is another thing - the biggest thing though is properly mastered disc-movies rarely exhibit colour banding unlike downloads).
my biggest problem is MakeMKV ripping tv show episodes out of order. I opened up what should have been the XFiles Pilot episode and it was actually the tooms episode which is episode 3. This isn't a problem for me with the Xfiles i've seen it several times and should be easy enough to fix, but i've never seen Sopranos or Spartacus, both of which i just ripped, I have no idea if they are in order or not. Anyone have a good reliable way to fix this?
Rick and Morty was also completely jacked up out of order. So i don't have much faith that sopranos and spartacus aren't the same.
PM me if you don't care about encoding time and want the best possible h.264 results at any size/bitrate. I will give you custom settings and notes about compatibility for various streaming boxes like an Apple TV, PS3, etc.
my biggest problem is MakeMKV ripping tv show episodes out of order. I opened up what should have been the XFiles Pilot episode and it was actually the tooms episode which is episode 3. This isn't a problem for me with the Xfiles i've seen it several times and should be easy enough to fix, but i've never seen Sopranos or Spartacus, both of which i just ripped, I have no idea if they are in order or not. Anyone have a good reliable way to fix this?
Rick and Morty was also completely jacked up out of order. So i don't have much faith that sopranos and spartacus aren't the same.
been ripping a bunch of TV shows lately, compressing them with x265, the compression is ridiculous. First season of the xfiles was ~230gb compressed down to ~60gb honestly looks indistinguishable from the source to me, thats on my 4k Dell XPS and a 106" 1080p projection screen. And thats with just auto by-passing Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master into the video.
If you're doing CRF / RF / CQ / CQP encoding it'll generally vary on how complex the scenes are in the movie for the encoder. They usually try to target a constant visual complexity throughout the movie, and for some movies that's a lot easier and less data intensive than others.
If you want more estimatable filesizes, try VBR encoding instead with a target file size. It'll still vary, but much less so - although it's difficult to directly compare the quality difference you'll end up with.
I mean even then, iTune's 1080p videos hit around 4.8GB usually. Blu-Ray movies can be upto 40GB for the main movie, there's a big amount of quality difference for ripping yourself. (Of course, whether you'll notice is another thing - the biggest thing though is properly mastered disc-movies rarely exhibit colour banding unlike downloads).
Obviously, you're going to get better quality from a BluRay, if you don't mind storing 40 GB movies.
The iTunes + TunesKit route gives you downloadable and professionally encoded videos at "reasonable" sizes. It's much faster than ripping a BluRay, and assuming you DO want smaller files, you won't have to re-encode anything.
i still wouldn't trust it. I've been reading the MakeMKV forum, threads on the same subject and no one has mentioned this. They all say some discs are in order and some are not. Its how MakeMKV reads the folder structure, apparently the titles are all in different folders and depending on their order on the disc thats how MakeMKV rips them. So folder one could have episode 3 or 4 on the disc and thus be called title 1. Sounds like a complete and total crap shoot.
As someone with a 900+ blu-ray collection, this has been on my mind as well. I just don't know if its worth my time to rip all my movies or simply invest in a digital service like iTunes or VUDU.
i still wouldn't trust it. I've been reading the MakeMKV forum, threads on the same subject and no one has mentioned this. They all say some discs are in order and some are not. Its how MakeMKV reads the folder structure, apparently the titles are all in different folders and depending on their order on the disc thats how MakeMKV rips them. So folder one could have episode 3 or 4 on the disc and thus be called title 1. Sounds like a complete and total crap shoot.
As someone with a 900+ blu-ray collection, this has been on my mind as well. I just don't know if its worth my time to rip all my movies or simply invest in a digital service like iTunes or VUDU.
It's worth it. Once you have it setup, it's a thing of beauty. Just have some patience, and let it be a background task that you have going on. Before you know it, you'll have ripped a substantial amount of content.
It's worth it. Once you have it setup, it's a thing of beauty. Just have some patience, and let it be a background task that you have going on. Before you know it, you'll have ripped a substantial amount of content.
Four 8TB HDDs should do it with room to spare. They're getting cheap now too with them being as low as $160 per drive. Think of it as a 70 cents per movie storage fee. No reason to do it all at once either. Add a new drive as you rip and fill each one up.
Depends on the quality you want to keep them in. If you want to save them all as pure mkv files, then yeah, you'll need a lot. I'm at around 550 movies and tons of tv shows at the moment and still have 3.5tb of free space on my 8tb drive.
I've done most of my movies on the HQ surround setting from handbrake.
Edit - and yes, it is worth it. I love having everything I own on Plex for whenever/wherever.
Buy from iTunes and then use the $40 Tuneskit to lossless remove the decryption and get DRM-Free files.
(Tuneskit looks mildly sketchy but I promise the video really is lossless; I'm paranoid about this stuff and I compared md5 hashes on a bunch of different videos to confirm.)
been ripping a bunch of TV shows lately, compressing them with x265, the compression is ridiculous. First season of the xfiles was ~230gb compressed down to ~60gb honestly looks indistinguishable from the source to me, thats on my 4k Dell XPS and a 106" 1080p projection screen. And thats with just auto by-passing Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master into the video.
I keep (most of) my media in x264 / AAC audio because that has the best support for the various Plex clients I use (I'm looking at you, Chromecats / Android) and I want to avoid transcoding. But I hope I x265 gets really cemented in in a year or two, the amount of space that will save is just insane.
its definitely worth it. I use Kodi and within seconds we can browse the whole library. Or say the wife says i want to watch a comedy, just go to filter and select comedy and then choose from the filtered list.
