My Handbrake Performance Notes

Great discussion, fellas. (and ma’ams).

I’m chiming in a couple days late as I’ve been ruminating over my sit’ation. Perhaps we can continue to discuss?

I’m not a computer guru, only moderately savvy.

Background: my main box and laptop are Linux-Ubuntu. I transitioned from Windows to Ubuntu several years ago. I have a couple Dell Opti 760s upgraded to 2TB optical and (maxx’ed) 8Gb RAM. One is a Win10, previously used for work but no longer needed since I retired last year. The other is whatever I decide. I have a lot of DVDs and music that I’d like to put on a media server for household wifi use.

I currently use MakeMKV and Handbrake to digitize DVD and blu-ray. These work pretty well except I have issues keeping the chapter selection intact for multi-episode TV show discs, and have to digitize the bonus features as separate files.

Blu-ray conversion takes much longer than simple DVD.

I don’t quite understand the NAS (network attached server) architecture that several of you have mentioned. More study is needed for me.

I’m not in a hurry to convert so I only use one box to do it. Having said that, in the months to come, I’d like to finish converting hundreds of DVD/BR to digital as time permits.

Ultimately, I’d like to have a standalone linux media server box that I can stream over the household wifi to 2 TVs and tablet devices. The TVs have ‘smart’ blu-ray/wifi players that I can put apps on. The tablets are a mix of android and kindle that I’d really like to jail-break...

I’m intrigued by the Plex option, but is that the best solution for this situation?

I spent time money and experimenting with some of the “paid for” softwares, I found PavTube Ultimate Convertor to be worth it.

It is simple and converts source to original video bitrates using h.264, also to 640k AC3 audio. For audio that is my preferred format as it is actually better than AAC and I found it to be more compatible generically.

Using Redfox to unlock pretty much anything can be ripped Blu ray. Occasionally I get a movie that is somehow “super encrypted” (Heavy Metal was one like that) I used handbrake for that

NAS is easy, QNAP or Synology are great boxes to start with, worth it if you are into movies and digital storage, can get a good NAS for 400-800 dollars, the NAS rated hard drives though will get expensive, they run ~ 200 to 400 a drive.

I started with Plex about eight years ago and loved the solution for managing my in-home content. But Plex is moving away from managing your own personal content and is focused heavily on streaming content like everybody else. In fact, my Synology NAS stopped working with my Plex and I need to get it going again. Plex seems to make a lot of changes that break existing installations which is very frustrating and I think their customer support has gone in the toilet. I bought a premium lifetime subscription, but I’m not getting much value out of it now.

I decided to avoid using a cobbled together system with an old home computer and external drives. I bought a Synology NAS and loaded it with about 40 TB of drives. Synology has an excellent operating system and the overall system is very robust and reliable. It gets pricey when you buy a good base machine and add the drives, but, once you get it running, it’s very solid.

I also use MakeMKV to rip the discs and then use Handbrake to encode them.

I have a “Director’s Cut” BluRay of “Das Boot” that I’m trying to rip right now. Getting the audio right (without the director’s narration soundtrack) is very frustrating! I just want the movie audio, not the director narrating.

I have had frustrations with naming seasons and episodes of various shows and getting subtitles. A recent frustration was the John Jakes series “North and South” which is an adaptation of three books. I created three seasons, each with episodes. Plex has an excellent FAQ on how to name your files to work with the Plex system and it works very reliably. Following it, the Synology NAS system shows you the seasons and episodes. The system is easy - just add suffix “S1E1” (Season 1, Episode 1), “S1E2,” “S1E3” etc to your file names before the file type prefix.

I did as you are doing — worked my way through our extensive collection of music CDs, TV show DVD/BluRay and movie DVD/BluRay discs.

I’m actually finding I use Spotify for music much more than my home server because of the excellent “Mixes” they prepare for me. They have a lot of my favorite music but add in enhancements so I get to find new music. It’s what the Apple “Genius” thing tried to be ten years ago.

I’m also finding more streaming content online (except for the older movies I like), so I’m using my home system less and less. But I’ve got great old British series on it (”Piece of Cake,” “Danger: UXB,” “Rumpole of the Bailey,” etc) that you cannot find online without commercials and I like rewatching those every few years. Also a lot of old war movies and westerns I still enjoy.,

Holy Moses!
I used to watch Danger UXB on PBS about 40 years ago. Hah.

For me, I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze for an NAS. I think I can hold everything on about 4TB. Even 2TB to start with. SSD is better than optical.

Mrs. Kit and kids are totally on Spotify. I’m more interested in self-contained (non internets) entertainment.

