Rip to NAS or to PC first? How to multiple discs?

[dcoke22]

Honestly it's probably fine to do it that way, but it's not really much extra time on my computer, (maybe two minutes through mkvtoolnix), and some part of me just likes not having the audio touched by handbrake, and just using the fully raw audio track from the initial rip. Probably a weird way to go about it, I just like knowing the audio is untouched haha

The audio is not untouched; it is just not included in the output. Even though tools like MediaInfo, Handbrake, and MKVToolNix show audio and video streams separately, the truth is they're all mashed together into a single bitstream. If this was not the case, a player would have to read all the audio, hold it in memory, then read & display the video and time sync the audio it is holding in memory to the video. Instead the audio and video are multiplexed together. A multiplexer allows for multiple inputs like a video stream and several audio streams to share one single file. When a player plays the file, it demultiplexes the file back into individual bitstreams so the video decoder can decode the video and an audio decoder can decode the audio so they can be output at the same time.

Handbrake takes the input file, demuxes (demultiplexes) it, does whatever you tell it to do to the elementary streams (aka encodes the video however you say and encodes the audio however you say) then muxes (multiplexes) the appropriate streams back together. If you told Handbrake to just copy the main audio track from the source into the output, it would do it muxing it together with the encoded video it produced.

Muxing in the audio in a second step via MKVToolNix doesn't really hurt, but it doesn't really help either. To each their own.

[Hittsy]

I'm actually of the opposite opinion of a lot of people here... I use a computer running TrueNAS with six 18TB drives, in a RAIDZ2 configuration, with 32GB of RAM.

Since I am concerned about wearing out my SSD, and TrueNAS is very aggressive about RAM caching, I've just been ripping backups straight to my NAS. I then process it into a *.mkv file and place it in my media directory.

With even 3 drives ripping at a time, I've never saturated even my 1Gb/s link.

[chatgpt]

I'm actually of the opposite opinion of a lot of people here... I use a computer running TrueNAS with six 18TB drives, in a RAIDZ2 configuration, with 32GB of RAM.

Since I am concerned about wearing out my SSD, and TrueNAS is very aggressive about RAM caching, I've just been ripping backups straight to my NAS. I then process it into a *.mkv file and place it in my media directory.

With even 3 drives ripping at a time, I've never saturated even my 1Gb/s link.

This was very helpful to me. I was working on the most efficient workflow and completely forgot that I'd be adding r/w cycles to my SSDs, not a huge deal but good to know it isn't necessary. Also your TrueNAS sounds just like mine! Have you been able to get it to use a GPU for plex or whatever streamer you have? I don't have as much time for this hobby as I'd like, but I have all the hardware, just waiting for me to set it up.

[Hittsy]

This was very helpful to me. I was working on the most efficient workflow and completely forgot that I'd be adding r/w cycles to my SSDs, not a huge deal but good to know it isn't necessary. Also your TrueNAS sounds just like mine! Have you been able to get it to use a GPU for plex or whatever streamer you have? I don't have as much time for this hobby as I'd like, but I have all the hardware, just waiting for me to set it up.

Interesting username there...

Truenas works a treat with plex, although I use the integrated graphics of an Intel CPU for transcoding if/when I need it. plenty fast, and quick sync video supports an amazing amount of codecs compared to Nvidia or Amd. When setting up the Plex app in Truenas, you do have to tick the box at the bottom of the app configuration page labelled "Passthrough available (non-NVIDIA) GPUs" for Plex (and Jellyfin or Emby) to access the gpu for transcoding.