RIPPING BLU-RAY DISCS TO PLEX | IS IT WORTH IT?

[@JeffRauseo]

Rip DVD movie to MP4 video in 5 minutes: bit.ly/digitizedvd WinX DVD Ripper can create digital copies of your DVD collections for playing on TV, Plex, Roku, mobile, PC, etc. It processes at 47x faster speed using GPU acceleration tech. Learn more → bit.ly/digitizedvd

[@Twitchstick80]

I like your channel a lot but the information you're passing on about Plex and how it's brings down your internet or you need faster speeds is false. I've been using Plex for 10+ years and when we only had 25/5 cable internet, I streamed with no issues. You need to take a hard look at your network setting, equipment, and even your actual server. I've got a few hundred movies ripped 1:1, both 1080p and 4K with full HDR and HD audio and my Nvidia Shield plays it all without a sweat. I stream my media at work from home with no issues.

[@jmcmike1]

Christopher Edwards also plex can help with the remote/mobile streaming with alternate versions feature where you can pre-encode bitrate/resolution combinations.

[@maplenerd22]

It's most likely the fact that he's streaming from his computer through WIFI.

[@3344precious]

1 hour to rip a Blueray movie wow a very slow computer as it should only take 25-30 minutes. Also he is missing the point of Plex being an all in 1 way to organize your digital media. Messing with physical media sucks and Plex makes more sense if done right.

[@kal-el5990]

@@3344precious thats a opinion

[@simplydan]

@@3344precious I agree. An hour to rip a movie is ridiculously long. Should not take more than 30 mins for a movie.

[@MaesComedia]

Holy shit, so many wrong things here i about died.. 😂 😂

[@charblee]

Yeah this was kind of frustrating to watch. I’m using a 2011 iMac as my Plex server (literally a machine inferior to his in every way) while ALSO being a Minecraft server (yes, it’s a Minecraft server for me and 3 friends AND a Plex server at the same time), we have absolutely 0 issues. I’m assuming his iMac is connected to wifi and that’s his problem.

[@T_B_C_L]

I have my entire 4k collection backed up on my synology nas running as a plex server. I have 40tb capacity. All my movies are backed up lossless in a mkv container and work perfectly on my nvida shield. I also use makemkv. When comparing the 4k UHD disc running on my Xbox one x to the playback via plex, I could see no difference at all! If there was any difference it was completely unnoticeable! All devices used in this scenario are wired ethernet on my local network. Doing this does take time but by far is way more convenient as I can open plex scroll through my movies pic the one I want and bam it's playing on my 4k TV. Plus all my movies get zero wear and tear!

[@xGaLoSx]

If its a dolby vision movie will the rip have DV? And will plex support dv in those rips?

[@BrianGarside]

Hell yes, totally worth it!

[@T_B_C_L]

@@xGaLoSx yes it will. Makemkv now supports dv

[@TrackerRoo]

Having a Plex server makes things so much better. I mean you can literally take your entire library with you when you leave the house thanks to it. You can filter based on genres, search movies based on actors or directors. The work you put into it is so minuscule. Rip the disk, title the file to appease Plex and it does the rest for you.

[@T_B_C_L]

@@TrackerRoo hell yea man.... I love plex 🍻

[@jlchavis0844]

Sounds like you are serving from machine that's connected wirelessly. That's probably you're biggest streaming issue. Hardwire to the router and see if that helps.

[@nairbos]

James Chavis or get a better router. I have an AC router across my house from my tv and it serves 40-50gb 4K remux files just fine with no stuttering. This guy doesn’t seem to know what he’s actually doing

[@deseijas]

I use a Nvidia Shield as my Plex server and it’s been working amazingly for me for the past two years. I mainly use it to watch movies outside of my house and to share with family outside the house. There were some hiccups at the start, but I changed my internet to a fiber connection (for other unrelated reasons,) tweaked a couple settings in the server and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

[@thorrollosson]

Hey bro, I have recently discovered your channel and really appreciate your content. As a physical media fan, I very much like checking out which transfers are great, average, or poor. Anyway, I am an IT admin who started on PCs back in the early 80s as a kid and have made it a career as well as a hobby, heavy emphasis on network infrastructure and security. I run Plex off of a 35/15 rural connection and am able to stream outbound with no problems. I have to drive down to a job at the moment so will be unavailable for a few hours, but when I get back I'll post info on how you can improve your experience, as well as a general guide to doing Plex on the cheap(ish). Cheers man.

[@DangerousDevilOfficial]

Super easy way to insure your collection: Take video regularly of the movies and cases. (update when you add a lot of movies). You don’t need to open and show every single disc. Just a clear video that scrolls across the entire collection. And maybe randomly open a handful of movie cases to show the discs. Add a newspaper into the video (to show the date). This makes it, so there is no discrepancy with the insurance in case of claim. Save the video to an external location. Such as friend’s or parent’s house. In the terrible event something happens. Then add on your insurance. As part of your personal property. This protects in case of fire, flood, theft, earthquake, ect..

[@davidreddick3016]

I have ripped blurays and 4k blurays for years and hosted with Plex with fairly few problems. With you re encoding your rips I would imagine you shouldn't be having Plex transcode for remote streaming but you can verify this why checking your CPU usage. Assuming you aren't transcoding, your problem is likely the fact your server is on WiFi. WiFi is great for many things but avoid it for servers. For most people, me included, your upload speed is the bottleneck but with your symmetric 250 mb/s you should have no problems there. Eliminating the wifi variable and verifying your CPU isn't being hit hard with transcoding you should be able to track down your problems easier.

[@xGaLoSx]

If its a dolby vision movie will the rip have DV? And will plex support dv in those rips?

[@davidreddick3016]

@@xGaLoSx I believe Plex can handle Dolby Vision assuming your end device also can but at this time I'm unaware of any "archiving" software like MakeMKV that is able to rip a 4k Blu-ray and retain the DV in such a way it can be played back.

[@anthonysanimationtalkextra9345]

I use mine for my massive animation collection eg the 1000 or so Looney Tunes where I can have them all in one place sourced from blu-ray all the way down to VHS (and even film in the case of the really rare stuff). I also love how Plex allows me to have bonus features attached to the movies I do have.

[@RandallStevenson]

Another advantage to backing up Blu-ray discs, I have at least one that starts with unskippable ads, takes like 20 minutes just to get to watching the movie

[@bensplace]

Plex is amazing, especially for sharing with family. You obviously have a network issue based on your comments. If you truly have 250mb upload speed, what is your latency? This is just as important. I have 4k UHD original quality movies, non compressed on an EXTERNAL USB drive (Make sure the drive isn't connected via USB 2.0) and can play them remotely in original quality and it uses approx 120-150mb of upload speed per stream. I have family members also using my server and never any problems, I have had as many as 15 people streaming at once with no issues. Your issue also could be you are using a Mac, I have a PC with an NVidia card (Plex can use your GPU for video and take stress off of your CPU). I think it is wrong to put out information like this that Plex is bad for sharing when it is one person having an issue with their set up. I would be happy to help you figure out what is wrong.

[@tsjohnsonjr4184]

Benjamin Rogers yeah - it is obvious this guy has very limited technical knowledge and doesn’t understand how to operate his network or Plex. I have less up than he does, and can stream 4 transcoded stream outside my network and not notice a single problem with doing anything else. I hate when these people that do not know what they are doing spread mis-information about things.

[@tsjohnsonjr4184]

And I love his “I spent all this money on a bad ass computer” bit. Cost has nothing to do with it, it is processor design - some cheaper processors can transcode much better than some more expensive ones - based on what it is designed for!

[@bensplace]

@@tsjohnsonjr4184 I feel like he should take this down, it's unfair and will turn people off to something that works great just based off of his network issues.

[@theoiv]

true words. i have a 10Tb Plex Server and no complaints from any of my members.

[@loadmastergod1961]

Problems started with "my computer is pretty powerful"

[@timramich]

Obviously you didn't want to put any effort into setting up Plex correctly before you ripped it apart.

[@Celestialrob]

Tim, can you point me towards a good guide on how to do this?

