Great video and your guide on ripping UHD Blu-Rays was great, but there are two ways you can improve this setup. Firstly I'd setup Tdarr for transcoding instead of Handbrake, Tdarr is much more suited towards automated transcoding and once you point it at your library you can very easily alter it however you want (transcoding, remove embedded subs, foreign language tracks etc.) and it's pretty much set and forget, Handbrake's watch folder needs a bit more manual intervention. Next I would suggest just spending a tiny bit more and getting a GPU which supports H.265 transcoding, you can get a Quadro P400 for less than $50. H.265 takes up significantly less space than H.264 at the same quality and allows you to really increase the size of your movie library on any given storage constraints.
What's the best method for just brute forcing my way through instead of using handbrake. I want to use a full fat mkv blu ray rip. I'll never be streaming to more than one tv at a time and almost always at native res.
Thanks for the videos. You mentioned near the top that you liked the form factor of these DT Optiplexes, "especially when lying flat". I had my 7010 SFF on its side for a couple of years before I realized the "DELL" logo on the bezel can be rotated 90 degrees. This is my primary work machine, maxed out with an I7-3770, 4x8 GB RAM, two Samsung EVO 1TB SATA SSDs (one in an optical drive bay adapter), and a 1 TB Inland NVME via a PCIe adapter. I'm driving two 27" 2560 x 1440 monitors from the I7's onboard graphics. I don't game or edit videos, just database conversions, software development, office tasks and web browsing. This little workhouse has been running nearly 24/7 for many, many years and has never let me down. I'm building a 12th gen Intel box now and will convert the "Little Dell that could" to a Linux server.
For what you are doing, you don't need a new machine, most of the new machines do the same stuff you are doing, at the same speed, if you are lucky...it seems like they've really tapered off in the way of speed increases until you get into high end productivity machines with multiple processors and such...but, like you, I just run what I have, and it works fine for my daily needs....those SFF Optiplex machines do pretty well...they were built for business, they were built to be upgraded/updated, rather than used a couple years and thrown away like so many of today's machines with everything onboard and not being able to upgrade RAM and sometimes even your storage drive isn't removable....what the heck LOL. I've salvaged a lot of the Dell Optiplex machines in recent months, cleaned them up, installed an SSD, fresh windows installation, and have given them away to families with school aged kids that can't afford to buy that stuff. They're not the latest and greatest but they'll get the job done pretty well when all you are doing is school work, web browsing, and a few youtube videos.
@@wildbill23c while I agree Intel has stagnated in recent years, you can't really ignore the single-thread performance in 12th gen is a huge upgrade over 3rd gen. Since many workloads are still single-threaded, you care about single-thread performance. A 12700 will run circles around a 3770, and more efficiently. iGPU performance is even more noticeable when you jump 8 or 9 generations forward.
It would be cool to see you do a video on the Automatic Ripping Machine (ARM) project. I don't think I've ever seen someone document setting it up and your videos are always so thorough! And I think you might enjoy all that sweet automation goodness
I agree, fully automating this process would be awesome. I know ARM gave me troubles in the past, but it’d be cool to see it take a 4K Blu-ray and rip/transcode/store for jellyfin all automatically
I'm sure I've seen something like this in the Unraid plug-ins. A Docker container that uses MakeMKV, but I haven't tried it since I store my Blu-Rays as decrypted isos, not as an mkv.
Thank you for mentioning Jeff Geerling! He's one of my favorite content creators. He's also local to where I live. Dude goes to the same Microcenter as me lol. He has some amazing Raspberry pi and Kubernetes videos, plus he literally wrote the book on Ansible.
10 years isn’t really that old for a computer anymore. Anything from 10 years ago is a reasonable up-to-date and modern computer as far as I’m concerned. Even some computers from 15 years ago with the faster variants of C2D and C2Q aren’t too shabby for basic tasks. Good to see a computer like this put to good use rather than be wasted. I’m actually surprised by the performance issues you had.
