www.makemkv.com

TLDR: Once you rip your movie to your media server of choice, do you ever load up that disc again to watch the movie, or is it just a physical backup now?

We are looking at building a Home Theater in our basement. 4K projector, 120” screen & some Dolby Atmos. “We paid off the mortgage” present to ourselves.

I gave up on physical media just as Vudu & Ultraviolet we’re getting popular. I noticed even though I bought the disc the convenience of not needing to load a disc finally trumped fidelity. Especially when 4K/HDR version we’re released.

As we get closer to our build, I found a great deal on a Panasonic 4K/HDR10/DV player and bought it. Picked up my Bond & Matrix collection and I was ready.

The instant gratification world we now live in was killing me after putting in the disc. Hardware load screen, FBI screen, oh the horrible DVD menus… oh how I’ve been so ignorant these last few digital years…

So after that hell, I headed over to my old friend MakeMKV forums, grabbed a 4K drive from a user and got to burning.

I can’t believe after all these years the physical disc experience hasn’t evolved.

So back to my original question, do I ever need to return to the physical media to watch my content? Will the ripped version be any less when it comes to DV/HDR or Dolby Atmos Steaming(DirectPlay) from my Plex server?

Can only tell how I am doing it on my side.

Whenever I get a new DVD or BluRay (I'm still buying physical), first I make an (usual decrypted) backup of the whole disc into an ISO.

This ISO then lands on my NAS. Afterwards I rip the movie (plus any extra features) from the ISO and put it into my video folder.

Why keeping the ISO? Physical discs does fail after several years. And today I convert into h265, but when the future gives me another encoder with better filters and all, I can just use the ISO and encode the movie from the original source again, not from the already transcoded.

Of course this takes alot of space. Currently my NAS has 44.6TB of data, mostly ISOs from BluRays and DVDs.

I have a similar process to Ezatoka, although I just keep my .mkv rips, not the .iso/backup folder.

From a playback perspective, I use Plex with an AppleTV 4K (3rd gen) as a client. It works well for me, but there are some limitations. The AppleTV doesn't passthrough the object-based audio formats in a lossless format. Normally, you'll find Dolby Atmos, Dolby's object-based audio format, encoded in a lossless Dolby TrueHD audio stream. The AppleTV doesn't decode it and it doesn't pass it through to a receiver. It does work, however, if Atmos is encoded in a lossy Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC3) stream.

There are similar kinds of limitations when it comes to Dolby Vision.

In my case, from an audio perspective, my receiver can't decode the lossless formats and I don't have height speakers in my setup anyway, so I can't do Dolby Atmos even if the AppleTV could. I do have a modern LG OLED TV that can do Dolby Vision, but my Plex on AppleTV setup just lets me do HDR. I would like to have DV, but making it work is more complicated than I'm willing to deal with.

A different streaming box as my Plex client would probably support the lossless audio formats better. DV is complicated and limited in some ways no matter what streaming box you try. Strangely, even after all these years, the simpliest way to watch Dolby Vision is to put your disc in a DV capable UHD player and wade through the FBI warnings and the stupid menus.

In my case, the limitations of my setup either don't matter or I'm willing to live with it. The simplicity of hitting one power button on the AppleTV remote, having everything turn on, and being able to watch a movie or a show in a few seconds without all the other stupidity outweighs all the limitations.

Ezatoka wrote: ↑

Mon May 15, 2023 11:57 am

~ Currently my NAS has 44.6TB of data, mostly ISOs from BluRays and DVDs.

HA! Call me when you pass 200TBs (and I haven't even started ripping my UHD titles yet)!

Storage is the most expensive part of this whole operation by far, I'm buying 16TB WD Reds (the biggest drive my NAS will take) every other month at $750 each! And to think I started-out buying an 8TB NAS and thinking I'd never fill that up!

To answer your original question, all my physical media (post-backing-up) is now packed away in boxes. I think of them as a backup to my backups, but I doubt I'd ever go back to watching the physical media unless something catastrophic happens to my digital data (touch wood), and even then I'd probably just start converting them back to digital all over again anyway.

It really drives me up the wall having to sit through all the garbage they put at the beginning of discs, sometimes there are 3 or 4 minutes of trailers that can't be skipped or even fast-forwarded. I mean, fine, show me the odd trailer if the subject matter is similar to the title of the disc, but don't force me to sit through previews of titles that I have absolutely no interest in.

Radiocomms237 wrote: ↑

Wed May 17, 2023 12:09 pm

I'm buying 16TB WD Reds (the biggest drive my NAS will take) every other month at $750 each!

Nice, that you're rich. I am not. The six 18TB hard disks in my NAS are now 14 months old, I never replaced one so far. And each disk "only" cost me 300€. I hope they will live each for some more years.

And I buy only things I watched in my childhood/youth or I am interested in. UHDs I nearly don't have any, because most movies are just upscaled without remastering, so I can also buy the DVD or BluRay and upscale it myself, if I want to have 4k.


My DVDs and BluRays are all put into shelves I have in my living room. They're covering nearly a whole wall. Kind of another poster so to speak.

Ezatoka wrote: ↑

Wed May 17, 2023 12:23 pm

And I buy only things I watched in my childhood/youth or I am interested in. UHDs I nearly don't have any, because most movies are just upscaled without remastering, so I can also buy the DVD or BluRay and upscale it myself, if I want to have 4k.


My DVDs and BluRays are all put into shelves I have in my living room. They're covering nearly a whole wall. Kind of another poster so to speak.

I am also a lot less interested in upscaled UHDs. We're in a weird spot where newer movies are often captured digitally at less than 4K. The eventual UHD release is upscaled. (For example, Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) was captured at 2.8K and finished at 2K) The HDR and the expanded color palette are often a nice upgrade over the SDR blu-ray, but not always. Older movies that were shot on film and that went through a proper rescan and remaster are much more interesting to me. A movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is really quite a treat on the remastered UHD.

In any case, my movies are on shelves on the wall in the room where I watch movies. It sorta goes with the movie posters in the rest of the room, even if I rarely take the movies off the shelf.