[@AnthonyFrantz]

@@Celestialrob support.plex.tv/articles/200264746-quick-start-step-by-step-guides/ - Links to other manuals/guides throughout this page.

[@3344precious]

The thing is there is no sure way to set-up Plex correctly because most people cannot even follow basic instructions. If you have kids then Digital is the way to go and 1 hour to rip a Bluray, I say it's time to get a pc that is somewhat current because it should only take about 45 with all the extras and 25-30 minutes for just the movie. I have no issues streaming in 1080p outside my home network, so it seems he hasn't even done the basics by setting up bandwidth control for his server holding his Plex library and thats not even to mention how his port forwarding is set-up. I will agree that if you are streaming in 4k then it may be an issue as the person on the other end has to have the same internet speeds or higher to insure that there will be no lagg or issue with sound syncing.

[@timramich]

@@3344precious Discs are digital, so...?

[@3344precious]

@@timramich Sorry not sure what your question is.

[@MrCREWCRUSHIN95]

Plex needs to have Ethernet to router connection. Wifi will never cut it on the host end. (And it needs a gig router - which is not expensive)

[@ricardomunoz7683]

I Will Never Get Rid off my Blu Ray and 4k Movies i Love physical Media i LOVE to go and Buy Blu Ray and 4k Movies and Physical Media will Never go Away 💯

[@PLr1c3r]

You're looking at this the wrong way. It's not about taking blu rays away it's about being able to enjoy your collection on all of your devices. Without the need of multiple 4k blu ray players and disks. Plex works on pc mac android playstation xbox you name it.

[@JeffRauseo]

Just my opinion and my experiences. I am certainly an outlier because of my collection size. I’m sure everyone has different experiences and as I said, Plex could work fine depending on how you feel about quality and your time/patience with it. For me, it simply isn’t worth the time and effort, and I would suggest just buying a Blu-ray player for any additional displays you want to watch high quality movies on. But that’s just my opinion!! Share them in the comments and let’s have a good discussion.

[@dormany]

I rarely have any problems with plex. my friends stream from me without any problems. You should check your settings, and your familys settings. With 5 gb files and 250 Mb speed, try to push the files out without transcoding. Try to use recommended settings for plex in Handbrake too. Also, try using an internal drive. I had problems while using external drives, the usb speed was really bad (probably a driver problem). Internet speed doesn't help if the usb port is the bottleneck.

[@rguitar78]

MKV 1:1 RIP, stored on USB3 WD drive, attached to Nvidia Shield, hard wired with CAT6 to router. Streaming full quality in and out of the house is perfect, but need 20MB/s internet on the end device. Looking for how to RIP UHD though...

[@jmcmike1]

See my reply to Zach on some technical aspects but for me, with a collection not nearly as big as yours, ripping 1:1 for local streaming is was totally worth it. Convenient access to native quality.

[@ThatWilsonGuyvids]

I will never go back to playing physical media directly. I have a Plex server with over 2000 movies and 2000 TV episodes. Every one directly ripped as full quality MKV. Internet upload speed and storage capacity is a real limit but outside of that, everything works extremely well. If you aren't compressing the files, your time to rip is not that significant. I would also say after ripping 2k movies the average Blu Ray size is closer to 25GB. Some are in the high 30s+, many are in the high teens. 4K Blu Rays are no joke and the average is probably closer to 70GB + if you do out of home streaming, you are better off also keeping a 1080 copy so 100+ GB per movie. All my discs go into storage, I still have them if I need them. I actually think of it in the reverse that you do. Plex is my primary, and the physical copies are my backup. Final thought is offline sync. Being able to transfer copies of my media to my phone, iPad, laptop, (any Plex compatible device) is great. Watching my hand picked movie(s) on a flight is extremely easy.

[@ThatWilsonGuyvids]

@@rguitar78 ripping UHD takes a fairly limited list of specific Blu Ray drives (all made by LG) and then manually downgrading the firmware as they removed the ability to rip 4K discs with a firmware update. Lots of great info on the MakeMKV forums.

[@Supercon57]

Decent internet service is only part of it Gotta make sure you're server is using a wired connection, huuuge difference with wired vs wireless Also make sure your home network is using smart queue, the problem you were experiencing could be an issue of buffer bloat I used to use a ubiquti USG but recently upgraded to a Dream machine pro for faster download/upload No more buffer bloat and I maintain my higher speeds

[@robertt9342]

I used to handbrake films, but I decided that I wanted to maintain the quality, now I am looking at a whole new media storage issues of components and cost. I am running a Plex server off an old desktop computer with a few drives of varying sizes. I am at the transitional stage just before moving to a more robust storage solution. I have no where near your size of collection so it's doable for me, especially if up I have a few ODD running and I slowly ripping them over time. Honestly it’s a bit overwhelming and exciting. I can also sync some optimized files to my device for when I am travelling.

[@MrWilsoniAm]

I’ve used Plex for many years. I have around 1,000 movies on it which did take a long time but was relatively cheap. I bought a 5TB hard drive and a Samsung external Blu-ray drive. It was a lot of fun to use and share with friends and family over the years. My biggest problem with it now is time but also spending the money to build a NAS which on the low end would cost me around $600 for the server unit and 12TB of storage (to begin with). I learned having a single drive is a dangerous plan considering it itself needs a backup (hence the NAS using RAID). Also, my Samsung Blu-ray player quite reading Blu-rays (but not DVD or CD). And of course I’ve had certain streaming issues in my home and with friends and family over the years. I came to the realization that spending that much time, money and effort isn’t worth it considering my collection will continue to grow into the thousands. This is a thorough video that lays out the pros and cons. Well done.

[@jesseroman3]

I’ve ripped close to 1500 DVD, Blu Rays and 4K never had a problem !!!

[@GraveyardGrog]

Instead of using your computer as the server...get a NAS with a Raid array. Hook it up to the router WIRED. Also, check your router, switches and wires and make sure they are all up to date with the highest speeds. I have friends who are in Canada (in US here) and they can watch 4k movies from my server with no issues. Again, most important, make sure all your wires, switches and router have the max throughput. Never EVER go wireless.

[@felixbronkhorst1674]

NAS as a Plex server and direct play via Infuse (connecting Infuse and Plex) on Apple TV 4K is the best setup for this imo. The Infuse app can handle every single file I tried including 4K HDR Dolby Atmos and it looks absolutely beautiful plus no transcoding or buffering whatsoever. I highly recommend to try this setup!

[@ambientlifeforms7508]

Exactly the setup I discovered recently - makeMKV to NAS (1:1 rips) - plex server on NAS - Infuse on Apple TV 4K+ and voila you have the same quality as on the 4K HDR dolby atmos disc, but infinitely more convenient.

[@sketchyhondas8061]

Need to enable hardware acceleration in plex. When its not local playback and the file is larger it has to transcode it. Its much more efficient to do it with the integrated graphics vs the cpu encoding. I have plex running on an old dell precision t5810 10 core 20 thread xeon cpu, 128gb ram, nvidia quadro p5000 gpu. My internet speed is 1000 down 350 up. I have zero issues offsite at the 8mbps setting in plex with multiple users at the same time. The buffering is likely not internet speed related its more than likely the transcoding.

[@cyberspider42]

I have a Plex server on my windows 10 PC. My internet is only 12Mbps upload. I share Plex with my family who never have any issue with streaming it and I normally have a mix of 2 to 4 transcode and direct streams going at the same time. I love Plex I've been using it for 5 years.

[@petersonj198]

I have young kids so the main reason I backed up my collection was to no have to re-buy their favorite movies that they ended up getting all scratched. I then got carried away and backed up my entire collection which is nice because much of it is at my parent's house, since my wife does not want me to have a huge Bluray shelf. So I like having my digital library, but it does take lots of time to setup. Everyone collects differently, and I just wanted to share my view on the topic.

[@jamess.9743]

i’ve been ripping movies into 720p because everyone in my family watches media on their phones and tablets and rarely on the big screen.