For many people a Thinkpad T420, or even a T410 can still handle their daily needs...although heavy compared to a brand new laptop...those old laptops and desktops will still do the job that many people actually use their computers for. Its when you get into heavy CPU/RAM usage needs like editing video, photos, ripping movies, etc. is when you really need the new hardware to support the new processes that some people are trying to do...although the old machine will handle it, it'll take way too long to get any meaningful use out of it for certain tasks. Most daily computing needs can be done on older machines for sure. I have a Thinkstation S20 for my desktop PC...still does all my daily computing needs....and the 10,000RPM 1TB hard drive can more easily keep up with tasks that many of today's drives can't due to their lower speeds...thinking of doing an SSD swap at some point though.
@Alexander Ratisbona A friend of mine has a PC I built for him out of stuff I had lying around, including a Core 2 Quad Q9650, slightly overclocked. He uses it to run DAW software to record his music and it works great for him. The machine is left on 24 hours a day, and it's been three years since I built it.
Since you have nvidia card, I think you could use ffmpeg and nvenc to transcode the blu-ray. Decode the video with the CPU, then resize and encode to h264 with the GPU. Audio can be easily copied without re-encoding. At the same time, delete unnecessary tracks.
The issue with GPU encoding (e.g NVENC) is that the filesize is larger, and quality is lower. Software X264/X265 takes longer but gives the best result. He could still use MakeMKV if he finds it easier, and use MKVToolNix to remove unwanted tracks (audio streams, subs, etc...) as well.
@@jarsky Quality concerns are really miniscule nowadays, high motion footage like video games still suffer, but movies are more than okay to just transcode with the gpu.
I was thinking the same thing. Kind of, anyway. I messed with tdarr a little, but couldn't get it figured out without spending more time on it than I wanted to. I just use an unmanic container (again, couldn't get it working the way that I wanted it to) and I have a couple of bash scripts that I wrote, to encode files that I drop into an imports folder, and then process them with the hevc nvenc encoder, using a GTX1650 GPU in the NAS. Average speed is about 18 to 20x (compared to about 2x for CPU encoding, although, the Intel QSV encoder was around 10x, so would still be a good option if you didn't have a dedicated GPU to lean on) I know that I should just spend a little more time in tdarr, however, MOST of my old collection from pre Netflix days has now been imported, and transcoded, and more importantly, all renamed to have a consistent naming convention (I can't believe how little I used to care about filenames, and folder structures lmao, one of the reasons it's always fun to explore old HDD's)
ffmpeg is so much faster than handbrake for me. it doesn matter which preset I use or how custom I make it, a simple ffmpeg libx265 is at least twice as fast with the same CRF
I use a rehoused 790 motherboard in a full height ATX case. I'm using it to run Automation software for a Radio Station. The Rehousing was to support a full height video card, and to add more storage bays. Dell was still using a standard ATX Power Supply in this design. So i replaced it with a larger one.
Watching your videos gave me the confidence I needed to finally go Unraid on my server desktop. Just waiting for all my files to land on the NAS and then gotta set up Plex and we’re home 🤗 also for the last week have been trying different configs. Huge thank you man 🎉
I've being using an old AMD PC @2010 for home movie storage, plug into router and it shows on five samrt TVs in our home, works really well and its tucked away out of sight.
OptiPlex's are pretty solid. I have two of them in my house, one is a i5 2500, maxed out ram/SSD/GT630 2gb (triple monitors), is on 24/7 and hasn't skipped a beat in the last 6yrs or so. It's mainly used for office work for my GF. I plan to do something like this video to repurpose it when I find something newer for her. Best part it was nearly free. I live in a tech sector, when the companies upgrade it just rains OptiPlex's and like office PC's...I got a Z640 workstation and 4 OptiPlex's in different conditions for $50, sold the Z640 for $120 during the pandemic when everyone wanted a gaming PC.
It's 2023, get a computer that can hardware encode H265, not H264. Recent phones, streaming boxes, smart TVs, and computers can decode H265. The H265 files can be smaller and/or of better quality than H264. The new AV1 codec is being implemented right now in some devices.
3:10 if you look closely, you'll see that the blue drive bracket in the top right of the picture, holds a 3.5" as well as a 2.5" drive so you don't need to buy a bracket if you're just using an SSD and a spinning SATA drive. The first SATA port on the motherboard supports 6GB/s SATA 3 for an SSD, but the second and third SATA ports only do 3GB/s, so don't expect miracles. For a real increase in speed, a PCIe adapter with an MVME stick would probably help (I think the motherboard can do PCI mode 3 but not mode 4). You probably also want a USB3 adapter but since there are no 5.25" style Molex connectors on the power supply, that will take some improvisation.
