Blu-ray MKV Playback, DNLA server/client?

dancook

dancook

dancook

Associate
Joined
26 Aug 2009
Posts
721
I've spent the entire day going in circles, I have a QNAP TS-453A still boxed whilst I figure out if it's really what I need - I could send it back for refund. I also have 12 TB NAS drive.

I want to digitize my bluray collection at 100% quality.

I want to serve it through my AVR with 7.1.4 surround sound (true hd/atmos where applicable).

I have a "4k" projector with which to serve it up on a 2.35:1 screen.

I have ripped Wonder Woman with True HD, and using Plex Media Player on my Windows 10 PC I have managed to get Atmos working.

I understand that the QNAP may not be able to run Plex satifactorily, I was looking to have it run DLNA.

Using the plex dlna server for the following...

Oppo-203 - Works but does not support truehd/atmos through streaming
PS4 Pro - Same as above
Kodi - Could not get Atmos/TrueHD to work and after configuring it to use the DLNA it crashed 95% of the times it loaded.

So far only Plex seems to provide a solution, I'm not sure the NAS drive could run it. I could use Plex server on the PC, NAS for storage and Plex Media Player on PC - but surely there is a better way.
---


Managed to get Kodi to ouput Atmos, had to go into advanced to get the options.
 
Last edited:
No experience with plex, but can't you just rip your bluray discs to your NAS, then use a media streamer to directly play from the shared directories? Rather than using plex as a service which probably is a overhead for NAS low speed CPU's. What happens when you use a PC to play the encoded videos over your LAN? Does it keep up?

50GB per movie is crazy though.

tbh I'd probably shrink the movies, or just get the BD disc out. Use the NAS for music storage, or 720p/1080p movies, because that 12GB will go pretty quickly with 100% rips.
 
hornetstinger said:
No experience with plex, but can't you just rip your bluray discs to your NAS, then use a media streamer to directly play from the shared directories? Rather than using plex as a service which probably is a overhead for NAS low speed CPU's. What happens when you use a PC to play the encoded videos over your LAN? Does it keep up?

50GB per movie is crazy though.

tbh I'd probably shrink the movies, or just get the BD disc out. Use the NAS for music storage, or 720p/1080p movies, because that 12GB will go pretty quickly with 100% rips.
Click to expand...

What 'media streamer' ? it'd be good to have a solution I can control with harmony.
Will consider the Nvidia Shield, will borrow a friend's to try it out.

PC has been fine playing off a usb hard drive full quality with atmos, will see if the LAN makes a difference.

it's about 30gb per film so far.
12TB and that's 1 out of 4 drive bays - it's about 400 films per bay, 1600 films if 48TB.
 
Last edited:
The 12TB seagate hard drive was a dud, 'abnormal' smart status. It smelled funny too, white perfume powder substance on it. :( try again tomorrow
 
I had a QNAP TS-453A also, but hated it. Probably mostly down to the OS to be fair. I aint too geeky with different OS's. Windows has ruined me. There were some nice features on it, but mostly it just didn't do what I wanted, how I wanted it to do it.

So I sent it back, and put together a windows machine to run as a 24/7 server. Sure, probably not as power efficient or anything, but it works MUCH better for me now. It wasn't meant to cost me much more than the QNAP, but I went a different way, and built a new daily PC, and used my old 4770k as the basis for the server, so is way overkill for that.

I rip my BR's too. Using a guide I found on some site (I wont mention on here). It takes ages to get proper transparency at 1080p, but you can often get the file sizes down considerably. Something like 8-15 GB depending on the film. Animation based movies generally get smaller file sizes, big CGI epics often not so much, for example, around 18GB for a modern Star Wars film. But as I said, it might take me several hours of testing settings for a properly transparent rip. The faster way, of course, is to simply use a very high quality setting in Handbrake. You gain some file size (no converting audio to flac for example), and lose a little quality (often only noticeable when comparing single frames), but then it's a click and forget process. But still takes a while to do the actual encoding. I built my R7 rig for this purpose. Still can take 4-8 hours to encode a file, depending on quality settings, and single or 2 pass encoding selection.

Either way, I'm hard pushed to tell the difference when playing the files back. But often possible with single frame comparisons.

I also have 12TB of storage. But will shortly need to decide if I want to delete content or increase storage space, as I'm running tragically low.
 
I'm only using makeMKV, and I have 2-300 blurays to rip. Each one takes about 45-60 minutes - because of riplock @ 2.2x speed! :(

My PC is a beast and in the same vicinity as all my home theatre stuff, so can always be used for this kind of stuff - except it has no hard drive space - two ssds and that's it.
 
dancook said:
What 'media streamer' ? it'd be good to have a solution I can control my harmony.
Will consider the Nvidia Shield, will borrow a friend's to try it out.

PC has been fine playing off a usb hard drive full quality with atmos, will see if the LAN makes a difference.

it's about 30gb per film so far.
12TB and that's 1 out of 4 drive bays - it's about 400 films per bay, 1600 films if 48TB.
Click to expand...

There are few android boxes, Nvidia shield is apparently good but it's pricey.

Just got amlogic s912 Octo core should play 4k, they're about £60. Minix have one at £150 for same spec.