[@toddjonesmusic]

It takes me a good hour for both "Make MKV" and "Handbrake" on a 2Hr Blu-Ray. Plex for sure requires tweaking to stream right. But lets just take "Home Video" as a subject. Being able to share those on the go with other family and friends is pretty valuable. Its certainly not perfect and it's there way or the highway:) Thanks for the Video:)

[@leif8436]

I own about 150 movies and do not own a blu ray player. I stream everything from my Server to the Shield. Sure the initial setup can be a bit daunting but once you've set up everything the truly right way it works like butter. And it also is just very convenient for family members. I use Jellyfin instead of Plex and its great.

[@tparadox88]

I don't know if Automatic Ripping Machine was a thing three years ago, but it's definitely going to be something I use when I'm ready to rip my whole library. ARM automates the whole MakeMKV-Handbrake-metadata workflow so usually you only have to put the disk in and wait for it to spit it out. It also supports using multiple optical drives at once if you have them. I'll also want to get a GPU in the mix because it's taking forever to transcode the season of TV I'm trying out ripping with in software. MakeMKV ripped all four DVDs in under two hours, but 900MB per episode is not okay for SD video at scale, so Handbrake is essential.

[@walllable]

I've found that GPU hardware encoding has lower quality than CPU software encoding for the same bitrate, but it all depends on if the time savings are worth it to you. GPU encoding can be SO much faster.

[@lastxflfan420]

I went full crazy and started building a Plex server last year. I bought a 14TB and 10TB WD external drives which I shucked. I have a collection of over 200 movies and 21 TV series. I absolutely love being able to watch my movies on my phone or at a friends house. I decided not to compress my video files and keep the full quality. The biggest pain in the whole ordeal is sitting down and putting in disc after disc to rip the files. I had 2 separate bluray drives and a dvd drive at one point ripping. The investment time is proportional to the movie collection. I couldn't imagine ripping all of your collection. Anyway I hope you continue to play around with the Plex server. Wonderful content, thanks.

[@triplerinse]

Its amazing I went from 1 4tb and an old i5 I had. Just recently moved up to 12 bay 60tb

[@robertt9342]

I heading that same direction,. I am at that stage where am you have a few drives of various sizes and having to consider long term expansion plans.

[@ThatWilsonGuyvids]

Same here, I started with an 800GB external drive plugged into my sons first laptop with a Celeron processor. I've now got a 12 bay enterprise grade NAS with 108TB capacity.

[@yatharthkaushik5504]

@@ThatWilsonGuyvids what the heck do you store in 108tb

[@ThatWilsonGuyvids]

@@yatharthkaushik5504 Right now I'm only using about 70TB, and it's all media for Plex. I made the decision early on to just store RAW MKVs at full quality. I didn't want to lose any quality and I didn't want to take extra time to transcode them to make them smaller. I have a little over 3k movies + another 150 4k and about 4500 TV episodes.

[@yatharthkaushik5504]

@@ThatWilsonGuyvids ok man for me it is super overkill

[@slimshady8408]

One of the most useful and awesome topics holy moly wish more people would talk about this stuff!!

[@manuelcastrojjd]

This guy talk about this all the time kzbin.info

[@ianpearson8567]

you should use a low end PC and setup truenas Core onto a usb and install that too a ssd drive making it as a sever, streamed to my phone out and about no problem.

[@shotinthetech4948]

For your blu-ray ripping speed, I might recommend a drive that fully supports LibreDrive with MakeMKV. It is much faster at ripping discs and should only take 20-30 minutes. As for your use case, a local Plex server may not be your best option for sharing media with your family outside of your home. I would take a look into cloud hosting and either a media server in the cloud or an app like Infuse with Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.

[@gtrogue]

I backup all my DVDs, Blu-rays, & UHDs to a NAS. I do not re-encode them. I use PMS as my media server software. I don’t have any problems streaming around my house or externally. I force direct play (no transcoding) for everything, even for external streams. The playback client is the real limiter for whether transcoding is required on the server. If the codecs are supported by the playback client you don’t need to transcode in most cases.

[@noeldillabough]

Assume your near line storage will fail, not if..when. so you need to have an off-site backup. I recommend a NAS with raid x, 5, or 6 to allow you to lose a drive without losing the files. Also some movies are going to have ripping flaws you'll need to research how to rip some. Lastly when you start uploading large amounts your provider probably started to throttle.

[@DangerousDevilOfficial]

Noel Dillabough all good and real points. I suspect throttling will get worse, as content gets bigger and bigger. 👍

[@TrevorRchannel]

I’m a massive Plex fan, I also rip my Blu-ray and DVD disks using the same applications, I always use the H265 10 bit codec and pass through the highest audio track which shoots out files around 6-10gb in size, also to my eyes no noticeable loss in quality at all. As for internet connection I have 350mb down 35mb up and share my library with my family and friends, I’ve never noticed my internet slow down even with two outside connections going at once, I’d say you have an issue with your router/ISP, my Plex server is also hard wired. Hope this info helps.

[@coreyhennessee6137]

are you using crf or abr? what are your settings?

[@rosscoleman6801]

It's worth it for the movies and shows your kids watch repeatedly.

[@MukilteoSailor]

While I did burn some movies to use with Plex, I found that for me it works best for my DVD/Blu-ray TV library. That way I can just navigate through series/seasons to pick the episode I want to watch. Plex even plays theme music of series when i select it.

[@Carlos-gc4hb]

Physical media is the only way for me. Technology has to improve tremendously before I can consider digital downloads or ripping disc.

[@writer8706]

i can stream 8-10 4k movies off my plex server with no issues what soever. so i dont know what you mean by improve tremendously. The tech is there you just need to know what you need and how to set things up. just like you cant plug a Blue ray player in with a composite output and expect to get great results. I get you may not want to take the time to learn how to do things your self or put the effort in when a blue ray disk is plug and play. But once you get it set up that Blue ray is now at your finger tip and on the go. I can stream and watch my entire media library of close to 200 movies and about 20 TV shows when ever i want. Whats not to love about that? i can keep my physical media and eat my cake with streaming as well.. its a Win win.

[@robertclark8546]

@@writer8706 Physical media is now my backup. I have everything ripped to Plex and love it.

[@streamingjunkie4397]

Technology is already there. The real issue is economy. A 1:1 rip will be identical to your physical media since the only difference is the medium in which those bits are stored. Nothing is inherently better about plastic discs over magnetic discs other than the cost and the computer industry has a great track record of lowering prices and increasing value over time.

[@writer8706]

@@streamingjunkie4397 you can get an 8-10TB WD red drive as a WD easy store external drive for under $200. That's roughly 160 blue ray movies in its uncompressed form. That is well worth the price. Cosidering that its $10-30 per disk.

[@ManniLive]

Gonna have to disagree on that one digital is far more convenient than physical at this point especially with Plex once you know how to organize your library you will see what I'm saying

[@lycanhd]

You need to make sure that everything is direct playing. If it is having to transcode it's going to bog your system down. I have no problem with 7 or 10 streams going at a time

[@shockracer]

This! Sorry but that Mac isn't that powerful, a GPU is needed for Transcoding.

[@steviefreakinc]

I have a blu ray collection and I sometimes rip stuff to my PC if I can't find it online from somewhere else that already did the ripping. Always use a VPN if you get it from someone else. But I own all of the movies I download, so I don't see it as a problem. I just didn't have to rip it manually myself and be "Time Sucked" as he put it. lol

[@WarumonoTube]

Totally agree. Ripping and transcoding is time consuming, I always check first if somebody else have already ripped and made it available. ALWAYs use a VPN and do it ONLY for movies you own, of course, I do not endorse piracy. Also, the re-encoding is tricky. I recently ripped a new BluRay and used a conversion tool to produce a playable MP4... turns out the output file I got (did it several times, tweaking settings, 45-60 minutes each time!) wasn’t as good than the one I downloaded using a Torrent client.

[@MuscleAL]

It's just too much time and efforts, especially for guys like us who have thousand of Blu-ray and DVD collections! If some of your collection have disc rot problems, you could either replace/upgrade/stream it if available, or just accept that you couldn't have everything you want!

