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I recently used Handbrake to convert a bunch of files that aren’t super important (YouTube, random documentaries, some wrestling, old stuff, etc.) and went from 1.1 TB to 0.4 TB. I was happy enough with that, and didn’t notice an appreciable loss in quality, that I might try more. Didn’t know about these other tools you guys suggested so maybe I can do that to automate it.
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Oct 5, 2021 15:19
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I very recently started experimenting with tdarr, it's pretty cool but I don't think I am going to give it access to my library directly which is how it is intended. I setup my gaming PC as a node so it can do NVENC transcoding with my 3080. Using the "Tdarr_Plugin_d5d3_iiDrakeii_FFMPEG_NVENC_Tiered_MKV Tiered FFMPEG NVENC settings depending on resolution" plugin and haven't manually adjusted anything in it. The mechanics of the program is already quite impressive, the UI is a bit rough. I wish it was designed so I could set quality profiles on a per show basis rather than per library. For 720p I have heard the efficiency for h265 isn't huge, but it's what I am starting out with. Specifically I'm converting procedural type shows with lots of seasons/episodes. NVENC can do 2 encodes at once, each ~45minute episode takes about 10-15 minutes so I can transcode 10 episodes/hr. With NVENC I can still use my PC totally normally, even gaming. File size reduction can vary a lot depending on the source file, have seen 25%-60% reduction. Southland was a show with the 60% file size reduction so I took a closer look at that. In the opening it has bright white text moving across a grainy background and the h265 encode added some blurring around the letters, but in the actual show I couldn't tell the difference just switching back and forth between them. Any shows I have in 720p are shows where I already decided they didn't need to be in top visual quality. Anime I heard works very well in h265, I tested this with a high quality 1080p of Spirited Away and it reduced file size by 65% and still looks great. I will probably convert most the anime I have. Still need to experiment with some 1080p content but I'm expecting it to work well. Also need to experiment with some older shows/movies, I have heard that h265 isn't great film grain. My tentative plan is -Movies leave alone. While the quality in my experiments so far has been fine, better to just let someone who knows what they're doing to a CPU encode from a 4k Remux than to do a one size fits all script GPU encode on a 1080rip. -Convert all 720p, most 1080p shows. Will probably leave some particularly visually impressive shows (The Expanse, Mandalorian) unconverted, but the shows I care to that degree will probably be replaced with 4k and be in h265 anyways eventually. -Convert all anime. -Maybe configure a sonarr profile where I add something to the filename name and filter tdarr to only apply to those shows to get it more automated.
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Oct 5, 2021 17:37
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EL BROMANCE posted:If you want to see high end servers, join Plexaholics on Facebook (when it's alive) and prepare to be amazed/confused. I don't consider mine anything close to high end, and it's 45TB or so. Oh god I can only imagine, that's why I took care to add in "what I consider"  I'm just a dude who likes archiving and watchin things.I figured that having it almost entirely full 4k remuxes and direct unlimited bitrate would be at least something a cut above though, frankly. But you're right, there's always somethin' better. Frankly I don't even think there are more than, say, 50TB of worthwhile 4k remuxes in existence. Maybe even 40TB would cover everything. Like, are you going to put Space Jam: A New Legacy 4k remux on the server? I hope not, even if I AM the guy who put Crystal Skull on there. Everyone needs standards. Taima fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Oct 5, 2021 |
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Oct 5, 2021 20:39
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Since the insecure connections thing has anyone else had problems connecting to Plex? I have my server on a Shield and even on the same device I have trouble loading the library. It think I have no internet connection. I keep having to restart the Shield. nexus6 fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Oct 6, 2021 |
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Oct 6, 2021 17:50
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I assumed that if anything would get completely boned with that change it would be my 7 year old TiVo minis but they haven't had any issues once I set them to not use encryption.
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Oct 7, 2021 03:18
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I think my external hard drive containing my media is at fault - Plex on the Shield will say there's no internet connection despite one existing and the server is the Shield itself, but I hear the hard drive spinning up and after a couple minutes all seems fine.
