First off, I’ll throw out initial apologies that this is going to be way longer than what should be reasonable for my first post here. If any of you make it through the entire post, I’ll be extremely grateful and will be happy to recommend you for sainthood. Second, I’ll throw out a disclaimer that I’ve spent tons of time trying to research this through Google, YouTube, and some of the content here – but I’m sure I haven’t been as thorough or efficient in how I’ve searched for it. So, second apology if what I’m asking advice for is contained within some older threads that I could have (and should have) easily found.
Now that the pathetic apologies and disclaimers are out of the way, here’s my situation. I have 2 Sony 400 Disc Blu-Ray carousel players that are getting long in the tooth, and are starting to exhibit some problems in playing back some of my discs. I have about 150 – 200 DVD discs in one player, and close to that in BluRay discs in the other. I’m tired of dealing with the situation of having to pull disc out and put it in my single BluRay player if there are issues in playback, as well as dealing with previews, menus, etc. Once I found out about Plex, it just made sense to start planning on deep-sixing the players and moving to a digitized media library. My current (and only) entertainment setup has an older 55” LG LED 3DTV that I believe will work with Plex but doesn’t support 4K. I’ll eventually add another entertainment system in the basement with a current-at-the-time OLED TV, receiver, etc and then update the current living room TV to an OLED/4K model.
For the Plex server, I’ve decided to go with a WD PR4100 NAS with anywhere between 24 and 40 TB of space using WD Red drives. I was also considering a Synology with Seagate IronWolf drives, but I’ve already got another WD NAS device so I’m more familiar with their stuff. The reviews I’ve looked into on the PR4100 seem to show good performance if you don’t need a lot of transcoding (which I don’t think I will, but that’s a question that will be included further below). I definitely want to go the NAS route for the small footprint and efficiency in power usage.
I’ve started to do some testing in ripping BluRays and DVDs with MakeMV and HandBrake, and here is where the majority of my questions/request for advice come in. Like anyone, I want to get as close to the original disc for quality but use the least amount of space. I know that there are a lot of considerations between h.264 and h.265 in terms of what (and how old) of devices that are going to be playing movies from Plex. I really want to go the h.265 route to use as little of space as possible, but I don’t know if that will be an issue with the devices that will be playing movies. We have very old tablets, but fairly current smartphones – but I’m really not expecting much of these to be playing back movies. I know my TV won’t support h.265 direct, and would require transcoding. I’m not sure if I just plan on doing H.265 and use an Amazon Fire Stick in my current old TV so that direct play can be possible without transcoding, or if I need to do H.264. I don’t know how good the WD PR4100 transcodes H.265 to H.264.
Next question would be in regard to Handbrake settings for H.265. I’m able to use the Nvidia HEVC option, but am just not sure of where to land for the following:
- Quality – the scale seems to be opposite of what the numbers show. Most recommendations seem to be in the 20 – 24 range, but the higher numbers correspond to lower quality on the scale
- Frame Rate – don’t know if I should be specifying a constant frame rate or not. I’ve seen that if you don’t do that then the compression finds the lowest frame rate and outputs the entire conversion at that frame rate
- Output – not sure if I should use .mkv or .mp4 for the output
- I’m using Very Slow for the pass speed
Once again, sorry if I’ve giving to much information in asking for advice. I’ve got a lot to learn, and am trying to get the best info wherever I can find it. I’ll take any shots that need to get fired for anything I’ve put (or didn’t put) in this post.
Thanks in advance for any help and/or responses,
Todd