[@DangerousDevilOfficial]

Allan Foo agreed! I have 8,000 plus movies. No way in HELL I am gonna do this. Have had the ability with my Blu Ray drive and even a 4K drive now for a long time. But I knew long ago, it was not a wise way to go when you have thousands of movies! I just use my digital locker on all TVs in the house not in my theatre. I have 425 movies and TV shows (and growing) on VUDU. Add to that, free Vudu movies, Crackle, Pluto TV, Tubi, Filmrise and all the other free movie and TV services and it makes ZERO sense to rip Blu rays today. The hard drive space alone for my collection would cost thousands. Never mind the years it would take to complete the job. Even if I did 5 movies daily, every day of the week, that would take 1,600 days! Or more than 4 YEARS! And that is if I stopped getting new movies! Impractical and not realistic.

[@ThatWilsonGuyvids]

@@DangerousDevilOfficial A fair amount of over exaggeration but time and money are always a consideration in any hobby or endeavor. What I will say is that the cost of hard drives is a fraction of what you paid for the movies if you really have 8,000. The time investment can be a little more complicated and I can understand this being a deterant. When I was doing my initial rip of the collection it was daunting but I found ways to incorporate it into my schedule and just remembered to periodically go swap discs. Also, you don't have to RIP all 8k. My intention was to never do all my movies. It started as my favorite / most obscure and hard to find movies. Eventually I found myself adding more and more. Now it's a matter of maintenance. I get a few new movies and they are added that evening or weekend. Plex is free, anyone with a media collection like yours should at least try it. I also understand it's not for everyone and that is okay too.

[@DangerousDevilOfficial]

Jeremy Wilson tell me, with specifics, how this is “a fair amount of exaggeration”? Let’s do the math: Roughly 45% of my movies are DVD. So roughly 3,600 movies. 3,600 X 8 GB (And some discs are doubled sided multi features and some have as many as 4 movies per disc and are 12 GB. But for arguments sake, let’s say all average 8GB.) This equals 28,800 GB. Next, let’s take Blu Ray: Roughly also 45% of my collection. Discs average between 25-50 GB. So let’s use a number between 40 GB. 3,600 Discs X 40= 144,000 GB! Next would be 4K and Laserdisc transfer: Roughly 10%. Let’s pretend that these ONLY take 20 GB. Obviously 4K is 100 GB plus. But I have a fair amount of Laser. So conservatively 800 X 20= 1,600 GB. That equals 174,000 GB on the CONSERVATIVE SIDE! Let’s say you can purchase an 8 Terabyte Drive for $100. That is 22 separate 8 Terabyte hard drives! Times 100. $2,200! Remember, these numbers are extremely conservative. Likely much closer to 30 drives. And over $3,000!

[@DangerousDevilOfficial]

Then let’s not forget the failure rate of hard drives. Anywhere from 5-10% after the first year. So you would have to have a backup hard drive of each drive. Otherwise you would be redoing ALL of the rips! So now we are at $5 to 6K! The time investment required would be astronomical! Let’s say an ISO rip simply takes 1 hour. Regardless. Which is absolutely not even close for Blu Ray or 4K. But that is 8,000 hours! Or roughly 334 days straight 24 hours a day! So both financially and time wise, this is 1,000 percent unrealistic! As far as copying your most obscure (there may be limited value there), using them on perhaps a single hard drive and storing the actual discs in a climate controlled environment might be a decent idea. If for nothing else, to save the cost alone of replacement when discs are out of print. I have Plex. It is ok. Certainly can’t complain at its price! I also have Handbrake, DVD Shrink, DVD Rip, DVD Creator. All of them. They all serve a purpose. And I don’t knock the free products. I appreciate having them. It just is not remotely realistic to rip a collection bigger than a couple of hundreds discs today.

[@burninator1983]

I have personally been using Emby (formerly called Media Browser) which is an alternative to Plex for years. I run it from a standalone media server with 40TB of storage and it has well over 1000 Blu-ray rips plus a few hundred TV shows and even about 50 4K rips which all play perfectly on my NVIDIA Shields. Despite how time consuming it is to rip and encode Blu-rays to HEVC MKVs with full HD audio tracks (I have also started ripping the special features too), I continue doing it for the backup and convenience factors. It's easier for members of my family to use, keeps my physical media safe from sticky fingers and leaves the discs far less likely to end up getting damaged. I have never really bothered with streaming externally yet since the need hasn't come up for me, but I could do it if I wanted to.

[@randallstamper8078]

I used to rip all my Blu Rays with MakeMKV and Handbrake like this, then use Kodi to play them on an Nvidia Shield. I also use TinyMediaManager with VLC on a HTPC. The biggest reason is to have the convenience factor to filter and find a movie from a drive, then hit play without hunting down a disc. It also made it very easy to take my Shield and (entire movie collection) a USB hard drive with me to friends, relatives, or wherever I go, no internet streaming bottleneck BS to deal with. However, once I started collecting 4K Blu Rays with up to 4x the data per disc and having to support new features like Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos, ripping became way more expensive, more complicated and more time consuming, so haven't done it in awhile. I'll need to buy a large NAS and settle on a new 4K ripping/playback strategy first, before I start doing that again. Either that, or stick to 1080p rips. That Zappiti NAS server solution might be something to consider, lets you drop in a 4K disc and come back later while it auto-magically rips the entire disc to your library. That would be a huge time savings.

[@johnstanowski9489]

I freaking love Plex. Any superfans of movies would definitely want to look into this. However, I recently strayed away from using it because your channel got me to get on the 4K bandwagon. And I was under the false impression that all of the movies I ripped were of lesser quality. Your channel got me into wanting to get off my butt, walk to the shelves and put a disc in the player again. Also recently found out that it's possible to rip them with zero loss in quality. Well, that changes everything for me. I don't care about the space it takes up. I've got computers all over the house anyway, so I will be getting a dedicated drive just for movies and starting up Plex again. As for the sharing with others, I'm not into that. Like you said, it slows your own network down. I'm actually not sure it's all that legal either. My 2 top favorite things about Plex are: 1. I have a LOT of movies. And having all of them backed up on one or two drives gives me great peace of mind. If a flood is coming I can just grab those boxes and all of my movies are safe. Can you imagine trying to gather up all of the discs with a tornado on the way? And second is the ability to browse through all of your discs right on your tv. You can use filters to show just Hitchcock movies, just 80s movies, just movies with Tom Hanks in them, etc.

[@millar876]

Plex has been great for me for years and years. I have 550/40 internet and can stream outside without problems, it sounds like your ISP may have traffic shaping which may place limits on your network. If I’m doing a lot at once, I’ll rip them with makemkv and set a handbrake que to run overnight. I use Plex because I’m lazy and don’t want to stare at disk spines to figure out what to watch. It is a time suck starting from scratch, but just doing your most watched and new ones.

[@lazinggu2051]

To rip Blu-ray to Plex, a blu-ray ripping software is required. DumboFab Blu-ray Ripper is an easy-to-use yet powerful Blu-ray to Plex converter for both Windows and Mac users. With it, you can easily and fast rip any 2D/3D/UHD Blu-ray discs to Plex format with excellent quality in a smaller file size.

[@Sh3lShock]

Things have gone a long way in 2 years with Plex. Now 1 to 1 ripping looks great on plex.

[@TheLingo56]

Plex is super worth it if you want the seamless experience of being able to stream on all of your devices cleanly, less worth it if you just want a high-quality stream after already owning the disc and a UHD Blu-ray Player. One massive plus though is that it's super cool to be able to share your library with friends and family.

[@Shnick]

I use a 12 tb Seawolf in an old compaq 4300 that’s has some upgrades, it’s networked right to my tv and plex works great right from my phone using a web address. If you use r-45 your network outside of the video playing won’t be affected.

[@faboneproject918]

I can see the issue if you have a large library. If you are just starting, like you said a smaller collection and you want to back-up, doing this would be good.