Might want mini keyboard/track pad with android boxes to use full smart features, unless just simple navy controls over IR? May need to find discrete IR codes to import to your remote, as like me use programmable remote - URC MX-850
 
Whichever I get it needs true HD atmos support.

I will see how everything else goes first, can always look further a field after, thanks
 
dancook said:
I have ripped Wonder Woman with True HD, and using Plex Media Player on my Windows 10 PC I have managed to get Atmos working.
Click to expand...
Although the rip worked with plex MP on a Win10, that may not qualify it for being correctly packaged for the oppo/ps4/kodi scenarios, if you look on the web maybe able to pick up some sample encodes validated by other folks ?

Also, if you are ripping for a 4k projector it probably does hevc/h265, so you maybe able to get a better compression than the h264 you probably used.
 
dancook said:
I'm only using makeMKV, and I have 2-300 blurays to rip. Each one takes about 45-60 minutes - because of riplock @ 2.2x speed! :(

My PC is a beast and in the same vicinity as all my home theatre stuff, so can always be used for this kind of stuff - except it has no hard drive space - two ssds and that's it.
Click to expand...


Personally I'd have 720p or 1080p dts movies encoded for convience but simply get up and use disc for proper watching. 4-6gb versus 30gb...
 
jpaul said:
Although the rip worked with plex MP on a Win10, that may not qualify it for being correctly packaged for the oppo/ps4/kodi scenarios, if you look on the web maybe able to pick up some sample encodes validated by other folks ?

Also, if you are ripping for a 4k projector it probably does hevc/h265, so you maybe able to get a better compression than the h264 you probably used.
Click to expand...

Research has told me oppo and ps4 don't support true HD atmos over dlna streaming.

I hoped makemkv was 100% of bluray, is it not? Bah I didn't want to make compromises for not using the discs
 
dancook said:
I'm only using makeMKV, and I have 2-300 blurays to rip. Each one takes about 45-60 minutes - because of riplock @ 2.2x speed! :(

My PC is a beast and in the same vicinity as all my home theatre stuff, so can always be used for this kind of stuff - except it has no hard drive space - two ssds and that's it.
Click to expand...

I built my server in a regular PC case, so have space for expansion. Do you not have any free HDD slots in your case? Or SATA ports on your motherboard for further disk expansion?

I use Xbox Ones as my streaming devices because I found them MUCH better at that than the PS4. Although I didn't like using Plex at the time I had the PS4, prefering Serviio instead. Plex was necessary as the PS4's "built in" media player didn't like DTS though. To be honest, I always thought the PS4 was more of a games console rather than a capable media machine. That said, I am not sure if the Xbox One would support HD Atmos over DLNA either, as I have never looked into it.

But then again, I am not trying to stream Atmos or DTS:X. Nor am I trying to do 4k, at the moment.

But if your PC is so close to the HT set-up, why not just play it off that? I often just watch content straight from my server rather than via Plex on the Xbox One (which sits right next to the PC in the cinema room).

dancook said:
Research has told me oppo and ps4 don't support true HD atmos over dlna streaming.

I hoped makemkv was 100% of bluray, is it not? Bah I didn't want to make compromises for not using the discs
Click to expand...

I am pretty sure that makeMKV is a 100% rip of the BR. But you are making the compromise of space. If you then encode it correctly, you can negate this compromise, by using lossless compression on the audio (FLAC for example, as a straight remux, should save a few GB at least), and you can save quite a lot of space by encoding out unnecessary bitrate from the video. Like I said, you can often get a blockbuster down to around 10-12GB with visually lossless video encoding. So at least doubling, or close to tripling your number of films stored per disk.
 
Most Kodi setups are able to do what you want.

The OSMC Vero 4k is getting very good reviews as a small headend box to pair with a Nas or external hard drive;

Runs a custom built variant of Kodi with monthly software updates support for all the Audio codecs and 4k.
 
Have a look at the OSMC Vero 4K, I've stopped using my Shield as my main library streamer due to the NVidia dev team concentrating mostly on adding pointless Google Home features for the Yanks only and not fixing important things like Colour Space mapping and resolution switching.

The Vero 4k, auto selects correct colour space and auto switches resolution, full HD audio support, is extremely well supported by the dev team (and is in fact an offshoot of the Raspberry Pi community).

The only issue you might run into is the Ethernet port is only 100mbs so with a full rip there is a chance of over saturating the bandwidth.
 
xs2man said:
I built my server in a regular PC case, so have space for expansion. Do you not have any free HDD slots in your case? Or SATA ports on your motherboard for further disk expansion?

But if your PC is so close to the HT set-up, why not just play it off that? I often just watch content straight from my server rather than via Plex on the Xbox One (which sits right next to the PC in the cinema room).
Click to expand...

My two SSD drives, since I have a water pump where the HDD cage would normally go.

13731037_10157451868295227_4891900596413588432_o by dancook1982, on Flickr

With a PC there are so many variables to getting things setup right, I don't want to have to spend time on faff if I can help it.

A bit like when the PC Atmos option is greyed out unless I perhaps turn the AVR off and on, or say the magic words.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom