New to MKV and Ripping

[pneumatic]

Hi pneumatic for your response. It’s certainly something to consider. The reason for wanting to rip the DVD/BD discs as opposed to just watching them via a player is the convenience of watching them back on a Tablet or Laptop without needing a drive to play them on (for the Laptop). Do you know the playback capabilities of Plex at all?

I have never used Plex but it seems like a good setup to have your storage in one separate place where any device can access it, than having it all on one device. That's probably what I'll end up doing as my HTPC's 5.25" bays are already filled with 3.5" HDDs. I would like something more generic than Plex, like some kind of Network Attached Storage rack that is truly platform independent, but I don't know how that all works yet.

Much as I appreciate the idea of buying a high quality such as either of the models suggested the UB9000 is £999 which is not an amount of money I would want to go splashing on a BD Player. At that price I may as well get an OPPO

Well HDTV Vincent says 9000 is the best player, I don't know if he compared it to Oppo or if Oppo is still even the same company it used to be (I'm a bit out of the loop). Apparently the step down model Panasonic should give roughly 80% of the performance for 40% of the price. I don't really care about all those advanced HDR tone mapping options on the 9000.

[CJT80]

I have never used Plex but it seems like a good setup to have your storage in one separate place where any device can access it, than having it all on one device. That's probably what I'll end up doing as my HTPC's 5.25" bays are already filled with 3.5" HDDs. I would like something more generic than Plex, like some kind of Network Attached Storage rack that is truly platform independent, but I don't know how that all works yet.

I have registered with Plex and I have a few movies a friend dowloaded installed on a NAS which runs Plex server, however I have only (as yet) ran it on my own network. My next plan is to copy some of my purchased BluRay discs and then stream them using Plex. Apparently you can also do the same with Music

Well HDTV Vincent says 9000 is the best player, I don't know if he compared it to Oppo or if Oppo is still even the same company it used to be (I'm a bit out of the loop). Apparently the step down model Panasonic should give roughly 80% of the performance for 40% of the price. I don't really care about all those advanced HDR tone mapping options on the 9000.

Oppo no longer make any BluRay players, but they did make the
UDP 203 and 503 which now sell at very high prices!

[pneumatic]

I have registered with Plex and I have a few movies a friend dowloaded installed on a NAS which runs Plex server, however I have only (as yet) ran it on my own network. My next plan is to copy some of my purchased BluRay discs and then stream them using Plex.

I am still trying to get my head around why Plex is needed. If I have a network attached storage connected to my LAN then why can't I access that storage from any PC on the LAN? I thought all PC's on the LAN can already see the network attached storage and access it without needing a third party app like Plex? I guess it would use a protocol to access it -- I just assumed that it would use TCP/IP or something that is already supported by all switches on the LAN. Like accessing a router through 192.168.1.1, I assumed the NAS would have its own address on the LAN and I'd just access it directly by referencing the address -- is that how it works? I remember there used to be a thing called DLNA which I was using on Xbox 360 to stream music from a WDTV box while gaming, but I've forgotten everything about it, maybe that's the kind of use case scenario Plex is for?

[dcoke22]

People like to use Plex for a couple of reasons. On the server side, Plex keeps a library of information about the movies and TV shows imported into Plex. If files are named correctly, Plex can download things like cover art and a synopsis and present them to clients that access the Plex server. On the client side, there's a Plex app for just about every platform and it does a decent job at having an interface that's easy to navigate from the couch using a remote control.

A very common situation with Plex is the Plex server is running on a NAS. All the movies Plex knows about are just files on the NAS and if you're at a computer you can manipulate them like any other file on the NAS. Most people don't have a computer hooked to their TV, but modern TVs can run apps and/or the inexpensive streaming box connected to their TV can run the Plex client app and let people navigate their library of movies and stream them right to their TV.

[pneumatic]

People like to use Plex for a couple of reasons. On the server side, Plex keeps a library of information about the movies and TV shows imported into Plex. If files are named correctly, Plex can download things like cover art and a synopsis and present them to clients that access the Plex server. On the client side, there's a Plex app for just about every platform and it does a decent job at having an interface that's easy to navigate from the couch using a remote control.

Oh I see, so it's a bit like Kodi then. I use Kodi but not in the way it's intended -- I just use it as a barebones GUI frontend for browsing the folder structure of my SATA drives and launching the media files. I don't use any of the library metadata features like cover art etc. as I found it to be unreliable and it would randomly be missing items that were in my library if it wasn't perfectly named or something, I don't remember much other than fighting with it and still not getting it organised how I wanted it to. In the end I use my own folder structure conventions which I find more intuitive when browsing by genre, year, actor etc. I have configured Kodi to launch MPC-HC as the media player instead of its own inbuilt player. Probably the best feature of Kodi for me simply the automatic ticking of videos watched, with configurable minutes of watch time before ticking occurs (I'm using 10 minutes currently). Yes that even works with MPC-HC as it appears Kodi is counting the running time of the target process (mpc-hc.exe). Without that feature I would be lost.