I use a Chuwi Larkbox Pro Mini PC as my media center. Running on Windows 11. Hooked up to my library on an external hard drive. Considering transferring to an ssd for faster loading time. Perfect tiny setup if you ask me. I could use a "bigger" mini pc but I really wanted something ultra small and simple.
I have the exact same optiplex also running a 2nd gen i5 which I converted to a home jellyfin and file/torrent server. I too, love the look of the optiplex lol. There is an additional slot for a 2.5 inch drive at the bottom part of the stock HDD holder(light blue plastic part). I was able to mount a 2.5" Sata SSD as boot drive and 2 units of 2.5" 1TB HDD on a 3.5 to 2.5 converter mount as well as a 3.5" 3TB low power HDD in a 5.75" HDD hot swap caddy. Total of 3x mechanical drive and 1x SSD. So far the PSU is able to keep running without any sudden shut down.
I'm doing something very similar to this but my older office PC of choice is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93P small form factor PC with the Intel Core i5-4590 (Quad core) It has served me well and has a total of 8 USB ports on it for expandability 6 of which are super speed. This was $100. I think it is a good 1st setup for me to get started and begin learning.
This is probably the best use case scenario for an old PC lying around; however, It's not for me specifically. I haven't jumped on the 4K bandwagon and probably never will. 1080P is perfectly fine for videos. I might upgrade to a 1440P display MAX for my desktop monitor...but I'll wait until one of my dual 1080P displays dies before a final decision. The live video stream transcoding is something I'd never use either. That's way too much power consumption just to watch a video. I'd just convert the source video into something more compatible before I'd ever consider doing that.
I don't know why but I clicked this video with a MJD vibe expectation and then I saw you and _where the hell I am bro_ I was certain this was from his channel, what a mind bug
I haven't ripped a DVD in over 10 years. It's interesting to see a lot of the same tools are being used but is seems like the process has gotten much more complicated.
Since you're files are going across multiple devices and being transcoded, fileflows or tdarr could be good solutions for you. Both support hardware encoding and work with workers that you can install on your home pcs to help. The server distributes the tasks to all workers. The final renaming and importing could be made easier with sonarr and radarr that are normally used for torrenting but have watch folders and manual imports. They get the series info from IMDb and help to keep track what you've ripped in which quality and what is missing in your collection.
Was successfully able to shoehorn a GTX1060 into a SFF I7 dell 5050 by using a sata to 6-pin power adaptor. The 1060 supports H265, and has no issues rendering 4k. Used NVidia x060 GPUs can be found really cheap, and work extremely well for this. As for handbrake, your much better off leveraging a GPU than relying on a CPU for that task.
I’ve installed hundreds of those small form factor SFF PCs for clients over the years. I’ve also repurposed several and different types of servers. Solid hardware!
the Quadro K1200 can't handle h.265 transcoding but the nVidia T400/600/1000 can... one of those might be a good option. Also the P620 can too, I think. And you can use nVenc with HandBrake. Also VCE or QuickSync.
Cool setup. I would just add as a tip, if your streaming device or smart TV has support for H.265 playback already built-in (most do these days), I'd disable hardware transcoding on the Optiplex and just stream everything with direct play. You'll eliminate the stuttering and you can keep your video files as H.265, which is much more efficient storage-wise and will save you a TON of space over time.
Nvidia T400 is an alternative to the K2000, it will allow you to use HEVC encoding/decoding. I am currently using an old Dell rack server with 2 x E5-2667v2 CPUs, draws too much power, so I am in the midst of getting together a server (HP ML110 Gen9) that will use a single E5-2630L v3, paired with Nvidia T600 for transcoding requirements.
I just started making a home server. My first big project like this. It’s extremely daunting. However, stuff like this fill me with that excitement that makes me want to do more. Plus, you’re almost convincing me to buy unraid lol. Love your stuff and looking forward to more in the future.
