UHD Playback solutions - what is yours?

[VA1DER]

Somewhat off topic, but I'm curious what people use, if anything, for UHD playback solutions for ripped/duplicated (decrypted) discs?

I'm fairly late to the game for UHD. The prevailing storage method seems to be hard-drive/NAS of either full-size or re-encoded ripped .mkv files. I have 8TiB for my DLNA setup and it's less than half full, but at only 8-10 movies per TiB, UHD movies at full-size eat up the space quickly. I haven't enough space for even the modest UHD library of classics I already have, and for many of these gems, I'm reluctant to reencode to shrink.

My thinking is to use MakeMKV's ability to make decrypted copies. I have a good supply of relatively cheap 100GiB BDXL blanks and am ready to dupe my library - playback becomes the issue.

Having been burned when a vendor claimed their UHD BluRay had a firmware which would read BDXL, that device was returned and I am now considering:
- Raspberry PI 5 with my Pioneer BDR-X13JBK repurposed as the "UHD" drive, likely with LibreElec or similar
- Trying again for a jailbroken player with BDXL support from a better vendor.

I'm curious what people use for their UHD playback.

[MartyMcNuts]

Somewhat off topic, but I'm curious what people use, if anything, for UHD playback solutions for ripped/duplicated (decrypted) discs?

I'm fairly late to the game for UHD. The prevailing storage method seems to be hard-drive/NAS of either full-size or re-encoded ripped .mkv files. I have 8TiB for my DLNA setup and it's less than half full, but at only 8-10 movies per TiB, UHD movies at full-size eat up the space quickly. I haven't enough space for even the modest UHD library of classics I already have, and for many of these gems, I'm reluctant to reencode to shrink.

My thinking is to use MakeMKV's ability to make decrypted copies. I have a good supply of relatively cheap 100GiB BDXL blanks and am ready to dupe my library - playback becomes the issue.

Having been burned when a vendor claimed their UHD BluRay had a firmware which would read BDXL, that device was returned and I am now considering:
- Raspberry PI 5 with my Pioneer BDR-X13JBK repurposed as the "UHD" drive, likely with LibreElec or similar
- Trying again for a jailbroken player with BDXL support from a better vendor.

I'm curious what people use for their UHD playback.

I don't do UHD disc playback at all. No reason for it. I rip all of my BD and UHD discs, then re-encode to around half the video bitrate (with no real noticable difference) and store the movie MKV files on my NAS (currently around 50TB) for streaming to any/all of devices in the household.

[dcoke22]

Big hard drives are available relatively cheaply. In the USA, I see a 24TB Seagate Barracuda drive is available for $300 at NewEgg.

All my discs end up ripped and on my Plex server, streaming to all the TVs and other screens in my house. After living this way for a few years now, I'd never go back to putting a plastic disc in a player and suffering the indignity of unskipable previews or inane disc menus.

[BrettTheRipper]

Somewhat off topic, but I'm curious what people use, if anything, for UHD playback solutions for ripped/duplicated (decrypted) discs?

I use Plex. I don't like the recent UI updates, but it's still a good solution that gives you all the benefits of a paid streaming service using your own content. And Plex can be a pretty good DVR if you get an antenna and a tuner like this one:

https://www.amazon.com/SiliconDust-HDHo ... 09G649P4K/

I recommend a lifetime Plex Pass, but I'd also suggest waiting a couple of weeks, because I suspect it will be discounted substantially for Black Friday.

[VA1DER]

So nobody plays off optical any more? The movies I care enough about to have on UHD.... I dunno. I can't bring myself to re-encode those. Goldfinger, Wrath of Khan, The Abyss... the idea of re-encoding them for myself hurts. For example, I have never been able to re-encode the Abyss at any bitrate for....ahem.... *cough*release*cough*... without getting motion vector stickiness around the submarine in that iconic opening scene where it comes literally out of the blue.

Big hard drives are available relatively cheaply. In the USA, I see a 24TB Seagate Barracuda drive is available for $300 at NewEgg.

It's a little more expensive up here, but that's a reasonable solution. That's 250 full-size UHD rips. And likely cheaper than even I can get 100GiB optical media for. It still means extra work for the "extra content", or making BD ISO's for each and getting a solution for replaying those. Do you rip to ISO for extra content, or just retain the movies themselves? Judging from your comment about unskipable portions (which I don't think are there for MakeMKV "copies"), I suspect the latter.

If there is anyone who still does optical, I'd love to hear your solution though. I do like to access the special features on discs. I think for optical, my idea of a Pi and re-purposing my Pioneer X13JBK as it's drive makes sense.

[Coopervid]

I rip to ISO and play with an Oppo Clone. It's like playing from disc and HDD space is the most affordable. I have several USB-HDDs.

[SamuriHL]

What are you talking about??? "Re-encoding"?? Um. No. We repackage into an MKV. Absolutely NOTHING with the original streams change by doing that.

[dcoke22]

Yeah, I don't re-encode 4K movies either. I do re-encode regular blu-rays and I make 1080p versions of 4Ks I buy, but mostly that's to have a version to take with me on a phone or tablet if I want to. At home on my TV I watch all the bits of the 4K.

[BrettTheRipper]

So nobody plays off optical any more? The movies I care enough about to have on UHD.... I dunno. I can't bring myself to re-encode those.

Big hard drives are available relatively cheaply. In the USA, I see a 24TB Seagate Barracuda drive is available for $300 at NewEgg.

It's a little more expensive up here, but that's a reasonable solution. That's 250 full-size UHD rips. And likely cheaper than even I can get 100GiB optical media for.

Yeah, I just did a little quick math based on the price of 100GiB optical disks versus the Western Digital Red Pros I use, and (based on current Amazon and Western Digital prices in the United States) the optical approach works out to about twice the cost per TB but with a lot less convenience. And as dcoke22 pointed out, there are cheaper HDD options available, which makes the economics even more compelling. You implied you're in Canada, and I know you said you had some inexpensive optical blanks, but even so, I can't imagine the economics are radically different for you.

It still means extra work for the "extra content", or making BD ISO's for each and getting a solution for replaying those. Do you rip to ISO for extra content, or just retain the movies themselves? Judging from your comment about unskipable portions (which I don't think are there for MakeMKV "copies"), I suspect the latter.

Yes, it does mean a little extra work, but Plex supports bonus content. However, I believe what he meant by "unskippable previews or inane disc menus" was just that: not bonus content, but things like cutesy menus you have to wait for, advertisements for/previews of other films, piracy lectures, production logos, and other stuff you normally have to sit through before you can access the "real" disk content (i.e., main feature or bonus content) that you bought the disk to watch.

As for whether stuff other than the main feature gets ripped or not, that's entirely up to you: MakeMKV doesn't know the difference between "bonus content" and the garbage I just described (e.g., advertisements). However, it ignores everything shorter than a certain user-configurable "Minimum title length," making it pretty effective at finding what users want and ignoring what they don't. For example, I think the default is 5 minutes, but my "Minimum title length" is currently set to 180 seconds, so anything shorter than 3 minutes long is ignored by MakeMKV when it scans a disk and presents me with the list of what's available to rip.

[dcoke22]

My minimum title length is set to 15 seconds I think. I generally grab all the useful content from a disc, like any behind-the-scenes stuff or deleted scenes and the like. Plex has a decent way to surface those on a movie's landing page making them easy to access and watch. It is a little extra work, but I don't mind it.