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Comment by iamacyborg | Hacker News Reader

I buy blurays, rip them and then store them on a NAS to play back via Plex. Much, much better quality than any stream from Netflix et al.

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How do you handle the storage for this? One bluray disk is about 60gb. I'm not sure if movies typically take 60gb but if you watch TV shows they do. 15 disks is 1TB. In a short while you're running a data center, especially if you collect a lot of video content.

I've heard that you can get efficient re-encodings, but that typically means torrenting it from somewhere. I'm not aware of a way to make high quality re-encodings locally without lots and lots of tweaking/testing/re-encoding and it takes a particular set of skills.

Handbrake, chose a profile, use a script, use a more efficient codec. Doesn’t take much manual work but computer chugs for a while.

Would this work for Dolby Vision et al?

It uses ffmpeg underneath which can handle a large number of formats, in theory at least. You might have to sacrifice some esoteric features however.

Does handbrake presets give you good space savings? I was imagining at most something in the 10-20% range.

Most Blu Rays I have are MPEG-2. AVC compresses to about half the size for the same quality and HEVC does that again on top.

Cannot wait for hardware support for AV1, since encoding with software takes hours for short clips.

Hopefully good encoders. The hardware encoders in my RX480 are pretty terrible and produce huge files compared to software encoding.

A Synology is good option here (I say this as someone with 2 UnRaid machines and 1 12-bay Synology). You can even get one that can run Plex for you as well (assuming your transcoding needs are minimal/none, else you might need a seperate box to handle the transcoding and just use the Synology as storage, like I do).

14TB+ hard drives are not too bad (~$235) so that would be 210 movies right there (though you are going to need to "burn" 1 drive for parity). The other option is to more liberally interpret copyright laws and buy the disk then pirate a copy that matches your requirements. Seeing how there are many people out there just doing the pirating step and that you aren't running a pay-for-plex scheme then I can't imagine you running afoul of law enforcement.

I honestly had no idea disks were that cheap now. I felt like I was looking for a new 1-2TB disk last year and it was around $100... camel^3 says I'm just imagining it though.

Even if for some reason you don't re-encode, 18+ TB disks are now available. This means you can fit nearly 300 films' worth on a single drive like this, more if you buy multiple. I don't think it's such a bad idea to run a 4-drive cluster out of a single Raspberry Pi, with all the drives connected over USB.

You don't even need backups for this, really. If you own the discs and lose the digital version, just copy it on the disc again. If you acquired it via other means, then... it should be possible to replace most such data. Even if you do choose to make backups, then that doubles your cost per terabyte at most.

Storage is really cheap, assuming you're fine with something that isn't a fancy ZFS/RAID array.

I’m 90% sure an rpi can’t handle the Bitrate needed to watch a 4K video.

You can't just throw files on there. You should make sure the clients you're connecting support the codecs and formats natively and at that point the pi is basically acting as a NAS. It should play 4k fine like that if it has the bandwidth necessary.

Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I don’t think the pi itself has the internal bandwidth necessary.

The rPI moved the NIC off the USB bus so is actuy1gbps which is plenty for even 4k and it has hardware x264/x265 so should playback fine.

Also most 4K videos on internet (except your recorded HQ file by camera or latest phone) even below 100Mbps so it's fine. Even in UHD Blu-ray, it's 128Mbps max.

I use a 4 bay NAS with 4TB drives. I guess things would be more problematic if I had hundreds of movies but I’ve got a hair over 100 right now averaging around 40GB per movie which is fine.

I use this project by Don Melton to get a Blu-ray video down to an 8 - 10 GB file size: https://github.com/donmelton/video_transcoding

It uses HandBrake, FFmpeg, MKVToolNix, and MP4v2 with some custom tuned settings and has really good results from my experience.

Might as well skip the extra step and just torrent them directly. What you are doing is illegal either way, so why do the extra work?

Yeah, no.

Maybe in America (Land of the Free). Elsewhere in the world it's perfectly legal to backup your owned media.

I thought about doing this, but I was worried about codec compatibility issues with Dolby Vision and Atmos, and DTS:whatever. Everything I've read says you need to buy an Nvidia Shield to do it right. This is probably even closer to ideal than my setup, but in the end I decided it's not worth the effort/cost vs just putting the disc in the player.

I mean, I still have all the discs too, obviously. I’ve not noticed any codec errors with my tv which is running the Android OS.

That's good. Some people seem to have issues with Dolby Vision. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/rw6mn3/what_is_the_cu...

I’m trying to think if I have any discs with Dolby Vision, I’m only buying 1080p blurays so maybe not. Most recent purchases were Dune and the new Batman movie and those both look and sound fantastic.

I believe Dolby Vision is only on 4k Blu Rays, so you're probably good.

Meh, ffmpeg doesn't support Dolby Vision yet either so you just get the non-DV fallback but unless you have a calibrated HDR monitor you're not really losing that much.

This is essentially correct. I've been bouncing between different boxes and HTPCs for almost a couple decades now and the best experience I've had has always been the Nvidia Shield. The only annoyance I have is I want to reliably set Kodi as the main launcher, which is more of Kodi's issue rather than the system.

But seriously, HTPCs of yesteryear are essentially dead due to Windows' terrible handling of Dolby Vision, Atmos, DTS:X, and HDR. Even though there are players that will allow you to get much better quality out of your source file on PC, the hassle of licensing and HDR modes is just absolutely not worth it.

An Apple TV 4K with Infuse app does all of this without problems and supports many kinds of storage backends.

I think this is what everyone should do instead of "buying" or paying for subscription services

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