Okay, that's too weird. At 3:57 There's a random image of my city (Calgary) for less than a second, and I'm just here to watch an old computer running 4K UHD discs! @Hardware Haven If you see this, please, can you tell me what this video of Calgary is? 😃
i've been running Emby on my media PC that runs Windows 10 with about 45TB or so for my movies/tv shows. I have a GTX 1060 6GB that does the transcoding.That's all it does. My main computer does the Handbrake legwork. Its a first Gen Ryzen 7 1700x with 32GB/RAM. I use a virtual machine to download my media and use Handbrake to convert some movies and ALL of my tv shows to save space on the drives. I used to convert movies but since you can download the x265 version of everything nowadays, i just download those and convert only what i need to. I will say this also... if you're converting a 1080p to a 720p (for most tv shows), there's NO noticable video loss in the file. Just throwin that out there...
I've been ripping Blu-rays since 2015 & 4k Blu-rays since 2020 I convert them to mp4 with handbrake making sure that all audio tracks are added despite cutting the file size down to roughly 10% of the original file size (which is useful for copying to my tablet for long car journeys) I've used over 6tb this also because I rip & convert all the special features which I'm surprised how few people who rip disc do. I don't have it set up as a server since for my simulation would be pointless. I copy the files to a USB drive and then play them on my LG B9 OLED TV which play even h.265 files without issues even raw if needed. I know my set up is uncommon but works for me and it's a good way to have a backup are out of print discs.
I have Optiplex 9020 micro. I replaced the original 128 GB SSD with 750 GB HDD (horrible for speed, great for capacity) and added one more external USB HDD. Runs just Windows and Plex server. Low power consumption, streams 4K video. No complaints at all.
Handbrake does support hardware encoding & decoding so if you upgraded the GPU you could use handbrake on the same computer to do transcoding. I was running plex on a Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3220 CPU @ 3.30GHz 3.30 GHz 8.00 GB (7.88 GB usable) So a slightly newer CPU than what you mentioned, but I kept running into out of memory & CPU errors when my kids & I were all watching different shows. I decided if I was going to build a new plex server (GPUs were going for triple MSRP at the time) I would make it a relatively high-end system. I put in a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K with 128 GB of RAM. I used RAID 5 for my 4 drives, & boot off an M.2 drive with a DVD & Blu-ray drive in the system. Because the CPU includes a decent GPU it can hardware transcode h.264 & h.265 with no issues.
Most of the older processors don't have the encoders needed to encode, later model Intel chips (like 8th or later) do have H265 compression codex built in, otherwise they just chomp their way thru with regular processing..it is possible...but it's ALOT slower than using video card cuda cores :(
all you gotta do is throw in an i7 2600, 16GB 1333 RAM, and something like a LP 750 TI (all these are super cheap on ebay) and those old 790s can still do lotsa stuff
For the heck of it, you could swap the motherboard and processor in that Dell out to something a little more modern, like a Ryzen 5 3600 with a B450 or B550 board. The only issue you’ll have is getting the pinout for the power button, power LED, and HDD LED (I remember that being the only proprietary thing in that computer). The only thing you might need is a low-profile cooler, but I think a stock cooler like the wraith would fit.
💥 new stuff to watch, man i loved it. Earlier i had a laptop which had 2 hhd and omv in a usb drive it worked as a good Nas for 2 years. But a few weeks ago i got my hands on a dead pc from one of my relatives, the only problem is the motherboard which is dead but no worries i am working on it, watching this guide now has motivated me to start working on this project and the life to this old pc. That my story, i will watch your next upload So see you next time probably under 15 sec
One way to improve here is another method of offloading to various nodes on your network with tdarr. It can monitor your central library folder and replace files when new additions are detected.
I currently have an Optiplex 9020 w/Core i5-4590,16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Boot, & 16TB HDD media running Plex. While is it probably quite a bit more efficient than yours, it still gets pretty hot and uses about 30-40w at idle. I have an Optiplex 7050 Micro (Core i7-7700T - idles around 10w) that I plan on replacing the 9020 with. I am going to attempt to replace the M.2 wireless card with an M.2 PCIE riser to add a 4 port SATA controller. If it is a success, I will de-case the 7050 and 3d print a new case that can attach to a 4bay hot-swap SATA enclosure (originally meant to fit into a tower w/3x5.25" drive bays)If it fails, I will settle on a 7050 tower and lose the ability to remove the drives without shuttting everything down.
