Is Plex still a thing?

[edgedemon]

Back in the day I used to run Windows home server which then migrated to Media portal and I went through the painful process of ripping our entire DVD collection to MKV to stream around the house.
I now have a QNAP NAS and wifey wants to sell all our DVD's to reclaim the space, which is fair enough, we don't even own a player anymore, streaming services have replaced DVD's.
Before she sells them I was thinking that I could re-rip everything and use the NAS as a Plex media server.
Is Plex still a thing?
Is MakeMKV still the best way to rip copies of our DVD's. For some weird reason, even though we haven't watched them in ages, I still feel I should give this a go now that we have the disk space available to us..USB DVD's are cheap on Amazon this week and most of our TV's are still 1080p so this could be an Xmas hols project for me.

 

[edgedemon]

Yep I run the server on my NAS dumped all my old DVDs and Blurays on to it. The children especially find it really handy with all their Disney films on there can watch them from anywhere in the house.

Pretty much what I plan on doing. It might be more than an Xmas project though, a quick estimate now, I stopped counting after 200 discs, no wonder she wants the space.

I'm laughing at makemkv, I'm pretty sure it was in beta 15yrs ago when I last used it.

Oh god, Plex does music as well, that will be a very deep rabbit hole...

 

[edgedemon]

Yep I run the server on my NAS dumped all my old DVDs and Blurays on to it. The children especially find it really handy with all their Disney films on there can watch them from anywhere in the house.

Pretty much what I plan on doing. It might be more than an Xmas project though, a quick estimate now, I stopped counting after 200 discs, no wonder she wants the space.

I'm laughing at makemkv, I'm pretty sure it was in beta 15yrs ago when I last used it.

Oh god, Plex does music as well, that will be a very deep rabbit hole

It's not a Plex issue but a configuration issue. I presume you have the server running on the same volume as your storage.
What you need to do is have a separate volume for your server I use a 256GB SSD this rightly stays active. But Volume 2 which is my RAID5 with all my files on powers down no issues.

OK, That is good to know, I have a 30TB Volume and an ISCSI LUN for my PC. Looks like I will need to add a USB drive as external storage and run it from that then.
Very useful info - thanks!

 

[edgedemon]

Is there a particular codec I need for makemkv?
I get an option to backup the disc to an iso file, I don't actually get to see the structure of the disk to select the parts and create an MKV file?
It isn't a massive issue as I can just backup to ISO and work it out later.
This is a pretty fresh W11 install. just downloading VLC to see if that helps

 

[edgedemon]

if your ripping with makemkv you simply pick whichever streams you want and turn it into the .mkv container. you arent encoding so no codec is needed with that. if you want to then encode you will use something like handbrake where you might make it h265 or something, but you can obviously just leave it as a 1:1 if you have the space. if you are doing dvd its such a small amount of space I wouldnt bother, but an HD bluray will be big, and then I'd encode it

Thanks for that.
At the moment Im just ripping each disk to an ISO.
I will get a Fire Stick on Friday and then I can experiment by taking a disk image I have ripped and encoding at various bitrates and quality settings to see what we think is acceptable minimum quality and then I can recode all the discs to that standard.

 

[edgedemon]

I nabbed a NAB9 mini PC in the black Fri sales, stuck Proxmox on it and have installed Home Assistant and Plex server in their own LXC containers, they have one for Jellyfin as well so I will install that to compare. I also picked up the Plex lifetime pass.
I have a firestick due today along with extra RAM for the NAB9 (32GB->64GB) so I have some playing around to do.
Meanwhile the long and tedious process of ripping all the DVD's to ISO continues. While doing that I can research the best options for encoding them down to something more manageable file size wise, but the ripping process is painfully slow and boring.

 

[edgedemon]

That was a chore!
I'm finally there now - DVD's have been ripped to ISO's and over the next few days I will re-encode one at various sample rates and resolutions and see what looks the best.
I have started adding my music in as well, it is a tortuous process, the albums are quite simple, but I have a massive dance music collection, from a very misspent youth which will require manual tagging by the look of it..
I do have a question over accounts though.
Im running Plex media server with a lifetime pass. What should I do for the rest of the family?
Should I get them to create their own plex logins and send them invites?
Or should I add them as managed users?
Ideally Id like for them to have the whole skip inro thing as well if it is possible