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Oct 8, 2021 17:02
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On the aforementioned Facebook group, some dude just posted screenshots of his library at around 1PB. Says the DB holds up, so that’s nice to hear! If you have that much hdd space it’s not hard to fill at least, just constant remuxes of all movies and TV and you’ll soon be shopping for more.
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Oct 9, 2021 06:35
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So I've been loving around a ton with different Plex clients and encoding settings and am dialing in the "best" settings in the sense of what's most compatible without needing to transcode or have playback problems. For video x264 8-bit encoding with High encoding Level 4.0 is still the way to go for most flexibility, but if all of the devices being used are using non-console and non-browser Plex clients you can use x265 8-bit encoding and it'll still direct play (x265 doesn't direct play on browsers or on most consoles. It also doesn't work on many non-4K devices but it does work on a non-4K FireTV Stick). Bitrate I think is fine up to around 25 megabits/sec minus the total of the audio track sizes, provided everyone's connection to the server can handle that. For audio stick with AAC-LC for Stereo and 2.0 Surround encodes, if you're doing a downmix do a "Stereo" profile downmix unless you know people are specifically leveraging really old 2.0 surround setups. 128kbps is probably good enough, can be VBR, I wouldn't go higher than 160kbps. For surround you can use regular AC3, or use EAC3 which also seems to work fine on everything, I usually encode EAC3 to 640kbps for 5.1 tracks from a DTS or lossless source, if it's a movie that has a 4.0 track you can go lower to like 448kbps without really losing quality (but you can go hog wild on the bitrate if you want). If a Blu-ray rip or whatever has an included regular AC3 audio track at 640kbps I usually just include that, though, especially if it's AC3-EX. Some newer movie webrips like from Amazon or Disney+ will include EAC3 Atmos tracks and these seem to work fine too so you can just remux those. Subtitles get pretty wild and you want to stick with SRT format if you're not burning them in, which is a gigantic pain for anime because anime people always do funky stuff with rear end subtitles online which isn't always straightforward to convert to SRT. There are times where I've just redone the Blu-ray PGS subtitles via OCR. Now while SRT is more limited, you can do the following things with it and I find it works on everything: Subtitles in basic colors, I think you might be limited to something like the EGA color palette. (so <font color="#ffff00"> usually works if every hex value is either 00 or ff). For subtitle positioning you can do the nine quadrants, so you can have subtitles at the top of the screen, the center of the screen, the bottom of the screen, and the corners and center of each side. You put {\an1} at the beginning of the line where the digit is 1-9 and laid out I think like on a numeric keypad. You can do bold, italics and I think underlining with <i> <b> and <u> respectively (and </i> or whatever after you want it to stop). The positioning I think is locked for a specific line (so you can't have a mix of positions at the same time) but I think you can play around with the others, so have different colors and some words italicized etc. Now one thing worth mentioning is that while SRT files on a PC player and Apple TV will work for overlapping, this generally does NOT work in other clients (usually the second subtitle turns off the first subtitle entirely) so in some cases you may need to be strategic (rebuild/simplify the subtitles to get rid of this sort of overlapping). Useful software for everything: Subtitle Edit seems to be the standard for playing around with text subtitle formats. It also has really good "correction" tools that will do things like find common OCR bugs. It also has a function to remove "hearing impaired" subtitles so you can convert SDH subtitles to simple dialogue-only subtitles in one click. SubExtractor is by far the best software I've found to convert Blu-ray PGS files to text-based rear end or SRT subtitles using OCR. It will also work for subtitles in formats like webvtt that you can rip from Netflix. XMedia Recode is a pretty straightforward easy software for selectively converting parts of a file, so if you have a bunch of movie files with DTS audio tracks that you want to convert this can re-encode them to EAC3, AC3 or AAC without re-encoding the video track, and it's very flexible for using with unusual track formats like 3.0, 3.1, 4.0 and 4.1 audio tracks. This coupled with my usual eac3to, Handbrake and MakeMKV pretty much handles everything I've had a need to convert.
