Newbie interested in storing movies to nas

mouldy15

Hi guys I'm interested in storing all my dvds and blu rays to mkv and storing them on a nas drive and playing them through my arcam 860 through to my projector !
I've always been used to useing discs and Netflix so this would be a new thing for me.
A friend of mine uses a nas drive and vero 4k to play his movies also..
Is this the easiest way to do this by ripping your blu rays by makemkv and storing them on a nas drive on your home network and useing vero 4k to play them through my system or is there a better way in having a nas drive which will do both ...
Thanks for any advice given..

mickevh

Ripping with MakeMKV is dead easy - though it can be a bit time consuming if you have lots to do. MakeMKV is a little quirky to use as it doesn't readily identify which streams are the "movie" content versus the menus, easter eggs, documentaries and all the other guff, (though you may want to keep such,) so you have to play around with it a bit to get used to it how to "spot" the movie, but it's a pretty short learning curve. For movie discs the movie is usually by far the biggest file.

MakeMKV is free and multi-platform, so just download a copy and have a play. All you need is a device with enough free storage (disc space) for the BD you are ripping and MakeMKV will tell you if you haven't got enough (I use my laptop) - you don't have to rip to a NAS share. Indeed, I prefer not to as it's a bit quicker and not reliant on my network link not crashing (not that that happens often.) I can then weed out all the bloat, check (and rename) the files on my laptop, then once I've got (just) the content I want, I move it to my NAS (over wired ethernet - it takes forever over Wi-Fi.)

MakeMKV makes no difference to the picture quality - it lifts the data from the BD's exactly as is. If you wanted to re-encode the stream to (I don't know, save space maybe) then you'd need to re-encode (or "transcode") the resultant files with something else such as Handbrake (also free.) But I don't bother. I kind of think, "what's the point of buying BD if I'm subsequently going to crunch it down to something worse - you may as well buy it on DVD instead." However, others advance the argument that the latest H265 CODEC can give you the same subjective picture quality as BD with a smaller file size if you need to save space (and have H265 compatible playback devices.)

Ripping with your NAS itself  might be possible with a NAS that has the right App, but given that ripping is not something one does very often, I've never bothered to try.

mouldy15

Cheers mate for the info I've got best side of about 250 films so lots of work there and need quite a big storage capacity too

mickevh

I had about the same (though admittedly mostly DVD's) and about the same number of CD's (which I ripped "lossless" using a different tool - IIRC it was called something like Exact Audio Copy.) Working 10 hours or so per day (I didn't have a job at the time) IIRC it took about 2 weeks to do the lot. Working "bit and bit" (as cyclists would say) it would obviously take longer but you could "prioritise" the order I suppose if SWMBO or kids are nagging for something particular.

Some discs seem to rip faster than others. I'd guess it's down to the nature the encryption that has to be "broken" (for BD's - DVD/CD aren't usually encrypted,) and maybe any "damage" to the disc surface - and your drive alignment and mechanics. I guess you just need to suck it and see.

mouldy15

What about viewing the videos what's the best way to view them through my processor to projector... I've noticed some nas drives have apps on there to view videos, also heard of plex too as well as kodi ....
Any thoughts.

mickevh

Others here are better informed than I to comment on the details of specific kit, but basically it depends on the playback device.

A NAS is basically "just" storage, like a disc, it just happens to be on the other side of a network link somewhere. If playback device X can mount (to use the jargon) a network share Y and read content from it, then you're good to go, you shouldn't need anything "extra." Just like opening a Word document, spreadsheet, photo, web page or whatever.

However, some playback devices do need (or at least can take advantage of) additional functionality afforded by apps running on the NAS vesting additional functionality over basic storage. For example, maybe the app will go off to the Internet to "scrape" meta-data about the content, maybe it will index the content somehow, maybe it will transcode the playback in real time (best avoided IMHO.)

My (rather old) streamer requires "nothing fancy" from my NAS. All I need is to avail the network shares on the NAS, tell the streamer where it is (including login names/passwords) and I'm done. If I organise my data "in a particular way," my media streamer likes, my streamer provides "movie wall" type functionality and my streamer has a wide range of format support.

