What are you all using to create blu ray menus?

[JCE3000GT]

Hi all. I've got a bunch of TV show box sets that I'd like to put on blu ray discs to combine multiple DVDs into fewer blu ray discs. Once I rip them from the DVD discs with MakeMKV what software do you all recommend to create the blu rays with menus (that isn't named Adobe)?

Moderators, please let me know if this topic is in the wrong forum.

[d00zah]

Hi all. I've got a bunch of TV show box sets that I'd like to put on blu ray discs to combine multiple DVDs into fewer blu ray discs. Once I rip them from the DVD discs with MakeMKV what software do you all recommend to create the blu rays with menus (that isn't named Adobe)?

Moderators, please let me know if this topic is in the wrong forum.

Many have moved beyond creating physical discs. Network storage devices & personal media server software like Emby / Plex / Jellyfin create a much more flexible / extensible experience (IMO).

Series (Small).jpg (75.86 KiB) Viewed 3043 times

Season (Small).jpg (71.72 KiB) Viewed 3043 times

Clearly not what you had in mind. Consider it food for thought.

[JCE3000GT]

Hi all. I've got a bunch of TV show box sets that I'd like to put on blu ray discs to combine multiple DVDs into fewer blu ray discs. Once I rip them from the DVD discs with MakeMKV what software do you all recommend to create the blu rays with menus (that isn't named Adobe)?

Moderators, please let me know if this topic is in the wrong forum.

Many have moved beyond creating physical discs. Network storage devices & personal media server software like Emby / Plex / Jellyfin create a much more flexible / extensible experience (IMO).


Series (Small).jpg

Season (Small).jpg


Clearly not what you had in mind. Consider it food for thought.

I appreciate the suggestion. I do have plans to have a media server on my network as well. Of those you mentioned what are some pros and cons? I'd dig it if it had an interface that easily allow me to navigate through shows and episodes in a pseudo streaming service format with little data management on my end. My free time is very limited and ripping hundreds of discs (1,000+ most likely) is going to be quite the undertaking!

[Woodstock]

My free time is very limited and ripping hundreds of discs (1,000+ most likely) is going to be quite the undertaking!

Automation is your friend. As well as batch processing.

A lot depends on your desires. d00zah method shows one aspect of dealing with multiple series/movies. Mine is simpler, because my needs are less. I simply encode (using handbrake) the various series into directories to keep them separate, and use whatever my player has for managing them, be it VLC or ViMu or ???.

The encoding is to save space - raw disk output from MakeMKV is 3 to 10 times as much space as you can get after processing through handbrake, with little or no obvious reduction in quality. It just takes time to encode, but that's time your computer spends, not you personally. When I did the various Star Trek series, my computer was busy for over a week continuous.

Directory layout make it relatively easy to find stuff with the remote control. It becomes more important when your get over a few hundred series.

Tools like d00zah mentioned can sit on top of the simplified structure I use, giving you all the convenience of a professional service, without the expense.

[JCE3000GT]

My free time is very limited and ripping hundreds of discs (1,000+ most likely) is going to be quite the undertaking!

Automation is your friend. As well as batch processing.

A lot depends on your desires. d00zah method shows one aspect of dealing with multiple series/movies. Mine is simpler, because my needs are less. I simply encode (using handbrake) the various series into directories to keep them separate, and use whatever my player has for managing them, be it VLC or ViMu or ???.

The encoding is to save space - raw disk output from MakeMKV is 3 to 10 times as much space as you can get after processing through handbrake, with little or no obvious reduction in quality. It just takes time to encode, but that's time your computer spends, not you personally. When I did the various Star Trek series, my computer was busy for over a week continuous.

Directory layout make it relatively easy to find stuff with the remote control. It becomes more important when your get over a few hundred series.

Tools like d00zah mentioned can sit on top of the simplified structure I use, giving you all the convenience of a professional service, without the expense.

Good stuff thank you.

[enigma_0z]

… I'd dig it if it had an interface that easily allow me to navigate through shows and episodes in a pseudo streaming service format with little data management on my end…

Plex / Jellyfin are this. I believe Emby too but I have no experience with this.

As far as “little to no data management on my end”, a lot of that comes down to your workflow for ripping your discs. Jellyfin has a nice guide for organizing your media files in a way that helps Jellyfin group stuff nicely. Your data quality will hinge on the data available in like TMDB, IMDB, etc.

The main titles should pick up pretty well from one of these databases, especially with movies, but sometimes animation can get categorized weirdly.

A good example is Animaniacs, which typically aired between 2 and 4 short animations in a 30m time slot. On the DVD set it’s listed as “Episode 1: Title A / Title B / Title C” where A B and C are the shorts that are in that title, and would be aired as one “show”. BUT most online databases seem to want these to be all separate (so it’d be like “Ep. 1: Title A”, “Ep. 2: Title B” and so on). For scenarios like this you’ll probably have to do some data massaging to either split things differently or edit the data after it’s in the library to reflect the titles. I like keeping shows like this in their airing order and grouping so I’m fixing it as I go.