Most people don't have a computer hooked to their TV, but modern TVs can run apps and/or the inexpensive streaming box connected to their TV can run the Plex client app and let people navigate their library of movies and stream them right to their TV.

Ah yes that makes sense. I see they have an android app so any smart TV could be used to play from the NAS. My TV is still a dumb TV from 2013 so I'm a bit out of the loop.

Looking at NAS devices, it seems I don't even need a NAS, all I need some kind of drive bay thing which attaches to LAN so I can access files on the drives over the LAN via a TCP/IP address. I don't need it to do anything more than that so a $400 NAS seems kind of overkill.

edit: neat, I just connected a 2.5" USB HDD to my router's USB port and now I can access it on all windows PC's on the LAN via \\192.168.1.1\ in the file explorer address bar, which can be mapped to a drive letter as well and therefore accessed through Kodi. That's pretty cool!

edit: pic


edit: ha, it even supports DLNA...I guess that means it would be possible to install a DLNA Android app on a smart TV and stream video to it? Is that how that works?

[pneumatic]

Well, I don't think I would trust some cheap chipset like this router to be managing my 20TB library which represents years of painstaking curation -- what if a capacitor went bad and I lost the whole thing? After doing some research just now it seems the NAS boxes have to format all the drives to a RAID format (how am I gonna do that?! I'd need to buy another 20TB of storage just for the migration!?) . And it doesn't use FAT or NTFS so once I have committed to the NAS box that's it -- no pulling the drive out and connecting it up to a Windows PC to pull files off. Might be better to do a cheap DIY NAS Linux PC build or something that lets you just add NTFS nonraid drives as you go along. Maybe I'll just give up and stick with directly attached SATA drives as this all seems too hard

[pneumatic]

After doing some more research it looks like a JBOD NAS would best suit me. It doesn't give any data redundancy - if one disk dies, all the data on that disk is lost. But the upshot is you're free to mix and match drive sizes and add more drives in future if you want. It seems better to me than RAID 0 where if one drive fails, all data on all drives is lost. RAID 5 seems to be the sweet spot for capacity & redundancy, but the drives all have to be the same capacity to make use of the space according to this - https://www.seagate.com/au/en/products/ ... alculator/

So yeah, I'll probably use JBOD with WD Red Plus drives, and do manual backups to 8TB WD Blues which are cheaper than Reds so it's more cost effective, and those drives won't be spinning 24/7 either so probably last longer.

I'll probably go the DIY Linux NAS route as I'm not tolerant of HDD noise and I've got these 5.25" drive bay shock absorber brackets which are amazing at silencing drive noise. edit: these are the ones. I can personally vouch for their effectiveness.

[dcoke22]

Personally, I run TrueNAS Community Edition on some modestly priced Intel hardware. I have 12 hard drives in that box. Those 12 drives are organized into 3 ZFS pools of 4 drives each, each with single disk fault tolerance (this is conceptually like RAID 5 but is not actually RAID 5). One of those pools (the smallest one actually, at around 35TB) holds my Plex library.

I have friends that use Unraid as opposed to TrueNAS. That's a fine solution as well. I also have friends that just use a Synology.

It sorta comes down to how much storage do you want and what level of fault tolerance do you need?

[pneumatic]

Personally, I run TrueNAS Community Edition on some modestly priced Intel hardware. I have 12 hard drives in that box. Those 12 drives are organized into 3 ZFS pools of 4 drives each, each with single disk fault tolerance (this is conceptually like RAID 5 but is not actually RAID 5). One of those pools (the smallest one actually, at around 35TB) holds my Plex library

That looks tremendous. The only limitation if I'm understanding it correctly is you can't add individual drives to expand a vdev like you can with a JBOD. I really need this functionality, but according to some comments on this video it sounds like they are going to add single drive expansion of vdevs in an upcoming update?

That video also says if a vdev dies it kills the whole pool — is that why you split yours up into 4 pools (1 vdev per pool?)

[dcoke22]

My data needs sorta naturally split in such a way that 4 drives can serve them. Also, it is easier to get 4 drives of approximately the same same size. I suppose if my data were different, I might be better served by a pair of 6 drive pools or 4 & 8 drive pools. In any case, 4 has worked for me. I've even upgraded two of those pools to larger drives and expanded the space available in them after all the drives were upgraded.

If adding a single drive to get more space is important to you, Unraid might be a better fit.

[pneumatic]

My data needs sorta naturally split in such a way that 4 drives can serve them. Also, it is easier to get 4 drives of approximately the same same size. I suppose if my data were different, I might be better served by a pair of 6 drive pools or 4 & 8 drive pools. In any case, 4 has worked for me. I've even upgraded two of those pools to larger drives and expanded the space available in them after all the drives were upgraded.

If adding a single drive to get more space is important to you, Unraid might be a better fit.

Thanks, I'll look into Unraid.

Since then I also saw I can make a JBOD equivalent in Windows Disk Management by extending a volume to a another volume with both drives set to dynamic disk.