Maybe other players behave differently, other readers here are better informed than I and will be able to get into the specifics with you.

If you have a PC around you can try if you like. Have a read of your players manual and see what it needs. Create a network share on the PC a drop a bit of content into and see how your player interacts with it.

The network sharing protocol (basically there are two - one called CIFS/SMB and one called NFS) are "common" open standards that make the implementation on the server end transparent to the client. As long as your client speakes one (or both) of the network sharing protocols, it should be able to mount a network share on any platform (NAS, Server, PC, Mac, whatever.)

There's a "media" oriented protocol called DLNA which is a bit more specific and increasingly "media" devices are using that. I don't use it.

Sloppy Bob

I'd definitely advocate some kind of streamer such as the Vero4k between the NAS and the AVR, there are many other options as well.

There are some NAS devices that have an HDMI out and can use Kodi, however, with all the drives spinning, clicking and whirring in them they're not the quietest thing and not something I'd want next to my TV. Also I believe you'll find Kodi on these devices isn't exactly given a priority with development etc. Kodi on QNAP was withdrawn from the QNAP store at one point.

The onboard video players you get with a NAS that are not Kodi or Plex won't really do what you want, they're too compromised in the formats they'll playback, you'll run into issues with audio etc.
Plex may do what you want but it does the same thing as Kodi it does it a different way.
With Kodi, the streamer, the Vero4K for example, does all the hard work, decoding the audio and the video.
Plex, however, works on a client and server model, your NAS is the server and does all the hard work, the client can be a low powered device or even your TV if it has an app available. The problem with that is if you use your TV and it can't handle HD audio then the NAS has to transcode the audio into a format the TV can playback and you lose quality or if it can't handle the video then it will transcode that and you lose video quality. This means the NAS needs to have a bit of grunt and will add to the cost but it also means you could stream content to mobiles and devices when you're out of the house.
The trick is to use a client that can playback all the video and audio formats you need.

Something I'd ask, how many TV's are you going to be streaming to?

If it's just the one and you're only going to watch the discs on that TV and have no other use for a NAS, then you don't really need a NAS. A large capacity external HDD attached to a streamer will do the same job.

liquidsoap89

250 movies directly ripped from the disk will probably be creeping up on around 10TB of storage (depending on the ratio of DVDs to Blu Rays), so keep that in mind when you're planning your storage needs.

The biggest decision I had to make when I made my media server was whether I was going to re-encode my movies or not. You can take a Blu Ray down from ~30GB to ~4-6 with very little loss in quality, the problem (besides the fact that its not looking quite as good) is that encoding a video is entirely dependent on the power of the computer doing the encoding. I have a PC with an Intel i7, and many of the encodes that I tested on it were taking over 10 hours to complete. I decided that encoding around 700 movies wouldn't be worth the year of my life, but that means that I now need 30TB worth of storage, which isn't exactly cheap. If a lot of your movies are DVDs (which you wouldn't really need to encode because they're already small enough) then maybe if could be worth it for you to encode the Blu Rays you've got. Your space requirements would be significantly smaller (probably to the point that you could put everything on an external drive and play stuff directly from your projector or a streamer).

I use Plex to play my movies. It works well and looks nice. I play everything through an Nvidia Shield though, not directly through my TV. Like Sloppy Bob mentioned, I'd also recommend getting a streamer to play your movies.

iainl7

Before you get carried away, ask yourself how you value your time, and that of the computer you'd be setting this all up with.

I embarked on the process of doing this for all my HD-DVDs once my standalone player got unreliable, but in the end I've given up. The amount of work to rip everything, the inevitable technical issues you have to chase down and debug, and the price of storage / playback solutions ended up being greater than that for just playing back surviving disc formats straight from the disc when I actually want them, and buying those HD-DVD films again on either UHD, Blu-ray or iTunes streaming.

Your mileage may vary, but do think about how much work you're taking on vs. how often each individual disc gets watched.

mouldy15

I've heard good things about vero 4k if that's the best way to go rather than use all in one as such then that's what I'll do , probably 1 projector and 1 TV will be useing the nas ..... I like the simplistic idea of it all rather than looking at rows of blu rays and dvds.