[@VirtualRobotsRevolt]

Great reason to rip your movies and why I did it is to play them in VR (especially 3D blu rays) and to play them for others in a virtual movie theater via Big Screen App. :)

[@TransCanadaPhil]

I do that too, Bigscreen VR is amazing

[@caseypdx503]

On the streaming to family/friends...it is much more about internet connection. To be able to stream decent enough quality, both parties need to have a pretty good connection...AND, your server needs to be hooked up by ethernet, not wifi! And actually beyond that, you can setup Plex to automatically adjust the quality for both the internet connection and the device they are trying to play it on...

[@JimLeonard]

It almost sounds like he didn't have transcoding turned on in the server, and was trying to stream full quality files without enough bandwidth.

[@smptactical259]

The issue I have with disc players in my dedicated 6 seat theater was when watching TopGun Maverick UHD disc with friends and it hung near the end when Maverick was shot down what a buzz kill Sony X800. It's happened enough I bought a Panasonic BDP-UB9000 but the shuffle was a chore. Now I backup as discs with makemkv as I buy them right to a TrueNAS with Plex plug-in. I leave them as mkv so I get disc full quality. Its a great all in one solution for AppleTV 4k players around the house with the App where most are setup with 5.1 or less. For the dedicated theater I use both an AppleTV 4K (2022 HDR10+) and plex for non-Atmos media content that is output as multi-channel PCM with upmix using Auro3D Auromatic and a Zidoo so I can get the full Atmos/DTS-X/IMAX track of the native movie. Its a much cheaper solution than what my friends have using Kaleidescape.

[@InimicusSolitus]

I use Emby software on my media server. I do 1:1 copies because I want to keep the quality. I currently have about 450 movies on my server, DVDs and bluray, with many more to go. It takes about 20 minutes to rip a movie. I currently have 22TB of storage, with each hard drive duplicated for redundancy. I only stream over my local network. I do this for convenience, and to save space storing the movies. EDIT : I am starting to get 4K discs, which I am NOT going to put on the server - file size is stupid big.

[@MrJsii69]

Jeff just saw your video and I have to disagree with you on several points; however I can see you pov from what you wanted to try Plex for in the first place. You are entirely correct that this will take a great deal of time if you have a large library. For me I have a collection about your size if not larger and it took over 2 years to convert them all but let me tell you why it was totally worth it for me. Our motivations were different so that may explain our counter viewpoints. I have a fairly large family and back in the day we had a HT with 3-400 dvd disc changers, along with books and zip up portfolios full of dvds, cds, and vhs (we'll come back to that). For road trips and just riding around with the kids we would have a book full of dvd's and such; often when I wanted to watch a movie it was not in the changer, loaned out to a friend or worse the kids had scratched them up. Additionally what became an annoyance to me at least was having thousands of movies cases everywhere. It was impressive to look at but storage and organization was a problem. So firstly my motivation was only to get a better system for use in our house and I decided that I wanted to do away with ALL physical media (games disc to). This started over 10 years ago before plex or at least before me knowing about it and using itunes. Plex came along and now we were able to play formats others than mp4 and apple movies. Today that library streams over every tv, pad, phone and computer in the house. Your purpose however was to stream outside of your home to others; there are a handful of people that use our library but it's never over 1 or 2 at a time outside of the home and have never had any problems streaming. Our internet is not nearly as robust as yours, we get 200 download but only about 10-15mps up and no problems but I do limit external streams to 4mps @ 1080p. Even today as we get ready for a road trip we can turn on the streaming device in the van or hook up a phone we'll have the entire library (and live tv through plex) readily available. Additionally I also converted those vhs tapes you mentioned years ago and over this past holiday we had some old cam-corder tapes converted through one of those services always on the radio and now can watch those lost memories without any fuss through Plex. I still rip 4k movies but when buying HD movies I'll get the digital download and give/throw away the disc. Same is even true for game consoles games. Still got one of those big portfolio books for the games but that was before digital game downloads became a thing but anything new is all digital if available. I will add finally that I'm more in favor of the uncompressed video vs compressed and had to go back and re-copy much of the library. When this first started the movie files where 2 to 5gb max and they looked fine on the 42in 720p plasma, then as the resolution of tv's got better and audio tracks got more complex & with the advent of bluray & 4k those files needed to grow. What looked good on a 42 didn't always looks or sound good on the big screen, larger tv's and audio equipment. So now in an effort to not have to copy those files again because of the next technologically tv/audio advance we keep the tracks uncompressed but that then lends itself to files that are 40-50 gb size for 4k and usually about 10-20gb for bluray. I will say that the bluray digital downloads are normally 5-7gb have not given me any problems. I completely see why it might not work for you and your goals but when plex came along and I was able to ween off of itunes (it only played mp4’s ) , store my large library, free up physical space in the house, view, record & store live tv, and make it easy to view anything, anywhere, anytime I was sold! Netflix for your personal media. I disagree with you but still liked the video, keep up the good work!

[@LouieGMDesign]

I have a big blu-ray and 4K movie collection. I use PLEX on the PlayStation5 so that I can share my movies with my gaming friends and they can share their movie collection with me. We can have a big 10-person movie night and watch a movie together. This is a great thing to have and a great way to share your movie collection with others. I use DVDFab to rip movies onto my external hard drive. It's a bit expensive, but it's a great all-in-one solution for DVDs, Blu-rays and 4K movies.

[@JHACbiz]

This dude doesn't know what he's doing

[@nickh5937]

Nice guy but he is giving tech advice above his knowledge level. The good example would be, your home network speed has very little to do with your home Internet speed.

[@GAZMAN2002]

Yeah a bluray quality mkv file transcoded would be a disaster. Ripping to mp4 yes compressed is the only way to go. If you are going to be a distributor for others.

[@ericwmartinez]

I’ve been using plex for 3 years now. Now not sure how your entire set up is. What I do I use mkv as well and you’re right about each Blu-ray is 20 - 30gb each. And I too covert my media to compress. Now what I do is try to use a format that gives me the most universal direct play to many client devices. So I use Wondershare to convert to 1080p mp4 formats. I mostly use roku devices both internally and external networks. That way there is no transcoding being done and it’s just upload bandwidth being used. Then I set each client to stream original quality in the playback settings. By doing this I get high quality smooth playback on all my devices. Even at my home I have two internet connections one for business and one for personal. My server is on my business connection and I stream using my personal home connection. I have had no issues thus far. I’m using a amd ryzen 2200g with a asus b350 prime and 8gb ram and 6tb external hdd for my collection.

[@RobotPorter]

I agree with your take on the issue. I do have a few rare things that I back up this way. But for most things, I just wait for a sale on digital copies of whatever movie I need.

[@ragnarokstar19]

I just recently tried Plex as well. I bought the Lifetime Subscription at the beginning of last year and decided to try using it on my Arrowverse Blu-ray collection last week (which I built from years of Black Friday sales; $10-15 each). The Blu-rays give like 20 mbps data vs Netflix which either does ~3 mbps an episode (muddy 1080) or ~6 mbps (decent 1080). Dark scenes are the worst victims of bitrate compression. My motivation was to watch The Flash, Arrow, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow in order with 1:1 Blu-ray quality without having to switch discs per episode. However even with Plex’s ‘Convert Quality’ option it still glitches and stutters, so now I feel like I wasted money on these Blu-rays. I feel like I shouldn’t have this problem cuz my PC and Xbox One are hard-wired into my internet via Ethernet cables and I built my high-powered PC. The only reasons I could think why it is stuttering is that I am limited to 20mbps upload and that a dedicated NAS server would benefit me more.

[@brianlasker5697]

That upload speed is very slow. I thought there was a possibility mine wasn't going to work. I thought it might be 200mbps at max. Just checked my Xbox now it says there's a 904.42 Mbps download and a 775.67 Mbps upload. What we have here is a brand new gigabit router. I think you may benefit from having the same thing.

[@shanecook9653]

Try Synology NAS (e.g. DS220j) and DSVideo app. Same as plex but free / pre-paid via Synology. Buy a WD external drive and pull out the large capacity HDs. Never bothered with Handbrake. Just buy a large drive. Found the sony X700 was the UHD best player as it plays directly from the NAS or from and actual disk. LG TV also picks up the NAS and plays directly. DSVideo also allows download of titles to android tablets, which is great for holiday trips / planes / trains etc. Only issue I found was Atmos+HDR if, like me, you have a 1.4 receiver.