As for the 1981 Director’s cut of Das Boot, get it from here: https://www.bitchute.com/video/xFVOJpXdCJAA/

Much easier than ripping and will play with subtitles. :)

NAS is simply a computer with hard drive(s) that can be accessed in your home network, across WiFi typically. Devices like smart TVs, Amazon FireTV, Plex and other video playback software which can run on Amazon FireTV, can all access a NAS device. Many times, a NAS storage server can be directly attached to a WiFi router and other devices like a Western Digital TV playback device. You can buy them at Best Buy, Office Depot, Amazon, and just about anywhere. Often, you just remote into them from your home computer to set their name and copy files up to them.

If you buy one, you’ll understand it pretty quickly.

I love the NAS with my Apple TV. Just launch the Plex app on AppleTV (like launching Netflix, Prime, Hulu, et al) and there are all my movies in a great UI. My NAS sits in my home comms/electronics closet, so all hidden away. Just use the AppleTV remote and away I go.

Tanks.

Some years back I got an Amazon Fire stick for watching movies in hotel rooms when I was on the road. Amazon does NOT like hotel room TVs. Never did get it to work on anything other than my laptop on hotel wifi, which defeated the purpose.

I got a Roku device when I was on the road last year. I got it to work. Only after getting a ‘real’ remote from the desk. Turns out they have the full remotes at the desk for the asking, where you can change the input to the TV. Just explain that you need to hook up your laptop to the TV for the work presentations and they will cough it up.

Again, defeats the purpose. If I can connect my laptop to the hotel TV, then why do I need a Roku or FireStick? For multi-tasking I suppose.

For future travel, I think I’ll pack a universal remote. In the meantime, maybe I’ll try out the Roku here in the house.

Thanks much for your explanation of the NAS!

K

a sandy spot on asphalt works best

In snow it's the nuts with a front wheel drive car.

Its a sony ubp-x700

Old movies that are not online.

I currently use MakeMKV and Handbrake to digitize DVD and blu-ray. These work pretty well except I have issues keeping the chapter selection intact for multi-episode TV show discs, and have to digitize the bonus features as separate files. Blu-ray conversion takes much longer than simple DVD.

Episodes are under Title in Handbrake. After Loading use the Title Down Arrow so see the Episodes. You can forget about the titles with small time listings. Most TV discs come with episdoes that are nearly the same size or one or two longer for a special. If you don't want the specials, just use the episodes that are about the same amount of time.

If the Disc labels that handbrake picks up are logical, then Handbrake works well and adds the title number to that name. If not, I sometimes have to alter the Output file naming in Tools, Preferences, Output Files, sometimes even per disk.

My daughter recommended EMBY over Plex and I see why in that it has links to opensubtitle.org and free subtitles. However most of the time the discs come with subtitles that EMBY can utilize. So if I want the subtitles included as an option, set the subtitle tab and selection behavior to First Track, the language you want (English for me), uncheck Foreign Scan and Save. Sometimes I have to check Add Closed Captions when available if nothing else works. I don't set anything else withing the subtitle that come up and through EMBY, the user can now select subtitles (default off). Under Video, for DVDs I use Very Fast, Quality 18.

Under Dimensions, I don't play with that as it usually messes with the quality.

On Preset, use the right arrow to save your selections as above to something like DVD, HD, 4K or such. Presets you might want to set this current preset to the Default. I have DVD as my default custom preset.

Now when I enter Handbrake or use Open Source, everything is pretty much setup ready to go and I use "Add to Queue", "Add All", to set up the jobs to process your episodes. I Click on Queue and delete those that I don't want (the small ones with time less than 3 minutes).

Start Queue gets it going. With the next disc loaded into another drive, I Open Source on it and load the next Episodes into the Queue the same way while the current episodes are processing.

I have found that DVDs do not burden my system, so I run another instance of Handbrake on two more discs. This way about two videos are processed every few minutes. If I have big set (like I just got Deep Space Nine. I will use 12 drives on three systems (4 per system) and use WiFi to put them on a shared output folder which the EMBY video server uses.

You are right Blu Ray and 4K Blu Rays are very slow. To make them faster you need more cores and I'd say that SSDs are the way to go on the Shared Folder as a Hard disk will thrash.

With DVDs, use H.264 Encoding. For HD and 4K use Matroska 1080p HD or 2160p 4k.

I don't know anything about Handbrake and Makemkv on Linux. I've been told that you can process HD and 4Ks with MakeMKV directly, but most times I use Makemkv to load the raw data and then Handbrake to process them. If you put the files into a directory you can Batch Scan them in and let them run overnight. My HDs process typically in an hour and 10 hours for 4K with an 8 Core 16 Thread machine (AMD). But it doesn't seem to help running multiple instances expect on different machines.

So If I want to process a lot of Blu ray episodes like Downton, I use 3 systems over Wifi.

Hope this helps,

CO PS: Hardware Acceleration can make things go faster but it usually results in much bigger files.