I use the Dell 9020 for a pfsense box. Works very nice with 2 x 30GB Intel SSDs in raid. PS, sata SSDs fit firmly between the PSU and the case lip nicely.
I’ll never understand why would anyone rip their own media. High quality encodes are already available on any public/private tracker, why waste time and energy doing it yourself? Just get a 80GB+ 4K HDR DV H265 encode and that’s it EDIT: seems you don’t event want/need the best quality. just get 4k remuxes online instead wasting hours transcoding and moving files
Its amazing I am using an old AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition as my Plex Media server and let it run headless in my attic Amazing to have found a good use for this old beats ! This PC I pulled out of the Trash in 2017 from a Recycling center and the only problem was that the power supply was broken.
I was just complaining about how all the bluray drives i was looking at don't support UHD. I'm going to grab a compatible external drive and plug that into my NAS as soon as one of them goes on sale.
I got HTPC/NAS in same box. R5 2600x, GeForce GT1030, 28TB total HDD space. Non-compressed 4Ks, Blu Rays. Can play 3Ds too on my projector. 10G NIC for network transfers. Windows 10 Workstation.
Im in a similar situation with a hp 800 g2 6500 sff that I got. I love the form factor and it sits nicely in my living room. Problem with it, is that its all proprietary hp components, so upgrading is a pain in the ass at best and impossible at worst.
I use a 4590T in my unraid server - obviously not a powerhouse but it does have QuickSync which, even for the vast majority of content today, it can transcode faster than real time in Plex (and presumably other media servers that support hardware transcoding). The whole system peaks at about 50w so it's not really an issue to run 24/7...I also run a flightradar node, a DVB-DVR, some web services, a self-hosted password manager and a few other Docker containers...pretty sick for something that doesn't use much more power than my ISP issued router.
Try an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF. It uses 6th or 7th gen CPUs, DDR4, and has room for TWO 3.5" drives as well as an NVMe SSD. The down side? Slim DVD drive. But an external box for your BD drive will cure that.
I also talked myself out of a cache pool on my server. I've found that it can stream multiple 4K videos at once without bogging down the drives or the basic gigabit ethernet I'm using, and my ARC hits are already pretty high. On a basic home media server, it's pretty overkill. Though the adapter card would allow you to have more disk space in the small form factor.
My current setup is Anime based, so i use Topaz to upscale the content i get from DVD's, then use handbrake to convert it to a smaller filesize without degrading the picture at all. Currently it takes Topaz 3 hours per episode on my 3070 to upscale and about 15mins to convert that file. Honestly some people hate upscaling but if you are like me and are not able to get good blueray's of anime this is the next best thing.
For the transcoding capabilities, and fast rip times. I wouldn’t recommend anything less than an i7 4790. Also the graphics card should be a AMD brand for inter compatibility between programs/apps. The WX2100 and Wx3100/WX3200 are great candidates. Also if you have 16 to 32GB ram set up a page file. The SSD will have an increased life span with less read/write cycles and the ram will cut the decompression time in half from less read/write cycles that normally occur on the ssd/HDD.
I've got a few similar machines at home that make pretty good retro gaming PCs. I've also used them for ripping DVDs as the included optical drives tend to rip quicker than USB drives. However when it comes to converting - even with a gen 2 i7 it can take quite a few hours. Although it's fine to leave it going overnight and they'll be done when you get up. These days I tend to lean towards x265 encodes for my collections because of the smaller file sizes. While the machines are fine for ripping and software encoding DVDs to x265, I'm not too sure whether they'll play them natively. I suppose using something like Kodi or Jellyfin player should work. I also tried encoding a 20GB Bluray and it was going to take about 3 days LOL. Personally for media centres I'd probably go a newer mini PC like those from Lenovo, HP and Dell (even though they don't have room for a DVD drive without the extension). 7 & 8th Gen tend to have x265 encoding.
Unless you want to watch it in a room with no blu ray player, or on your phone, or many other places where a Blu-ray player doesn’t really make sense… but if that works for you, great!
Just a bios update and a xeon e3-1265l or 1245v2 already solved it, it has a lot of performance close to the tdp, which is not 80w, it stays at a maximum of 60w to 65w at maximum load, I use it on a computer and it works very well, my third xeon, in cinebench r23 I got about 500 points more than the e3-1270v1 (i7 2600). The 1245v2 has integrated graphics, which makes it a little easier, but you have to put a better cooler to not overheat, mine is around 40ºc stopped and using a maximum of about 52ºc.
