Building a Home Media Server

[daveh75]

Personally I see little point on building the Media Server you're planning, unless you really want it all in one box, or you want to transcode on the fly..

You don't need all that processing just to serve files.

I'd go with a separate NAS, then either use your AFTV if it'll handle Atmos OK or go for the NVidia Shield...

 

[Feral]

Personally I see little point on building the Media Server you're planning, unless you really want it all in one box, or you want to transcode on the fly..

You don't need all that processing just to serve files.

I'd go with a separate NAS, then either use your AFTV if it'll handle Atmos OK or go for the NVidia Shield...

i'm with you on that but I supposed it depends if BB has a way of ripping the files, if you already have a pc then perhaps a GPU upgrade with CUDA would be a cheaper option overall plus a symbology nas with media server built in. Thought mine was a pig in a poke as cannot transcode but even the Pi could play the files on the Kodi so as a file server it's perfect. No need for plex as kodi just needs the NFS share on the synology.

 

[Feral]

Are you comfortable with PC components and messing around inside the box? Asking because some of the tweaks are easy but if you are not comfortable messing around then it can be a bit daunting and you might be better getting something built to spec. The old adage of beware of overspeccing applies but there are plenty of good companies that can build and over lock for you like Scan, overclockers.co.uk (my current water cooled rig). Worth having a play as you would be surprised how easy it is and you can upgrade parts yourself much cheaper than getting someone to do it for you. For example, I took the bluray drive from my broken vaio laptop and installed that in my rig to back up by bluray collection.

btw I've raised a query with pavetube to see if they have a way of keeping the lossless audio with H.265 video compression. The h.265 files are .mp4 extension but the shield plays pretty much anything you can throw at it. I'll share their reply once I get it.

i got a reply from pavtube and then had to reinstall latest version and try again. After which I think they misunderstood the question but hey. Anyway, I am ripping several versions of the man from uncle. The title sequence and WB logo are really good at showing artifacts with very fine lines in the news print rotating which appear as jagged lines in a poor video copy.

1 uncompressed video and trueHD

2 compressed video high quality and uncompressed trueHD

3 compressed h.264 video original quality and AC3 audio 320kbs 5.1 surround

4 compressed h.265 video original quality and AC3 audio 320kbs 5.1 surround

i'll share the file sizes in a bit and need to check them side by side in SPMC on the shield but what I am looking for is lossless audio with original quality h.265 video encoding to bring the size down. This is the current ticket I have raised with pavtube but I'd like option 2 at original quality video as a compromise.

 

[bigboss]

Thanks. The main thing I need to decide if I would be happy ripping off an external blu ray drive connected to my laptop. A few blu rays would be fine, but when it comes to 150+ blu rays, it may become tiresome. A media server may make this easier, if I'm able to set it to rip automatically.

 

[bigboss]

Which of these motherboards will be more suitable for my needs? One has 7.1 HD audio but no HDMI, and the other has HDMI and is 4K compatible. I will be connecting it to my AVR anyway which can decode audio.

I think I know the answer, but wanted your opinion.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/asrock-z170m-extreme-4-intel-z170-s-1151-ddr4-sata3-m2-(pcie-sata)-sli-crossfire-intel-lan-usb31aplu

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigabyte-ga-b150m-d3h-intel-b150-s-1151-ddr4-satae-m2-(pcie-sata)-2-way-crossfire-intel-lan-usb-30-m

More here, if you think anything else is more suitable (micro ATX):

https://www.scan.co.uk/shop/computer-hardware/all/motherboards-intel/socket-1151-intel-b150-micro-atx

 

[Feral]

There are others who could answer this better than me but on the basis there has been no mention of a GPU card previously then i expect you can afford to drop the SLI (Nvidia) and crossfire (AMD) support etc. as you would be reliant on on board graphics and GPU for any ripping grunt.

Again, if your intention is to strip out the full video and leave HD audio intact then you won't need a separate GPU on a card do do this as you won't be transcoding which removes another source of heat and noise in the chassis. With MBs a lot of the cost relates to feature sets which are aimed at the enthusiast such as overclocking, over volting etc whereas you are likely to want to have something that works and you can forget about it. The less comlplex, the less things can go wrong.

In terms of ripping your discs via your laptop to a nas or getting a dedicated media server/ripper you will still have to put your 150 discs into the drive one at a time. From what you have said previously you want to put a disc in and have the file ripped at the press of a button. Make MKV is good but not the most intuitive interface, so before you got to buying anything i would download it to your laptop and maybe trial versions of bytecopy and a few others to see if they work for you.

Some of the trial versions will give you a limited number of rips or put a watermark on the file but you will get a good idea of how your system will performa and what you can expect.

 

[bigboss]

Thanks! I'll try both MakeMKV as well as AnyDVD HD to compare which is more user friendly and faster.

I've decided to go for QNAP TS-453A. This, with 4 X 6TB WD Red drives is cheaper than a media server. It has HDMI output as well, and can play films via Kodi or Plex directly.

 

[Feral]

Thanks! I'll try both MakeMKV as well as AnyDVD HD to compare which is more user friendly and faster.

I've decided to go for QNAP TS-453A. This, with 4 X 6TB WD Red drives is cheaper than a media server. It has HDMI output as well, and can play films via Kodi or Plex directly.

nice BB, i've no experience with QNAP only synology but a quick update on the ripping of the discs. I found that on the new 65 inch TV and audio through the Denon i can clearly notice a difference in PQ and SQ so will be sticking to lossless vidio and audio rips which mean having to rerip a lot of my collection but if the end result if more immersive then i think it's worth it.

one bugbear i have is very minor scratches preventing the PC from reading the discs as a normal DVD/BR player will bypass the odd error but with a PC any errors cause failure. More reason i think to be able to back up discs extended verions of Battle of the five armies has a scratch effecting the main movie file so i cannot rerip it i had to pull the file in windows and then try to rip the file from the disk copy but it has artifacts in the titles but have yet to watch all the way through to see if that copy is ruined.

 

[bigboss]

Tried MakeMKV today. Ripped Fury blu ray. I couldn't choose which audio to rip. The biggest file was the full film with comments for the visually impaired I think. Otherwise, it's individual chapters. The audio is Dolby Digital, not HD. Am I missing something here?

 

[Feral]

once you open disc you will see a tree structure on the left panel. I generally uncheck everything and check the folder with the largest size 25-35gb. I put in a copy of hot fuzz to test and it appears to default to the lowest item in the audio tree which in this case was a 5.1 surround track, i uncheck this and check the item above it called DTS-HD MA Surround 5.1 so it might be that you just need to uncheck the current audio and check the other. Details of the file appear in the right window. You might also want to check forced subtitle tracks.