Day 250 of quarantine, bored out of my mind, but saving a lot of money by not commuting to the Bay Area for work, so I'm building a Plex Media Server on a new NAS, Synology DS1019+ (for my nerds) w/ 48TB of raw storage. Gonna rip all my DVD/BR/3D collection and retire the dusty old unused DVD player.
But hey, discovering that ripping my BluRay collection is nothing like ripping my DVD collection, especially on my Mac. H264/H265. MKV/MP4, different encryption types, a trillion different compression options, lots to sort through. When I used to rip DVDs on my PC, I had a program called 1ClickDVD which, coupled with DVD Decrypter, would literally make a perfect exact copy of a DVD with, yes, one click. Now with BRs it seems I have to rip first, then transcode which took just about all night long to finish on my Macbook, and decide which one of 50 formats to use, trying to guess all the devices it would be played on some day- Plex on Roku, Smart TV directly, Smart Phones, Tablets, laptops, Mac, PC, getting confusing. If this was normal times, I'd say phuckit, turn on Netflix and watch whatever. But there's nothing to do so I need a new hobby. At least I know the DS1019+ has hardware transcoding so I can really just choose one format and let the hardware work, but its really only capable of a few streams if its transcoding. Direct streaming it can handle a ton more.
Anyone build a good media server (Plex or other) and have some good tips to share?
BTW, 12TB external drives are $220 now. Storage is so damn cheap now its insane, and fun.