Rip in lossless M2TS format using DVD fab and copy to a NAS (QNAP/Synology recommended) then use a media streamer like a Dune 4K or 8K player (8K is recommended for better performance across the board). This is THE best solution bar none for a networked home cinema solution. Make sure you have gigabit ethernet installed as 4K lossless streaming is over 100mbps.
Your problems mostly arise because like most of us we've bought dozens if not hundreds of DVDs over the years, then we now have the ability to rip them to digital storage devices to be able to watch them seemlessly without having to swap discs...so, now we are asking our household computer to try and copy/convert literally years worth of data over the course of days...doesn't work very well when you need your computer, and your internet connection for other tasks. If you started this task with the very first movie you bought, the problems wouldn't really be an issue, but with a box of DVD's to rip/convert and store, its a very daunting task to say the least.
Someone probably said this somewhere below but jsyk that's not a dual NVME adaptor - I have have same exact card - it has one NVME drive that goes through PCIe as normal and one SATA drive which is POWERED by PCIE but then connects to the mobo with that SATA port on the back so that the M.2 SATA drive is then connected via an old school SATA port....hence the different keying and the NVME mentioned on one side and NGFF (next gen form factor for SATA) on the other
By using the jellyfin "native" client rathen than the web client, there's no need to transcode most of the time. Range of codecs supported by browsers is smaller than the app.
why don't you try making a NAS/media server with an old laptop like a thinkpad t420 or an affordable generic laptop. even though its not as configurable, you have low power draw, battery backup, and it saves a lot of space. would be an interesting video
I swapped the k200 for a RTX A2000. It's compatible to encode x265/h265 to x264 so, I guess, no problems there I guess. And the Case of the Dell Optiplex is quite nice, so swapping the Mainboard for some low powered AMD Epyc is a valid option here.... I think a M11SDV-8CT-LN4F would fit that. Just put a noctua or something on the Heatsink, because well, the Mainboard is designed for a Server Airflow case.
If you have a Nvidia GPU you can encode much faster. Most Blu rays can be done in 10-15 mins. 4k bout 25ish. I encode everything on my main rig and transfer it over to my Plex server. I dig the setup though.
Yeah right I just watched the video again. The GPU does not supported the h265 codec. But I think at least the encoding part to h264 could be accelerated by the GPU
You should take a look at radarr/sonarr to automatically rename/manage and import your media files, this will save you time and it's easy to setup in unraid (or any other os)
@@HardwareHaven It sure is usefull for that haha, but I believe it can also be used for a legitimate media library. For torrenting stuff, prowlarr is also used in addition to those services to automate the whole process.
I got one of these LG drives back in 2016 and didn't have to flash it. Stock firmware is good to go. If you're too squeamish about flashing look for used ones online and see if you can confirm they'll work.
Im still surprised what my old i3 4130 can handle. Ive it set up to run unraid and Jellyfin with its igpu and as long as i dont use 10bit video and stick to h264, it will transcode 4k just fine. So nice to get my old hardware to use. Only gotta help out with my PC to transcode a move once into 264 so it will work with it. Wish the Handbrake container would work, but sadly i had no success since the older versions dont have the QuickSync support on Linux by the looks. but i did test it on a windows machine with handbrake 1.07 or something, and holy smokes it worked really well.
Those old 4th gen Intel chips are amazingly capable. Consider grabbing an i7-47xx chip off of Ebay for around $50, and it'll make that computer really sing.
I use the same programs. I have an old pc I use for Plex. But what I do is use my my main computer for MakeMKV and Handbrake. I do this because my main computer is my strongest computer. And I usually will do 10-15 movies at a time. I can keep an eye out for strange encodings in certain movies and blurays.
This is almost identical to my server project. I took my old first PC, which I quite like the form factor, and managed to set up a headless ubuntu server capable of ripping DVDs (BluRay lectors are incredibly expensive) and host them in Jellyfin. I am currently looking for a gpu to do the heavy transcode lifting as the CPU is just an Intel Core Duo which if I reckon correctly is incapable to do hardware acceleration. Thanks for the content, Hardware Haven, really enjoyable!
