Hello, I’ve ran a little test Plex Media server on my laptop at home. It went OK and worked on TCL and Vizio TV’s. So now I’m buying an Nvidia Shield Pro and a 8TB hard drive to run a Plex server at home.
I have a lot of DVD movies, TV shows, and some VHS tapes to put onto the server. I actually forgot how bad the quality of the DVD’s pictures are! And when testing with the Iron Man 1 movie, it looked blocky and pixelated after I encoded it in Handbrake with HQ 480P settings. I ended up using MakeMKV to copy the DVD to the hard drive and that picture looked exactly like DVD quality. That’s what I’m going for ultimately.
I learned that some Blu-Ray discs, like Deadpool UHD won’t copy, and I need a UHD friendly drive for that. Maybe even to buy some software. So I’m holding off on those discs at the moment. But I do plan to try to move them eventually.
But I had a question with the DVD’s. One of my TV’s is a 4K, the other a 1080P. What is the typical person doing with the movie picture format? Are you guys compressing videos and dealing with artifacts? Are you upscaling to better fit the TV? OR just doing an exact copy and letting the TV deal with it? Will an Nvidia Shield Pro upscale on the fly for me? I’m only anticipating to use Plex on these two TV’s, and maybe infrequently at the same time.
“up-scaling” won’t do your content any good… the content quality won’t improve, you’ll nonetheless need more storage – your TV or set top box will deal with adjusting the resolution anyway.
As for what a typical person will do… ask 5 users and you’ll get 6 opinions
If storage is not an issue… you’ll be best off taking the media as using MakeMKV.
If you have limited storage or clients with certain playback restrictions (e.g. clients not supporting certain containers/codecs for video/audio/subtitles), you should consider going down the transcoding route and Handbrake the files before adding them to Plex. The 2nd could also be helpful if your server isn’t strong enough to do the transcoding on-the-fly.
Thanks for the input Tom80H! I’m going to stay away from “up-scaling” then. Especially if you say that it’s not improving the end result quality. That’s the opposite direction that I wanted to go. Much appreciated!
So, I’m hearing that Plex has a lot of options from not doing a thing and just acting as a pointer to a file on the network, up to using some magic and transcoding files on the fly to a Plex app/client. From here I think I need a few more tests to see what my TV’s like, as they are the clients running the Plex app in this test. I don’t fully know what they’re capable of! Maybe they can read the files directly, maybe they would like the files to be transcoded first? It’s up to me to check the chips in my TV and learn what they’re capable of then. New opinions will be formed.
Nearly all devices can play H.264/X.264 w/ AC3 audio… If it was me, especially for the DVD Content, I would transcode them. Although, you using the 480p setting gave you garbage results, you don’t let that disuade you.
If you’re using handbrake, try the following settings.
h.264, .mp4 container.
Use Average Bitrate 1024kbps for video
Apply Unsharp with Medium and Fine in the two respective drop downs (This is optional, but gives me good results)
Do 2 Pass with Turbo First Pass
And change the Framerate to 23.976 (if in North America), or 25fps (If in Europe)
Choose AC3 Audio, or transcode what’s there to AC3 @ 640 for 5.1 or 256 for Stero, or 128 for mono.
dvd rips can never be better than the original dvd rip.
you can rip them and leave them in native mpeg2, but a lot of clients may need transcoding (shield will not).
you can convert dvd/mpeg2 to h264 and save a ton of disk space, but you will have to experiment with different handbrake qualities to find the best balance of quality vs size.
only YOU can decide what that balance is, although google can give you plenty of starting points.
as far as 1080 blurays, many people leave them in the native codec + mkv, however blurays can be easily be 20-30+ gigs.
they also can be converted to lesser size via handbrake, and again only you will be able to choose what balance suits you size vs quality.
one other thing you should be aware of upfront.
sooner or later you will outgrow your 8tb drive, and outgrow the capabilities of shield as a server.
as you approach that point, you may want to start researching various NAS products, some of which can run plex server on them directly, others are just used to expand storage (keep shield as the server).
how long that will take, will be dependent entirely on how fast you fill up/expand your library.
To pipe in, upscaling has improved dramatically over recent years especially in TV’s that have good processors like LG 2019 Alpha 9 and alpha 7 Gen 2 or even LG 2018 Alpha’s. It’s not perfect but does display a decent picture for 20 to 40 year old titles. For me I’m impressed and it’s enjoyable viewing.
As for ripping your Disc collection, totally agree with MakeMKV, it’ free for a month and if you still need it. Download again and re istall. If your TV can handle mkv with most audio codecs, that’s the way I would go. I do have a mixture of players so some titles I have are 4K copy and 1080P, the 4K titles I have in a separate Library. Beware of 4k HD-MA 7.1 channel as most players have issues
So don’t discount upscaling value, considering your DVD collection will be 480P. I’m personally thrilled with my LG OLED upscaling my DVD collection of 600 plus.
One bit of advice I have learnt with Plex, keep it simple.