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Oct 10, 2021 16:19
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Anyone know why some files won't play locally on my Shield via Plex but play in Kodi just fine? Now and then I try to start a file that just spins on the loading screen for ages but in Kodi it opens immediately. I also ran into a transcoding error part-way through a movie yesterday - I thought it was playing locally. I should mention that my Shield is both the server and the client here. Edit: I think it's something to do with subtitles - a known file that won't play on Plex is fine if I disable subtitles but they're forced for an alien language so that isn't an option. Also, - playing the file in the plex app on my PC works fine so it looks like it's just the Shield Plex client at fault here. Edit edit: This seems to have helped  nexus6 fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 11:32
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I've noticed that I can now direct play a number of downloaded youtube videos on my phone since hopping over to the 13 Pro from my older XS. I presume whatever chip(s) being used in the newer model can just handle the formats/codecs/ect instead of needing transcoding. Is there somewhere that keeps up with the supported formats for a given phone? I would make an interesting read through I figure.
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Oct 17, 2021 16:31
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Warbird posted:I've noticed that I can now direct play a number of downloaded youtube videos on my phone since hopping over to the 13 Pro from my older XS. I presume whatever chip(s) being used in the newer model can just handle the formats/codecs/ect instead of needing transcoding. Is there somewhere that keeps up with the supported formats for a given phone? I would make an interesting read through I figure. My post above sums things up pretty well, although for Apple devices you might want to stick with AAC audio (although audio-only transcoding isn't particularly onerous). So H264 8-bit for video, AAC-LC stereo for audio, SRT for optional subs (or burn them in) is the "this will work on anything" format, and if your smart devices are fairly new and you're not using Plex browser playback you can do H265 8-bit for video (for 4K you can do HDR10).
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Oct 18, 2021 13:08
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I'm about to pull the trigger on a Shield TV Pro, but during a bit of research on it, it seems that people complain a lot about plex metadata being stored on the 16gb internal storage. I guess it fills up if your library is large enough and causes a lot of issues. All of these complaints seem to be from last year or before, so I'm wondering if this is still an issue, because the fix seems to be using an external drive as the internal storage. I'd rather not buy another drive just to store thumbnails and poo poo. I'm planning on having it pull media from an old WD mycloud NAS with plenty of space, could it just store that data on there? Do any of you think the 16gb internal memory is adequate or should I pull the trigger on a 500gb USB SSD to upgrade?
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Oct 19, 2021 21:10
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U.S. Barryl posted:I'm about to pull the trigger on a Shield TV Pro, but during a bit of research on it, it seems that people complain a lot about plex metadata being stored on the 16gb internal storage. I guess it fills up if your library is large enough and causes a lot of issues. All of these complaints seem to be from last year or before, so I'm wondering if this is still an issue, because the fix seems to be using an external drive as the internal storage. I'd rather not buy another drive just to store thumbnails and poo poo. I'm planning on having it pull media from an old WD mycloud NAS with plenty of space, could it just store that data on there? Do any of you think the 16gb internal memory is adequate or should I pull the trigger on a 500gb USB SSD to upgrade? I have a plex VM that read media from a NAS, so similar setup. The fast forward scrubbing whatever metadata does indeed get huge. You can turn it off, but I wanted it. So I made a folder for it on my NAS and symbolically linked the folder plex drops it into (which I just took a look for and can't find at the moment). So no, you don't need an external if you already have network accessible storage.
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Oct 19, 2021 21:38
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Awesome, thank you. I'm gonna give it a go without the drive. I can buy an SSD later if things go south, I suppose.
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Oct 19, 2021 23:06
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Sorry if the novice build questions are better elsewhere. I'd like to look into a low-power Plex server to leave on all the time for remote play but I just don't know where to start. If I wanted something capable of 3 transcodes or fewer of 1080p x265 content. Is this something I should start pricing out a NAS for (never owned one), or what low-power refurb PCs on ebay should I look into. I see the processors indicated in the OP but I'd like recs for particular devices.
