I have 1,000s of Blu-Rays and DVDs - how to watch them via Apple TV?

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › I have 1,000s of Blu-Rays and DVDs - how to watch them via Apple TV?

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#1982301 23-Mar-2018 17:11

KiwiTT:

I am looking for a service whereby I simply place the disc in my computer that verifies that I possess the disc and the movie or TV show is added to my library without fully uploading the disk to a site.

I did consider a PLEX server, but the conversion is problematic and storage required is way too large.

So what are my options in New Zealand to view my collection via a Apple 4K TV app

I moved all our DVD's to a NAS box and use plex on the various devices around the house, best move ever

MileHighKiwi

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#1982304 23-Mar-2018 17:16

You must have a lot of time on your hands to even consider this. I started a project like this a couple of years ago and got bored after about 30 BluRays. If you have thousands it could literally turn into your life's work! When will you find the time to watch these movies? Lol..

gregmcc

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#1982311 23-Mar-2018 17:31

MileHighKiwi: You must have a lot of time on your hands to even consider this. I started a project like this a couple of years ago and got bored after about 30 BluRays. If you have thousands it could literally turn into your life's work! When will you find the time to watch these movies? Lol..

Quite time consuming it was, but it just makes it so easy to pick and choose what you want to watch, even resume watching it on another device where you left off

cadman

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#1982313 23-Mar-2018 17:35

I honestly struggle to think of more than about a dozen movies that I'd consider worthy of such attention.

PhantomNVD

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#1982317 23-Mar-2018 17:42

Yep, way too time consuming I’d say... subscribe to Hulu and/or Netflix/Lightbox and have almost all those movies available to stream whenever...

gehenna

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#1982337 23-Mar-2018 19:16

shk292:

I can't see why it's worse (more illegal) to download a digital copy of a movie when you own the DVD/BD, compared to ripping it yourself.

Because usually the method to download is BitTorrent, and the act of downloading also uploads parts of the file to other users. So you're also sharing the media, effectively trafficing pirated material not just downloading it.

afe66

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#1982338 23-Mar-2018 19:17

Ripping dvd wasnt too time consuming for me just needed some planning.

I had an old pc with ubuntu doing the work and would rip on the side as I was studying at my desk. insert disk, select dvd and click rip on handbrake with automatic ejection when finished to annouce it was finished.

As ripping took nearly real time, would take study break and fresh coffee. Finished 100+ Ripping well before finished studying !

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gehenna

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#1982340 23-Mar-2018 19:38

@afe66 Ripping a DVD is one thing. Ripping a Blu-ray is a whole other story, especially if it's also being compressed. You're looking at 40GB+ for a single Blu-ray. That's up to 10x bigger than a DVD, so you'd imagine also up to 10x the time it takes to rip a DVD.

Dunnersfella

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#1982344 23-Mar-2018 20:19

I studiously ripped all my DVD's to Plex (watched back on a Mac via my theatre amp and on iOS devices)... but only ever managed to make it half way through my Blu-rays. Painful, time consuming process.

For Blu-rays I still use my Blu-ray player(s).

KiwiTT

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#1982349 23-Mar-2018 20:36

One of the problems I found trying to rip DVDs was that there was just so many acronyms and formats that I just could not understand what people use. This was probably the most problematic part - understanding it all. It seemed I needed to be a video 'expert'.

I have a decent PC - i7-4790K with 32GB of RAM and a 770GTX, with a 6 TB drive.

So just finding the right 'user-friendly' software and there are lots when I do a google search and then I have to pay for the 'unlocked' version. I just gave up in disgust. Why does it have to be so hard? I had no problems converting my CD collection to MP3s

EDIT: Seems I needed a workaround for handbrake to work to read my DVDs - https://www.howtogeek.com/102886/how-to-decrypt-dvds-with-hardbrake-so-you-can-rip-them/

I was getting an error that it could not work with copy-protected DVDs.

Seems like it takes about 20 minutes to convert a DVD.

rb99

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#1982385 23-Mar-2018 22:03

You should try MakeMKV. Its free while in Beta and does DVDs and Blurays, does movies no problem. Doesn't compress though, you still need handbrake for that. Compressing a BR can take maybe 2 hours though depending on settings.

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afe66

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#1982396 23-Mar-2018 23:08

gehenna:

@afe66 Ripping a DVD is one thing. Ripping a Blu-ray is a whole other story, especially if it's also being compressed. You're looking at 40GB+ for a single Blu-ray. That's up to 10x bigger than a DVD, so you'd imagine also up to 10x the time it takes to rip a DVD.

I agree.

I was commenting more on ripping dvds.

(Although I could have done the same for Blu-ray's.

One each overnight while studying would still have completed my collection before the desk work finished....)

lurker

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#1982400 23-Mar-2018 23:39

Real men rip ISOs! Or maybe crazy men. I like extras etc so I do rip complete ISOs and just mount them via a script in Kodi to be played through PowerDVD.

Storage is cheap these days and I figure in time ISO size will be insignificant to the size & speed of storage.

KiwiTT

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#1982452 24-Mar-2018 09:55

OK. 2nd problem.

I was able to rip a DVD to M4V format, but when I placed it in a USB stick and plugged it into my Blu-Ray player the film expanded to fill the screen. This made the aspect ratio wrong as the characters were too tall.

Do I need to adjust my Blu-Ray player to TV connection, which I do not need to do for other things, or do I need to encode it differently so the aspect ratio stays locked to one shape.

I am thinking using and old USB 2TB drive I have to place up to 1,000 DVDs on it and simply plug it into my Blu-Ray player and watch through that.

FineWine

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#1982467 24-Mar-2018 10:53

Hope you got a good cataloguing programing to start with to keep track of those thousands of DV disks. I personally use DVDpedia from Bruji, best Apple App cataloger out there.

Whilst the difficult we can do immediately, the impossible takes a bit longer. However, miracles you will have to wait for.

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