[@xechs88]

I have a online server and plex allows me to run 4k fine through wi fi just make sure it's newer AC ones, works flawless if wired. Great thing about plex if you make online server is you can play it off anything. Basically turns all your movies/tv shows to be able;e to be played on any device. Basically making your own netflix. Also you are not limited on the content you can put whatever you want on there. Even blu rays are worth ripping as it will look better then compression on most streaming services due to bitrate alone, especially darker scenes. Also plex can grab subtitles automatically from various sites. Being in multicultural society it helps to be able to accommodate lots of different people. A lot more options then a standard blu ray will hold for subtitles. Also since online, close family members can add in their collection as well and build the library. Also it can even list what is on netflix so if you have both you don't need to double rip.

[@Celtpjs34stone34]

I use Plex and rip full lossless copies of my discs- 4k and 1080p. Yes it takes a long time to rip but once you catch up to your new purchases it's perfectly fine. Use Plex's settings to limit quality for outside the home streaming and not use handbrake- doesn't seem to make sense for Plex AT ALL. I have 75 down and 5-10up and it works just fine with my family in a completely different state- you might need to check your settings but I use an Nvidia shield 2017 pro for the server and Nvidia shield 2019 pro for my main rig and my in-laws have a 2017 Nvidia shield. I usually just use my Oppo 205 for primary playback but Plex is convenient plus the interface is great! Either way love the channel and maybe give Plex another chance and reach out to some of the Plex KZbinrs and see if they can help ya!

[@xGaLoSx]

If its a dolby vision movie will the rip have DV? And will plex support dv in those rips?

[@piman2boek364]

It really helps if you have a newer, faster computer. I normally start converting a movie at night and that computer is used primarily for conversion. You need another computer to back up the movies in case your hard drive(s) fail. I have 3 or 400 movies on my Plex server which allows me to view the movies on any tv in my house. My son-in-law says if you drop the file size down to low you start to lose some of the background in the dark areas of scenes. I only stream wifi. My son and son-in-law both have fast internet speeds and my son streamed movies from his server to my son-in-laws house. The movies streamed perfectly.

[@2Timothy2.15]

I own about 1100 x Blu-rays and 150 x 4K movies and have them all on 32TB (4 x 8TB HDDs). All Blu-rays are re-encoded to x265 and are between 3GB and 10GB each (size varies depending on AR, grain level, compression settings, audio codec, etc). The 4K movies are 1:1, no re-encoding. I use an FTP server and stream the BDs to KODI devices around house (the 4Ks are used solely for the dedicated home theater and stored on HDDs attached directly to my Vero 4K). Plex isn't required.

[@tylee5291]

First off, I AM a physical media guy. Was looking for a way to condense my Blu Ray collection to make room for 4k discs and to just have more movies on hand at home. Plus, wanted something cheaper than a Kaleidescape server which about $5000! I was looking for a video like this a couple of days ago. I JUST bought the parts this past Monday to have a Plex server built. A buddy is building it for me. Plan to hard wire straight to router and stream thru Apple TV+ box.

[@sprocopus]

Part of the problem with the streaming from outside of your home could be the what they are using to watch. Most of the built in Plex apps (like on smart TVs, etc.) should work fine. On a PC, you have to use the Plex Media Player Desktop App, NOT other apps like the Chrome Browser Player or the UWP Windows Store app. They both have to do their own decoding, whereas the Plex Player does not.

[@TrollGamerStudios]

I see your arguments, but for me being able to access my discs remotely is a game changer since I travel so much and can’t take a player / discs with me

[@christopherm7741]

If you’re gonna rely on Wi-Fi, time to invest in Wi-Fi 6 tech. Plus hard wire when possible for a good mesh coverage. A lot of the complaints just seem hardware, networking and configuration setting issues. NAS Plex servers are also becoming very popular with Synology or Qnap.

[@thelegendjimbob]

I thought of using Plex first hearing of it a few years ago. Decided it was better to use the digital codes and/or buy digital from Vudu. I read last year Walmart was looking to sell Vudu.

[@writer8706]

I have been running Plex for about 2 years now and man its like a second Netflix once you get things built up. The oonly thing i will say is back up your drives.. I had one hard Drive crash on my NAS and i had to re-rip about 1K tv episodes... not a good time at all.

[@MOEBABY3000]

Great video bro.

[@Mr.HotRod]

Man I wish I had a tenth of all the super great, smart ripper / storers here in the comment section. I am older but been in the video / audio game a long time. I am very unknowledgeable on the ripping / storing movies but am going to get my feet a little wet in the game. I have a good tower built by a pc guru friend and a couple of My Cloud storage units but am just getting a feel of how they work. You commenters are great. Take Care. Hot Rod

[@Iliescuvalentin]

I think its worth the time. Plex not only has has a webplayer, they have a standlone player for pc and plex htpc for tv's the last two can pley the movies without transcoding. I don't encode the movies from the disc, jus transfer them into an mkv file. So it's easier, at least for me.i pull everything from the disc including bonus features, extended versions, alternate versions.. it like Neflix, but much better

[@undergod1987]

Internet connection is only as good as your network hardware. It sounds like your network hardware is at fault. Not plex.

[@roqueadeleon]

Good video! I've thought about this myself as well and not sure if it makes sense for me to start backing up my physical media. I'm only just starting collecting but I thought having a plex server would be fun in conjunction to my physical collection but the more I think about it the more I realize it's probably not the right move for me right now. I have 1 TV in my house - the same TV that I watch my physical collection on. So why even do it? Sure I could share the digital collection with other but that means dozens/potentially hundreds of hours ripping and then a few hundred on hard drive space, a ripper, premium Plex account etc. For now i'll jus spend that money on the movies maybe one day it will make more sense to start a server for my collection.

[@RobHoffman83]

If you want to stream outside your home you need your server hardwired to your router. My plex is and I've streamed a few times when I was out of town. I tried using WI-FI and it was just as you described. That said, I love MKV for my home theater. I rip using MKV to my NAS then use VLC using an NFS connection back to the NAS. My old synology nas is too slow to transcode MKV files. I use Plex with MP4 to the TVs in my home and it's great for that.

[@cujo9999]

I know I'm a little late to the party of (politely) saying how wrong you were, in so many ways. The most obvious one is backing up your investment. If you don't want to, fine, that's on you. As someone who's had to rebuild their movie collection a couple of times because of accidentally fomatting the wrong drive (stupid me) and and a corrupted drive, take it from me, the 3-2-1 method of archiving is worth the effort. Three seperate copies, in two seperate methods (two different copies on drives and one on blank blu ray disks) with one of the drive copies being off-site. When I update my plex server, I save my changes for quarterly and make those quarterly changes to the other copies. I have waited six months but you get the idea, just depends on how much needed to be added to the backups.

[@furynotes]

Ripping 4k movies with hdr though. That is expensive.

[@jlchavis0844]

Why? Other than size of storage, it's the same.

[@furynotes]

@@jlchavis0844 Its the security and discs themselves. They can be 100gb discs. Eposvox did some videos on the subject. You need specific blu ray uhd supported drives. You also have make sure the firmware is correct for the blu ray drives themselves. I do want to get one though.

[@Nobddy]

Just don’t lose your discs.

[@seanf316]

I don't see the point of streaming when the quality is much worse, the whole point of watching 4k physical is your getting the best possible quality viewing experience. If your changing 50gb file to 5gb your not getting the experience you should be getting

[@PLr1c3r]

@@seanf316 You don't have to compress them to back up your 4K disks. It will be as good as watching it on the disk itself as backups do not alter the file at all, it merely puts it in a container.

[@ericimi]

I have a 40 TB NAS and I use Kodi to play the movies from the drive.I can play HDR10 Atmos and DTS X at full disk quality using a program that turns them into a remux .