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Oct 20, 2021 23:12
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For what it's worth, my 50 TB Plex/18,000 video library has about 260 GB worth of video thumbnail previews. I keep the folder on my Unraid server's SSD cache drive so it loads quicker for people who are streaming from me. I also just started transcoding my library to H265, only about 25% done and I've already saved 4.5 TB of space.
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Oct 20, 2021 23:41
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Gay Retard posted:For what it's worth, my 50 TB Plex/18,000 video library has about 260 GB worth of video thumbnail previews. I keep the folder on my Unraid server's SSD cache drive so it loads quicker for people who are streaming from me. Do you use a docker container for the transcoding or just off whatever OS is hosting the storage?
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Oct 21, 2021 00:12
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Gay Retard posted:For what it's worth, my 50 TB Plex/18,000 video library has about 260 GB worth of video thumbnail previews. I keep the folder on my Unraid server's SSD cache drive so it loads quicker for people who are streaming from me. I’d love to setup thumbnails, but I’ve never done it because I’m running Plex server on my iMac for maximum processing power for transcoding but the SSD is too small to store them. My media is on a Synology. The last time I checked changing the thumbnail dir was cumbersome so I never got around to it. I wish the thumbnails were stored in the individual media folders.
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Oct 21, 2021 04:14
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Ohio State BOOniversity posted:Sorry if the novice build questions are better elsewhere. People report 15-20 transcodes for $90. How you solve the storage issue depends on your use case, but common setups will be 1) Build a PC from 2nd-hand parts in a cheap case for under $100 as you were suggesting. Add drives internally. 2) Grab something like that mini PC above, point it at a basic NAS (storage only) 3) Grab a beefier NAS. Neat solution but can be expensive and limiting. Just stick to Intel CPUs of 7th gen or later, because the hardware transcoding they do is extremely rapid.
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Oct 21, 2021 10:22
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Violator posted:I’d love to setup thumbnails, but I’ve never done it because I’m running Plex server on my iMac for maximum processing power for transcoding but the SSD is too small to store them. My media is on a Synology. The last time I checked changing the thumbnail dir was cumbersome so I never got around to it. I wish the thumbnails were stored in the individual media folders. I wish you at least had the option to store metadata alongside media files, yeah.
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Oct 21, 2021 18:54
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I'm pretty sure I just fixed this issue on my shield by doing this https://support.plex.tv/articles/moving-server-data-storage-location-on-nvidia-shield/ Now all that poo poo isn't taking up space internally on my shield. I imagine there must be a similar process for other setups.
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Oct 22, 2021 01:36
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So Sonarr recently downloaded a file but the forced subs appear to be blank so I have to enable/disable full subtitles - how can I fix this myself?
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Oct 22, 2021 23:08
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nexus6 posted:So Sonarr recently downloaded a file but the forced subs appear to be blank so I have to enable/disable full subtitles - how can I fix this myself? I don't know how to fix it for sure, but I would load the file into mkvtoolnix and look at what flags are on the subtitle files. I assume the forced display flag is what is needed. Maybe extract that sub file and see if they aren't actually blank.
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Oct 22, 2021 23:49
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subscene.com might have the right subs too if the file is missing them.
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Oct 22, 2021 23:52
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phosdex posted:I don't know how to fix it for sure, but I would load the file into mkvtoolnix and look at what flags are on the subtitle files. I assume the forced display flag is what is needed. Maybe extract that sub file and see if they aren't actually blank. I have, and the file is empty EL BROMANCE posted:subscene.com might have the right subs too if the file is missing them. I did find some - can I replace the file in the MKV though?
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Oct 23, 2021 00:42
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nexus6 posted:I have, and the file is empty Yes. Use MKVToolNix and you customize the tracks in the file (output to a new file).
