Using a NAS as a media server
Im looking to set up a media server for home to put our extensive DVD collection and be able to access this from an TV in the house.I have been looking at various NAS boxes with up to 32TB disk space but Im not really sure what I am looking for.
Has anyone else done this that can give me some guidance?
Thanks,
Conor Any commercial NAS from the likes of QNAP or Synology will suffice, even the most basic home units.
Just how extensive is your DVD collection ?, from my experience the average DVD size is around 6GB ripped so multiply that by the number of titles you have then you have a rough idea of what total capacity in gigabytes to aim for. If it is 32TB that is one hell of a collection.
Next is how you want to play those DVD's.
* If you rip as .iso disc images the DVD's menus will be intact on media players which can play disc images. However many media players built into TV's and such do not support this.
* If you rip as .iso disc image and use a special media server running on the NAS it can extract the video from the .iso to play on players which wont play .iso but you only get the main movie in this scenario. But you can still use players which play menus in addition.
* If you rip as .mkv using something like MakeMKV which is lossless a 1:1 copy of video/audio into .mkv container then you get the main movie only which takes up less space that full .iso image of dvd disc. I rip discs to MP4 & stream from a 4 TB WD Mycloud, works fine everytime. I have a Synology 2 bay nas with 4tb storage. Plex works pretty good for the majority of content, however Kodi is even better and works a gem on the fire stick. In fact I have 2 firesticks one connected to the main television and the other connected to the TV in the bedroom. Both of them access the nas flawlessly and playback codecs which Plex fails to do. I use a Synology 2 bay NAS and have done for around 5 years. It's absolutely rock solid. I pair it with an Apple TV running InFuse I already have my Synology NAS in place but am not sure what I need to rip the DVDs. In the past I used DVDShrink (I think that's what it was called) but I don't have that any more and I don't think it's available.
What software do you all use? I could do with a one step solution so that I put the DVD in my drive, press a button in the software and it's ripped to the format I want. I'm not sure what format I want! I mainly use DVD shrink for ripping as it allows you to choose only the film and remove pointless trailers, etc. I know that handbrake can rip DVDs but I have only ever used it for encoding because of it's high compression capabilities.
For BD discs I mainly use make mkv to rip and then handbrake to encode. Most of my mp4 files of 1080p resolution are 2gb or just under. As above a Synology or Qnap.
I rip to MKV as space is cheap and it's much faster than encoding it into another format that is smaller in size. You can also remove unwanted stuff if required.
If you have 100s of BRs to rip then encoding may be worthwhile though time consuming. NAS is basically an external hard drive that you can store information on, accept its attached to your network so anyone connected to that network can access the files (assuming no password or network restrictions are present).
Synology make some excellent NAS servers and are very easy to setup, you can also look at Western Digital which another well known brand.
They are almost plug and play, just power it up connect directly to your network, you will then be able to map it as a drive so its shown in "My Computer" OR later versions of windows "My PC"
Best of luck,
Curtis
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