I’ve never done anything like this before. I have a ton of DVDs and blu-rays. I have a Mac and a solid network. What software do I need? What hardware do I need? Can I run everything of a NAS (not 100% how those work) please, just point me in the right direction; tell me what to buy. I just want to be able to share all my purchased discs between my devices at home.
Start with your “devices at home”.
Eventually you will need a Plex Server running on a NAS or your MAC but will also need the Plex client on your “devices at home” and clients have all sort of different requirements and play different file formats.
Once you figure out what “devices at home” you will be using you can focus on your server, a NAS might work if you do not need much if any transcoding for your clients but if you do you might need something more powerful.
You will also want your Plex server online 24/7 for the most part so if your MAC is a laptop and you take it with you getting something permanent at home might be better.
Hey welcome to the forums 
It’s a broad topic. Tell us a bit about yourself, and we can point you to success.
- What is your experience with:
1 - The macOS terminal, which is essentially Unix.
2 - Networking concepts like netmask.
3 - Building computers from scratch, dealing with static electricity
4 - The general differences between MP3, wav, DTS, AC3, Flac
5 - Open source software like FFmpeg, mkvtoolnix, Audacity - What is your budget approximately? The range might be bare-bones to semi-pro, name brand, somewhat overkill.
- Do you enjoy repetitive organizational tasks and fine tuning requiring significant time?
- What is your goal for quality from the stored video?
- Are we talking 4K also?
- How many discs approximately?
- What devices do you intend to play to?
- How many devices will run concurrently?
- Describe your current network in a bit more detail.
Those are some concepts that apply.
Your general work flow involves a lot of time consumed in loading a disc in the device connected to your Mac, slowly reading that in, then slowly converting that to a file that’s stored on your computer. It historically has been 100% CPU intensive and slow. Nowadays with hardware encoding, it’s not so bad.
Good luck!
I would start with the articles on this page, and bring any questions that come up to the forum.
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