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Oct 23, 2021 00:52
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Yeah or even just dropping it in the same folder as the mkv with the same name as the video file *should* work. There’s a naming guide that’ll tell you how to tell plex they’re forced subs too. I usually just embed in the file personally (different tool because I’m a Mac person and there’s one I kinda prefer)
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Oct 23, 2021 01:02
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I think I am going to stop at Best Buy and pick up a Shield Pro. I was against doing it since it's been two years since the last update.....and I was holding out hope for an updated box.....but the old chromecast I've been using to stream seems to have finally died. Plus....it will be nice to not have to worry about what streams will work and what won't due to transcoding issues with my NAS.
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Oct 24, 2021 15:16
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If you're streaming from a NAS, I don't think it's worth getting a Pro over the regular version.
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Oct 24, 2021 16:50
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RestingB1tchFace posted:I think I am going to stop at Best Buy and pick up a Shield Pro. I was against doing it since it's been two years since the last update.....and I was holding out hope for an updated box.....but the old chromecast I've been using to stream seems to have finally died. Plus....it will be nice to not have to worry about what streams will work and what won't due to transcoding issues with my NAS. I got the Pro and probably should have just gotten the tube because I don't use the additional stuff for nothing.
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Oct 24, 2021 17:08
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Yeah I have the tube and the only thing I can't do is emulate GameCube games because dolphin requires a 64 bit processor. I mean there are other features but they're not important
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Oct 24, 2021 17:43
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Enos Cabell posted:If you're streaming from a NAS, I don't think it's worth getting a Pro over the regular version. The $50 price difference wasn't enough for me to think too hard about it.
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Oct 24, 2021 21:29
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I had the tube for awhile but it suffered from stuttering and loss of audio sync when playing 4k mkvs in plex from my Synology Nas. The Pro has been buttery smooth ever since I swapped it in. Definitely worth the $50 if you're going to be playing big files.
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Oct 24, 2021 21:39
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Delzuma posted:I had the tube for awhile but it suffered from stuttering and loss of audio sync when playing 4k mkvs in plex from my Synology Nas. The Pro has been buttery smooth ever since I swapped it in. Definitely worth the $50 if you're going to be playing big files. Kind of what I thought. The $50 savings just isn't enough when I'm looking at $150 anyhow. I figured.....who knows how I'll want to use the thing once I got it.
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Oct 24, 2021 22:05
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Yeah just get the Pro. You'll have it so long you'll never miss the money.
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Oct 24, 2021 22:55
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There's some options in the developer menu (disabling background processes) that fixed the stuttering on the tube for me, but it does make app switching slower. I'd say the Pro is probably a better choice.
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Oct 24, 2021 22:56
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I've got a couple DVDs that I'd like to watch, but generally steam to my TV via Plex. Is ripping DVDs still a fairly nightmarish process? Haven't tried since the great "Gonna rip all of my DVDs to my hard drive!" attempt of 2006 where I got 3 done.
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Oct 24, 2021 23:33
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I mean, you could just run MakeMKV and ripping the disc to a single file is super trivial. It’ll keep it as the original MPEG2 file which is a bit of a waste, but if your client does native playback and you don’t care about file sizes then hey.
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Oct 24, 2021 23:39
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EL BROMANCE posted:I mean, you could just run MakeMKV and ripping the disc to a single file is super trivial. It’ll keep it as the original MPEG2 file which is a bit of a waste, but if your client does native playback and you don’t care about file sizes then hey. Yeah space is no longer the premium it was when I never deleted anything, I trimmed my collection massively last year during the pandemic. I'll give it a shot again.
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Oct 24, 2021 23:45
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RestingB1tchFace posted:I think I am going to stop at Best Buy and pick up a Shield Pro. I was against doing it since it's been two years since the last update.....and I was holding out hope for an updated box.....but the old chromecast I've been using to stream seems to have finally died. Plus....it will be nice to not have to worry about what streams will work and what won't due to transcoding issues with my NAS. It's great. Worth the cost. Ever since I setup my NAS (six or seven months ago) I had to deal with sketchy playback.....casting to my old chromecast (six or seven years old?). So far a bunch of the things that wouldn't play have started up and run beautifully. Snappy device. I am happy that my chromecast died and finally got me to spring for a far superior device.
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Oct 25, 2021 01:47
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