Then I realised I don't need to even do that cause in Kodi I can add multiple directories from multiple drives into a single media item on Kodi's desktop. So I can just keep adding drives as I like, and for redundancy I can just manually backup to some separate cheaper drives once every few months. It's a bit of a pain tho cause I have to keep track of what media files are new since the last time I backed up (I don't want to be writing the entire 20TB library every time - that takes days and I noticed drives get hot after a few hours of sustained writes so I'd like to avoid all that wear and tear if possible). So I might have to go with a NAS setup just to avoid this record keeping problem. I might wait to see what happens when TrueNAS adds the single drive expansion option, cause TrueNAS seems to be the most popular one. I saw there is also DAS, but I don't trust USB connections anymore, had so many issues with them and corruption, connection issues, slow speeds, bad cables. USB is not reliable in my view, I know that probably sounds weird but my experience with them for data storage has been flakey. I just don't trust it. Once you lose data more than once, the trust is gone. Poof, gone. I lost 2 drives and a SD card. And the connectors even get hot and depending on the chipset stay hot even when there's no sustained read/writes.

[dcoke22]

The hard part about redundancy being a manual process is most people don't keep their backups up to date. It is better if redundancy is built in and/or an automatic process.

Using a RAID 5 or some equivalent protects from a single disk failure, which is super useful since hard drives will fail. It is not, however, the same as a backup. It won't help you recover from a fire or a flood or a lightning strike that fries every electrical device plugged into your house (a $20 surge protector isn't going to save you in a direct lightning strike).

Maybe in the case of rips of commercial blu-rays and DVDs, protecting from a disk failure is enough. If all the data is lost, the discs can probably just be ripped again. It'd be annoying, but possible.

But that video of your kid's first steps or first birthday… that's irreplaceable and should be backed up accordingly. (Search the 3-2-1 backup strategy.)

[pneumatic]

The hard part about redundancy being a manual process is most people don't keep their backups up to date. It is better if redundancy is built in and/or an automatic process.

Yep, so what I am doing currently is keeping a file like backup.txt and inside it I'll write something like...

Code: Select all

Last backup date: 01/12/23

New files since last backup:
/Video/Series/Drama/(1985-1994) MacGyver

Renamed files since last backup:
/Video/Series/Drama/(1986-1992) Jake and the Fatman/Season 1/S01E01E02 Fatal Attraction [prof=adaptivesharpen low].mkv
(this was a madVR tag I added to sharpen the image of this individual episode which I thought was a bit bit blurry)

It's a pain and I wouldn't need to do this with a NAS.

Using a RAID 5 or some equivalent protects from a single disk failure, which is super useful since hard drives will fail. It is not, however, the same as a backup. It won't help you recover from a fire or a flood or a lightning strike that fries every electrical device plugged into your house (a $20 surge protector isn't going to save you in a direct lightning strike).

Yes, that is a very good point. I have 2 backup drives sitting in a drawer, 8TB WD Blues. These can't be damaged by hardware failure of the SATA controller they are plugged into, because they aren't plugged into anything. So that makes it slightly more protective than even a mirrored RAID. It also reduces wear and tear cause they aren't spinning (the guy in that video kept calling them "spinning rust" ).

Then again, I would probably turn off my NAS when not in use, or I think the larger WD Reds spin down the individual platters inside if they aren't being accessed in a while. But a full spin up would be annoying, that could take a long time to wait for the spin up when you just want to launch a media file. My PVR was doing that and I had to flash the USB controllers firmware to get rid of the spindown power timer cause it annoyed me so much.

[dcoke22]

There are utilities that let you synchronize one drive with another. For example on Unix/Linux/macOS, rsync. Conceptually, rsync checks the files on the source to see if they exist (or were changed) on the destination. If the source has a new file, rsync copies it to the destination; if the file is already the same on the source and destination, it leaves it alone. On Windows I think robocopy can do something similar.

In any case, using one of those utilities can greatly simplify making a manual backup of a drive or folder without having to blindly copy the whole thing.

[pneumatic]

There are utilities that let you synchronize one drive with another. For example on Unix/Linux/macOS, rsync. Conceptually, rsync checks the files on the source to see if they exist (or were changed) on the destination. If the source has a new file, rsync copies it to the destination; if the file is already the same on the source and destination, it leaves it alone. On Windows I think robocopy can do something similar.

I was actually going to write my own AHK script to do it, but I didn't trust myself to not write bugs. With a 20TB library that represents years of work, if the code makes a bad decision, like maybe the "last modified" date tag was incorrect or not interpreted in the correct format or something, or one of the path strings had a weird character in it, or Windows User Account Control / Permissions silently denying access to certain paths, I don't want it tainting my library.

On the other hand rsync and robocopy have 25 years of testing and bugs like that would have been caught. I suppose I should give it a try then - thanks for the tip.

edit: aaaand I just realised it won't work, cause my backup is split over multiple 8GB drives, so Robocopy's skip and mirror functionality probably won't jive with that. So I'd still have to combine all drives into 1 with a NAS or extended disk in Windows so that Robocopy sees it all as one folder on one drive.