[@TheEasterFerret]

I call them "portable copies" rather than backups because eventually I'd like to do more travel and camping and would love to have my entire collection on a small hard drive. But it's not to replace using the discs. HD gets reduced to 720p stereo. Being H264 mp4 with aac audio means they're compatible with just about anything. I use slower on HD and veryslow on dvd because I want to squeeze as much quality as possible into a small size, usually less than 2gb per movie. An 8 core cpu helps.

[@piman2boek364]

I used three different programs to turn DVDs and Blu rays to rip to hard drive. I used several computers at the same time usually during the hours I am sleeping. Then I used an older computer as the server. I also only use Plex on my network. Then I have either a computer or a Roku on each tv to play them. Using Handbrake to reduce file size does affect the quality but I don't have a lot of hard drive space. To watch movies on my phone or tablet I copy the files to them.-Usually only need a few movies for downtime when outside my home.

[@nosuchthing8]

Good to know, still might do it. If we get sick during a pandemic might need easy access to films for entertainment.

[@MarquezDaniel]

It's honestly worth it. It's so convenient to access your entire library from anywhere and on any device.

[@nosuchthing8]

@@MarquezDaniel thank you sir!

[@Maitch3000]

I sort of had the same experience when I started. It takes a while to get things set up the way you want it and ripping took a long time. However, now I have made presets in Handbrake and while it does take 2-3 hours to encode a movie, you can just make a giant queue and let it work while you are sleeping. If you do need to work on your computer, you can just pause the queue. So some times I go out and buy 10 blu-rays and my total ripping effort takes less than 5 minutes. Alternatively, you could just not use Handbrake and put it straight onto the server from MakeMKV. I have 200 movies on my Plex and 14 tv series. I love that I can just browse my entire collection and start it right away. No forced ads before the movie and no forced copyright warning. With TV it is even better, because it remembers where you left of.

[@JeffRauseo]

You rip 10 Blu-rays in 5 minutes? Even just taking them out of the drive and replacing discs with new ones takes more than that.

[@2Timothy2.15]

@@JeffRauseo I think he's talking about the time to put the disc in the drive and set up MakeMKV to do the rip.

[@Maitch3000]

@@JeffRauseo So imagine you have MakeMKD'd the first and is now between that and the second. 1) Insert new disc and open it in MakeMKV 2) While waiting for titles in MakeMKV, open the file from the first disc in HandBrake. 3) While waiting for that to load go back to MakeMKV and just start ripping. Don't go over the options, just rip it straight with everything. 4) Go back to handbrake, choose a preset you like or that you have made yourself and add to queue. The whole thing takes like 30-40 seconds for me. Rinse and repeat.

[@unbeta00]

I would advise you buy a router with QOS if Plex is bringing it to a crawl. I’ve been using Plex on a 160/20 line and it works like a dream. I would say your experience in this area is atypical at best. We have 50+ TiB and use a gaming computer that’s ten years old running Ubuntu where Plex really shines.

[@unibrowser1]

You should really do an updated version of this video but one where you get your Plex Media server settings correct. 1: In the network settings you need to disable the relay server and configure port forwarding properly on your router. The relay server limits the outgoing bandwidth to 4mbps, which will force Plex to transcode all outgoing files and compress them to unbearable picture quality. 2: If you rip and encode the movies, you have to make sure that the clients that are streaming from you can support the container/video and audio codecs being used. For example some early Blu-ray disks were encoded in VC1 instead of MPEG4 or H.264. VC1 is almost never supported by client device chipsets. The Nvidia Shield is the only exception that I'm aware of. Anyway this will force Plex Media server to transcode the video on the fly, but the algorithm used to encode VC1 in the first place was not designed for multicore processors, so it basically makes it unusable. When you encounter a VC1 title you should use Handbrake to permanently re-encode to H.264/265. Also most clients are now supporting H.265, although you will still find older smart TV's and other older devices that don't which can cause issues, because H.265 can be a pain to transcode unless your hardware is newer/powerful and/or you have hardware acceleration on (Plex Pass only). You can find a list of supported codecs for Intel CPU's by generation via this link, there is a nice chart. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video 3: If your clients are forcing your PMS to transcode for one reason or another you will want a Plex Pass, because it unlocks hardware accelerated transcoding (Intel CPU's with Quicksync or Nvidia GPU with NVENC). To give you an idea of what this looks like, my PMS runs on my Synology DS918+ (40TB of usable space). It has an Intel Celeron CPU with Quicksync. I can have as many as 10 1080p simultaneous transcodes going at the same time no issues, that's right I said 10. I have also gotten 3 4K transcodes going at the same time during my testing with that. Although I still wouldn't recommend letting people stream 4K from you because they still haven't quite ironed out the HDR to SDR tone mapping issues. Unless you have an upload speed of 100mbps or more, which in that case your clients can direct play the files over the internet just like if they were in your living room, no transcoding needed. Personally, I rip the 1:1 copies and don't touch the quality. The whole point of Plex for me was that it was the same as getting up and putting the disk in. Obviously you have a much larger collection than I do, so that may not be viable for you at this point. I'm getting to the point my self where I will need to upgrade my server in the next year or so, I will be building an Unraid server next, and it will host at least 100TB (this is getting easier and cheaper by the year because Hard drives are up to about 22TB in size now).

[@MrCREWCRUSHIN95]

Don't use WIFI - ethernet connection ONLY from Plex server to router. I don't even have 250/250 speeds - and I stream to many friends across the country in 4K Plex is awesome - you have a bottleneck somewhere. I assume you made the mistake of not using ethernet from server to router. But you are spot on about server use- it is for convenience only. When in the media room always go physical.

[@onedot6674]

I got had a 50down/5up cable connection and I could get Plex to work. I turned on QOS on my router and also set the upload speed in Plex. Of course your upload will limit the bitrate of your videos which can cause videos to convert to a lower bit rate. Anyway after you get the right settings, Plex works fine remotely.

[@keancv]

Geoff as much as I don't condone copying, a good video. A couple of ways to save space that you did not mention; 1-only include the the main English Audio 2- don't include the extra features

[@PLr1c3r]

One of your main issues with the setup is your server has to be wired and your drives must be internal. If you want the quality of 1080p or 4K do not compress them with handbrake just remove unwanted audio tracks. Plex is complex and has a myriad of settings and could be very confusing to a new user but is also makes it so powerful. Encoding compression and hardware acceleration all play great roles in tuning your setup. If you haven't given up yet i suggest looking for a used mid range pc tower and running plex on that before making any decisions about playback issues. Also never use your main computer to serve files it will cause your computer to slow down during critical operations.

[@robertt9342]

External drives are fine. Using an iMac is fine. Actually Plex works pretty well on a Mac.

[@PLr1c3r]

Robert T never said otherwise but all in one computers are like laptops and not servers. Wifi is not fine for serving either, getting a dedicated server is how to run plex without running into issues like he was experiencing.

[@PLr1c3r]

Robert T ps I wasn’t taking shots at his Mac I was just giving him a cheap alternative to running it on his main computer

[@robertt9342]

Ditto . Maybe, plenty of people have no problems with using Mac minis as plex servers. I do understand you were taking shots at him using a Mac. USB drives are fine for small collections, you will have to deal with issues that crop up with them though. If anything, if someone one doesn’t want to invest in a whole separate computer to act as a server at least they could do is get multibay drive enclosure. I guess he is just trying to see if this is a solution that works for him The one part I do agree 100% is the need for wired Ethernet. FWIW, I run plex server with 6 internal drives. I am at the stage where long term planning and investment is required.

[@PLr1c3r]

@@robertt9342 Yeah trying to serve and stream on the same wifi is bound to flood the signal and cause buffering and transmission artifacts, one way (stream) to wifi it should run just fine. I run 4k streams on mine without any buffering over my network but it's a gigabit network and devices are hard wired. 6TB hdd's on sata for the storage & ssd boot. If you want to serve 4k uncompressed I'd def go with Sata over USB (although not a must like i said just a hard recommendation).

