UHD Playback solutions - what is yours?

[Matti]

I used Dune HD media player for two years or so. Got it after I got fed up with streaming and went back to physical media movies.

It was great, could well be using it still, but then I decided to stop streming music as well and went back to CDs also. Dune HD is essentially useless for music. So I bought ASRock N100DC-ITX motherboard and installed LibreELEC for it. Absolutely love it. Great for both music and movies and the UI and its UI andlooks can be customized just the way I like it. Only problem is that Kodi/LibreELEC cannot do Dolby Vision and HDR10+ on Linux based systems. Only with very spesific Android hardware. So, now I mostly use Liberelec , but still watch some movies with my Dune HD player.

I have about 49 terabytes of lossless bluray and uhd backups on SSDs and back ups of those on mechanical HDDs. Don't have NAS. I live in 3 room city partment and there is basically no space for loud HDD NAS. Instead I have that motherboard and my SSDs inside nice small ITX case in my living. N100 uses so little energy that there is no need for fan, PSU is passive and SSDs make no sound. So its great and totally silent case with nice wood finish on top. Fits nicely in my living room near TV. Have USB CEC adpater so I can control it with my TV remote.

Altough with current SSD prices... would not do it. Was actully lucky to get idea late 2022 when SSD prices were in historic lows after COVID demand dropped and there were loads of unsold SSDs.

[staknhalo]

I rip the movie + any trailers for the movie or other movies in my collection that are on disc + any in universe to the movie bonus content (don't care for behind the scenes or deleted scene material) + the menu backdrop (if it's not just a still image with music) and put them on my NAS and watch in Plex + I encode my movies (~45Mbps 4K ~15Mbps 1080p) mainly to crop out black bars (better when transcoding to phones etc) and burn in any forced subtitles (so I don't have to worry if I need subs and if they're on/working/etc) but also to help save on amount of HDDs and size needed/cost etc (cause I also have to have backup/redundant for all data/drives too - not losing all the time/encoding/files I've been doing for ~20 years now since DVD!). Currently at 52TB (104TB with backup) for non-DVR Plex content, that's about 555 movies and 126 TV shows for me.