My workflow looks like this:

1. Put in a disc
2. Answer some questions about it, partially, providing the TMDB ID for Jellyfin since this gets it cover art and. Metadata in the app
3. Wait for the disc to rip
4. Organize the output files into where they are supposed to go like “/Media/DVD/Shows/Show name [tmdbid-######]/Season ##/Show Name S##E##.mkv”
5. Let Jellyfin see it

The hardest part is #4, but I’ve made my own little commanding tool to handle it automatically based on the answers in #2. Typically takes about 2m to get a disc going and then when it’s done everything falls into place “on its own”

[Blyth]

Jellyfin is great for someone just getting into it. It's free so it's good to learn how things work, then you might go onto something like Plex later on, only downside is if you use a NAS it doesn't have a official installer package. So it's a bit harder to put on a NAS.

[Mr. Red]

Jellyfin is great for someone just getting into it. It's free so it's good to learn how things work, then you might go onto something like Plex later on, only downside is if you use a NAS it doesn't have a official installer package. So it's a bit harder to put on a NAS.

If the NAS supports Docker just use the official Docker image.


Jellyfin is open source and has a large number of contributers. It's not perfect and new features can take a while until they get merged, but overall I'm very happy with it.

[Blyth]

Jellyfin is great for someone just getting into it. It's free so it's good to learn how things work, then you might go onto something like Plex later on, only downside is if you use a NAS it doesn't have a official installer package. So it's a bit harder to put on a NAS.

If the NAS supports Docker just use the official Docker image.


Jellyfin is open source and has a large number of contributers. It's not perfect and new features can take a while until they get merged, but overall I'm very happy with it.

You say it like it's simple, for some people they might have a NAS but have no clue how to use Docker, and opt for something easier that you can just install. I don't understand why they haven't made a installer I think they would get far more users. There is a unofficial installer made by the the Syno community and QNAP community.

[flojo]

You say it like it's simple, for some people they might have a NAS but have no clue how to use Docker, and opt for something easier that you can just install. I don't understand why they haven't made a installer I think they would get far more users. There is a unofficial installer made by the the Syno community and QNAP community.

Installer of what?

There are Windows .exe's for installing Docker: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/setup/i ... s-install/

There's a literal bazillion "compose.yml" files out there that will install 1 to many containers using Docker Compose. They're called "stacks", and I've seen some pretty extreme media centric stacks and I've seen simple 1-off containers like from linuxserver.io.

[Blyth]

You say it like it's simple, for some people they might have a NAS but have no clue how to use Docker, and opt for something easier that you can just install. I don't understand why they haven't made a installer I think they would get far more users. There is a unofficial installer made by the the Syno community and QNAP community.

Installer of what?

There are Windows .exe's for installing Docker: https://docs.docker.com/desktop/setup/i ... s-install/

There's a literal bazillion "compose.yml" files out there that will install 1 to many containers using Docker Compose. They're called "stacks", and I've seen some pretty extreme media centric stacks and I've seen simple 1-off containers like from linuxserver.io.

I'm talking about if you want to install it on the NAS, Docker is the official way but many people will avoid that as it's not actually straightforward and quick. You have the unofficial way for at least QNAP and Synology.

[flojo]

TLDR; You're imagining it harder than it is.

Put the commands to install Docker from that Docker page into a script named "install_docker.bash" then copy it to your NAS and execute it.

Code: Select all

scp install_docker.bash root@omv.local:/root
ssh root@omv.local
chmod +x *.bash
sudo ./*_debian.bash

Docker isn't a virtual machine, it has to share system resources to run, eg. the kernel for filesystems, networking, etc. Thus, if the underlying system changes, so can the install procedure. That Docker page I linked to, the one I'm saying copy the commands from, that page has change over time (in particular the instructions about the key system), so the install process has changed (a tiny bit).

But make no mistake, it's always as basic and easy as copy a few lines then running them on the NAS. Docker is pretty good at being stable, at least to the point where a typical user like me won't run into silent bugs, so it's pretty straight forward after you install it.

With certain NAS software like OpenMediaVault (OMV) there is peculiarity which is if I use the NAS software (OMV) to install Docker (which it has the option), then the NAS software (OMV) will keep certain container information in a DB separate from containers installed outside the NAS software, which can lead to unexpected conflicts. It is for that reason I will always install things like Docker without any "helper" or "installer" or whatever and install it from the shell by the vendor's instructions. Granted OMV is just Debian, so it's easy, but with Synology or QNAP I'm not sure if you have the option to install from the shell, you might be forced to use their NAS software.

[emann123]

The encoding is to save space - raw disk output from MakeMKV is 3 to 10 times as much space as you can get after processing through handbrake, with little or no obvious reduction in quality. It just takes time to encode, but that's time your computer spends, not you personally. When I did the various Star Trek series, my computer was busy for over a week continuous.

When you encode through handbrake, are you preserving the subtitle tracks? I haven't found out how to do that. I'm capturing DVDs via MakeMKV then encoding in Handbrake, but maybe I don't have the right settings because I'm not finding that they have subtitles when I try to watch my dvds on Jellyfin. Any ideas?

[Woodstock]

Definitely saving subtitle tracks... usually two per file, since I do both "everything" and "just the untranslated stuff". In fact, I'm doing two series right now, where I have to swap the subtitle tracks ("primary" one is "everything", rather than the untranslated stuff).

Handbrake recognizes both DVD and BD subtitles, but... if you're trying to output MP4, only DVD subtitles are valid EXCEPT as burned-in. That's why I always output MKV files nowadays.