[@SuperSports1]

It sounds to me like you have your Mac through WiFi, that's your problem, you have to go through Ethernet, I have Comcast and unfortunately the new router it's really hard to get a getaway open and keep open, but I can have 10 plus stream at the de time, I have a i7 8700 with a GTX 1660ti not a powerful pc at all but good enough to get 1080p for 10 streams

[@Victor-Vargas]

I don't know anything about the technical stuff because I have a friend who has a massive 1500+ title Library. Plex was like what you said where it was pixelated. Then one day, I don't know what happened, everything was 1080p quality. Also, my internet network is constantly being used because I have 2 other people constantly using it along with my PLEX. I almost never have buffering. The owner of the server is REALLY good at computers, so I'm going to say if you know your shit with computers etc, go for it. You'll save time of money (he doesn't burn physicals, he downloads them from online). So yeah, you'll save literally tons of money.

[@extract]

Hi, you can do the ripping from Blu Ray in one go, using the MakeMKV decoding libraries. It requires you to do 2 things: Register MakeMKV(or remember to get the new monthly free code inserted every month, which is a pain in the butt!) and insert the following command in the terminal on your mac: mkdir ~/usr/local/lib ln -s /Applications/MakeMKV/Contents/Lib/libmmbd.dylib ~/usr/local/lib/libbdplus.dylib ln -s /Applications/MakeMKV/Contents/Lib/libmmbd.dylib ~/usr/local/lib/libaacs.dylib And press return And Bob is your uncle. Bonus: VLC will also be able to access the blu ray disc so you can watch psysical media on you mac, good to compare quality of psysical media with compressed version. Also if you want to show snippets of the movies you present(that is allowed, as it is fair use), you can use VLC to find the exact time it begins and ends and enter it into HandBrake. If you stream over wifi in your house, make sure you stream on 5 GHz and 801.11 AC (5GHz is required for AC!), as your bandwidth may get to low when streaming. Oh, and get a NAS: My little brother has ripped his BDs in full quality and stream them from his Synology to his TV, but over Ethernet. You may need some ethernet wirering in your house to get decent stream quality. For streaming to family over the internet, you should look into making a smaller version of the movie in HEVC compression. For AVC/H.264 compression in the house I prefer the following settings in HandBrake: MP4 File, Video Framerate: Same as Source, quality RF 24(do not use average bitrate if you aim for constant quality!), Encode options: Ultrafast, Fast decode, Audio: 256 kbit AAC.

[@d.n6695]

Hi Jeff, I use DVDFAB and strip the Blu-ray/4k to only the movie and the best audio track, so you don't get to much space loss, my average is 20 - 30 GB for blu-ray (average 25) and 40 - 80 on a 4K (average 60), so when you use a 4TB drive and assume that we rip for the max (average) and do the math you can get 160 Blu-ray or 66 4K's on one 4 TB Hard disk or just combine, I keep it simple, so if you don’t want any video or audio loss (I am a purist) then just use shield TV or apple TV, I use shield TV with kodi and that works great every Blu-ray or 4k at my to use directly without video or audio loss, they play Dolby vision, hdr, hdr10, atmos, dts:x, and have a max framerate of 4K:60Hz, just saying, great vid keep it up!

[@DangerousDevilOfficial]

I have 8,000 plus movies. No way in HELL I am gonna do this. Have had the ability with my Blu Ray drive and even a 4K drive now for a long time. But I knew long ago, it was not a wise way to go when you have thousands of movies! I just use my digital locker on all TVs in the house not in my theatre. I have 425 movies and TV shows (and growing) on VUDU. Add to that, free Vudu movies, Crackle, Pluto TV, Tubi, Filmrise and all the other free movie and TV services and it makes ZERO sense to rip Blu rays today. The hard drive space alone for my collection would cost thousands. Never mind the years it would take to complete the job. Even if I did 5 movies daily, every day of the week, that would take 1,600 days! Or more than 4 YEARS! And that is if I stopped getting new movies! Impractical and not realistic. Disc rot is indeed real. But as you said, not super widespread. Part of it is manufacturing defects as you said. Part of it is heat, or hot conditions on your discs. I have had some of my laser discs have it. CDs have had it. And 2 DVDs have had it. But that is out of 9,000 plus DVDs, Blu Rays, CDs, Laser Discs, ect.. Going back to the 80’s. The discs most widespread to have it have been CD.

[@aaronpartida6692]

HD DVD's are the ones that really suffer from Disc Rot. I have about 50 of them, and about 50% have rotted. Some I purchased recently still sealed in the original plastic and they are bad. Other than that I have about 6,000 DVD's and Blurays and since I do not watch them all, maybe 1% of the ones I have watched have suffered from Disc Rot.

[@DangerousDevilOfficial]

Aaron Partida interesting. I recently acquired an HD DVD player for like $20. And I already had 10 discs I never could play. I played one and it was fine so far. I will have to investigate that. Now that you bring it up. Kind of sucks. Because at yard sales and flea markets, people practically give them away. Since not many people still have the players. I won’t spend over .50 cents a movie for those from now on.

[@KevinDouglas11]

Big yikes on this one, this information is very false. I appreciate the film reviews but go elsewhere for Plex configuration advice. I have 4K UHD BluRays that stream full quality (80+ Mbps) internally. This was likely running wirelessly and is not a proper configuration. I sincerely hope this video is removed in order to not dissuade people from a proper setup.

[@DanJackielz]

2:40 By compressing a movie from ~30 GB down to 4-5 GB you lose the advantage of Blu-Rays, the quality but you already knew this. At that point, the only thing you gain over streaming services is that you have all your media in 1 place instead of multiple services. I don't know why I wrote this long comment, I hope someone can find it useful. I'm too just recently jumped into the world of HTPCs and media servers and there are a lot more things to learn than I anticipated. This just an overview of the main problems that I have come across around storing (and serving) your media on a server (or NAS) where you have easy access to all of your movies, tv shows, and music in one place (like in Plex). One of the problems of storing 1:1 quality Blu-Rays (I mean Blu-Ray rips) on hard drives is that you will need a lot of hard drives and the thing about hard drives is that they consume power, unlike Blu-Ray disks that just sit on a shelf. So storing Blu-Rays on hard drives is always gonna have a sort of ongoing cost to them. Another problem is they tend to fail every few years (3-5-8 years, depends on a lot of things). To combat the power consumption of drives you might want to consider buying bigger drives, paying more upfront but save on electricity in the long run by having fewer drives that will consume less than a lot of smaller ones. Example 4 10TB drive would consume idle about 20W while 10 4TB would consume about 40W idle. (This is just a rough estimate) There are things that directly affect a drive's health that can cause it to fail prematurely but they will fail eventually, so you will have to have a system in place where if one or two of your drives fail you won't lose data. Two options for this are: 1) Full Backup: Have a secondary server with the same amount of storage as the first and backup your media to that as well. In case of a drive failure just copy/clone the content to the new drive from the backup server. This requires basically double the drives but it's the fastest way to restore your data. 2) Redundancy: Put your drives in a raid configuration where there are a couple (at least 1 or 2) of drives that can fail and you will still able to "rebuild" the data from the failed drive if all the other drives are intact. This method requires fewer drives than the full backup and don't require a 2nd machine, but requires RAID technology either software or "hardware" (RAID Controller) to not fail. Also, rebuilding data from a failed drive usually takes (a lot) longer than copying the data from a backup. The amount of time requires to rebuild the lost data depends on the amount of data and the hardware could be days when you won't be able to access any of your data on the RAID. (3) You could do both at the same time if you have the means. Things get especially difficult when you want to access your media outside of your local network. In the case of Plex, you will need a subscription or a 1-time purchase for a lifetime pass to get every feature, most notably hardware transcoding and offline access to your media. However, you don't need to pay anything to use Plex at all if you don't want to and there are workarounds for almost anything but you will need a good understanding of how Plex and other media servers work to make the best of your setup or to know what hardware you need for your use case. There is a 100% and open-source alternative for Plex with Jellyfin but it's not a full replacement for Plex, nor is Plex a full replacement for Jellyfin. Even with spending a lot of money, it will require a lot of tweaking and learning to get things set up the way you want to. In conclusion, it's hard to achieve both the full Blu-Ray quality and convenient access to your media without spending a lot of money.