If youre going to need enough storage for nearly 1000 movies, then consider a NAS. You might not need the redundancy (if a drive fails you could re-rip those movies), but it can be very convenient especially if you then use it for storing backups of documents and photos etc.
You can either get a stand-alone NAS unit thatll take 4 drives, or you could build your own. I use a HP microserver and run Unraid on it.
Worth considering is your plex server. If youll need to transcode to any of your target devices then you need a decent CPU (relatively recent intel i3 or better). That might sound easy but most standalone NAS units have poor CPUs. If you can dedicate a PC in your house to always be running when you want to watch, then you can just run plex on that. But consider it in case you build your own NAS to have enough CPU power.
Are you sure you're not thinking of a different program? There's a lot of similar ones, and most of them are lossy (and crap).
I know there's a crap ton of FUD about this on the internet, so if you don't want to take my word for it you could theoretically replicate my experiment yourself. Decrypt a video with both Requiem and Tuneskit and extract the raw h264 stream with ffmpeg to remove all metadata. Then compare the streams. Some details you'd need are in the below spoiler.
(Requiem is a good control because it's open source and widely acknowledged to be lossless. Also, modern video encoders aren't deterministic, so the chance of two unrelated programs encoding the same content and getting bit-identical streams is next to zero.)
You will need to setup a version of iTunes 10.7 for Requiem compatibility—I recommend using in a VM for simplicity. As of February 2017, Apple restricted iTunes 11 and below from downloading 1080p video, so make sure to use 720p in both versions for your test. You don't need to buy TunesKit for the test—the trial will let you decrypt the first five minutes (iirc), so just remove everything but the first 120 seconds or so from the h264 stream. Also, Requiem sometimes chops off the first frame, so try removing the first frame from the TunesKit version if the hashes don't match initially.
Are you sure you're not thinking of a different program? There's a lot of similar ones, and most of them are lossy (and crap).
I know there's a crap ton of FUD about this on the internet, so if you don't want to take my word for it you could theoretically replicate my experiment yourself. Decrypt a video with both Requiem and Tuneskit and extract the raw h264 stream with ffmpeg to remove all metadata. Then compare the streams. Some details you'd need are in the below spoiler.
(Requiem is a good control because it's open source and widely acknowledged to be lossless. Also, modern video encoders aren't deterministic, so the chance of two unrelated programs encoding the same content and getting bit-identical streams is next to zero.)
You will need to setup a version of iTunes 10.7 for Requiem compatibilityI recommend using in a VM for simplicity. As of February 2017, Apple restricted iTunes 11 and below from downloading 1080p video, so make sure to use 720p in both versions for your test. You don't need to buy TunesKit for the testthe trial will let you decrypt the first five minutes (iirc), so just remove everything but the first 120 seconds or so from the h264 stream. Also, Requiem sometimes chops off the first frame, so try removing the first frame from the TunesKit version if the hashes don't match initially.
What do most people do with audio tracks these days? In the past I just kept DD5.1, and I re-encoded DTS to DD5.1 for reasons I don't remember. I'm guessing I was using some playback method that lacked DTS capability. I never bothered with lossless or the bonus tracks.
Now I'm looking for new methods, after years of not ripping stuff. I'll be using Plex for playback. I don't currently have means to play lossless tracks, but I'm sure that will change at some point. I just recently redid my gaming display, but still need a new receiver and such. The main home theater display is possibly waiting for HDMI 2.1 for a refresh.
What do most people do with audio tracks these days? In the past I just kept DD5.1, and I re-encoded DTS to DD5.1 for reasons I don't remember. I'm guessing I was using some playback method that lacked DTS capability. I never bothered with lossless or the bonus tracks.
Now I'm looking for new methods, after years of not ripping stuff. I'll be using Plex for playback. I don't currently have means to play lossless tracks, but I'm sure that will change at some point. I just recently redid my gaming display, but still need a new receiver and such. The main home theater display is possibly waiting for HDMI 2.1 for a refresh.
I know I replied to you in PM about this, but I thought I'd reply here too in case anyone else was to pass by here.
I just rip all the English tracks that are included with it. I don't bother with the other languages like French and Spanish though. Even if you can't play lossless now, you may some day and it'll be nice to have that ready to go. That happened to me where I had a couple client devices that couldn't pass on lossless audio, but later on were replaced with ones that could. No need to go back and rerip those movies again because I just kept everything intact to begin with.
My version of MakeMKV (1.10.6) has stopped working and prompts me to get the newest version, but it looks like the website has been taken down by the ISP.
I found a mirror for 1.10.7 but again it prompts me for a key that I don't have and it seems you can't purchase either.
I did find another site where someone had posted the latest Beta Key through to the end of November, but when I try to register that it doesn't work.
Does anyone have any alternatives to MakeMKV that they could recommend?
My version of MakeMKV (1.10.6) has stopped working and prompts me to get the newest version, but it looks like the website has been taken down by the ISP.
I found a mirror for 1.10.7 but again it prompts me for a key that I don't have and it seems you can't purchase either.
I did find another site where someone had posted the latest Beta Key through to the end of November, but when I try to register that it doesn't work.
Does anyone have any alternatives to MakeMKV that they could recommend?
I'd like to recommend WinX DVD Ripper for DVD ripping. It has a good support for different kinds of DVDs, even if they are from other regions or encrypted by certain copy protection scheme. It allows you to rip DVD with all subtitle tracks and audio tracks, or rip with selected tracks only. But this tool isn't designed for Blu-Rays. For Blu-Ray ripping, you can give HandBrake a try.