Yeah, you’ll definitely need something else for transcoding. Luckily there are lots of cheap GPUs on the market, at least compared to recent times haha
I learned this like 20 years ago at a job. Generate a complex password for the user and have them append something like 4+ chars at the end. This way when they forgot the complex part, wrote it down and left it on a post it on their desk they weren't giving up the entire password. And we checked that stupid stuff like 1234 and pass weren't used.
OMG I Just got a Blu-ray drive for my pc so i could rip my Blu-rays. Good to know i need to flash the firmware on it first. Looks like its even the same model drive too!
Does Handbrake convert the original HDR video to a lower bitrate and also keep the HDR? That's interesting, I use ffmpeg from cmd and use hardware acceleration and the best I can do is tonemap it. Also in jellyfin I believe, tonemapping is not available for CPU, only hardware transcode can, which is why in 10:43 the lionsgate logo looks weird. I'm wondering if you can utilize the minisforum ryzen PC as a jellyfin or as a handbrake transcoder (via network share, though the share speed is not that fast), however I don't know the hardware transcoding capability and quality of Ryzen APU. Overall great video showcasing the potential of these hardware and tools.
Nice idea, I never knew about the possibility to do something with CDs and DVDs, but this is a very nice project, imagine a notebook for that, it would fit perfectly ROAD TO 100K! 🥳🥳🥳
man i am definitely bouncing back and forth from TrueNAS and unRAID.. MY setup right now I'm running windows 10 with 15 2TB drives in RAID 6 on a LSI MEGA Raid card. the new server im working on is a 8x 3TB with an HBM that will run ZFS. But for any hand brake work I 100% just use my AMD R9 5900x with the RXT 3070ti that thing with blast a movie in a 1/4 the time my Dual Xeon X5660 with a 1050TI Server can..
Been running MakeMKV / HB on various Win 7 / 10 combos from a couple old Phenom 2’s to a 16 Xeon to a recent i5. Also running with Linux Mint on a Core2Quad and a Ryzen 5 setups. Mint seems to run a little better because of no bloat ware for Windows. My (2) i5’s running Win10 on a small form factor like yours. Once I threw in some low profile graphic cards and SSD drives-they took off like a rocket!
Sell the K1200 and get a P400 or P600. Both are low profile, both low power, both can do HEVC/H265 perfectly. It’s a better codec anyway. Half the file size of H264 while retaining quality. Plus, there’s already advancements to get to H266 within the next couple years. H264 was great in its hayday but it’s getting a bit long in the tooth these days.
I have an Asus external and mainly buy blu-rays as my drive as unpatched cannot read 4k UHD blu-rays. I usually rip the blu-rays as is and keep the large file sizes. I guess eventually if i run out of space i will have to look into transcoding as well. Also last i checked i think i am sol and my drive was not on the recommended list but maybe if i ever go to the makemkv forums i will find hope that it can be flashed lol. Not that i have many 4k uhd discs but having the capability is nice lol. MakeMkv is amazing isnt it. I was blown away when i found out it exists.
Why not use ffmpeg instead of handbreak as you can do the same thing. Also when dealing with 4k Blu-Rays usually they are in HDR. so usually when I try to transcode they come out all desaturated as it doesn't do the HDR to SDR conversion correctly.
Ha my file server is a 21 year old AMD (Sempron I think? Mobo is from 2002 anyhow) and it works just fine - It does get hot with 6 hard drives in there though - tons of fans everywhere. And early 2000s blue LED (case came that way, I didn't remove them).
I just went through the same guide to update the firmware on an older portable USB LG BluRay player to work with UltraHD discs and it works fantastically. Only problem now is I'm using OSMC on a really old pair of raspberry PI boxes that can't go beyond 30fps playback, and my rebuilt media server can't possibly handle the transcoding. I may experiment with buying a new Raspberry Pi IV which can do the decoding and and see how that goes...
There are some potentially good alternatives for transcoding that are a bit cheaper on the market. At least with the current pi market.i haven’t had a chance to fully test it recently, but the linkstar from seeed studio supposedly supports 4K h264, and there are also some cheap mini PCs with newer Intel mobile chips that should be able to transcode 4K with quick sync
