Is it worth the effort setting up a NAS? Do you watch all those films you transferred from disk?

tich77

I think I paid about £165 for a Gen8 on here 2 years ago, so maybe ~£140. Now, you don't need a Xeon CPU if all you want is a NAS (because you have a front-end media player), or a NAS and media player all-in-one; for the former the default i3 will do, for the later the default plus a low-profile Radeon 6xxx or 7xxx series card (cant remember exact model, cant find the buying details in email).

So about £200 for the box and gfx card.  Drives are, well, 2TB Segate 7200rpm £55 at Scan. 3TB 5400 rpm is £88.

TBH, the Gen 8 holds four disks. I'd buy three x 3TB at least. Thats just about in your budget overall. 3 x 3TB will give you 6TB under Synology DSM (dont dont dont go RAID0 and stripe them as 1 x 9TB volume; one drive fails and you have lost the lot). Likewise, dont go for anything less than 3TB drives as you *will* run out of room. You can then add a fourth drive when budget allows, and Synology will extend the volume size to 9TB without issue.

One option; buy the Gen8, gfx card and a single 2nd hand 500GB/1TB drive and "play" with Synology and/or *Elec/Kodi. Then, when budget allows, buy 4 identical drives and roll it out for real?

The comment regarding whole disk copy... well, if you "rip" a BD to disk "with care", keep only the audio track you want, and are careful with the quality settings, there is little discernible difference between a 10GB 1080p rip and a 30GB vanilla copy. There *is* a discernible difference between the rip, and an on-line 1080p stream (and no issue with QoS, bandwidth stutters, the odd drop down to SD quality due to network conditions, etc).

mushii

I have had both HP Microserver and Synology. I personally loved the microserver, but it didnt always have the highest WAF. The Synology is far easier, if she cant get Plex to work, she just power-cycles the Synology and everything comes back up. Although we only use Plex for music today, ripping BD's was too much of a ball-ache to maintain. If I really love a movie I will buy the disk and watch it in my cinema room, otherwise for casual viewing streaming is your friend, its cheap and its convenient.

Harkon321

Having never done it since the days of DVD...

How long are we talking to rip a Bluray in full?  
How much longer to mess about with handbrake, stripping out trailer/menus/subtitles etc?

duffbeerdrinker

Depends on the spec of your PC and the quality settings that you use.

mushii

Too long imho and as @duffbeerdrinker said, it depends on the spec of your pc, quality settings etc. You are talking multiples of hours per disk, that is once you have finalised all of your settings which could be a day of trial and error on its own.
Honestly it is why i gave up. I was messing around upto half a day per disk by the time I was finished on an i7 with 12Gb RAM. Yes you can go and do other things whilst it is ripping (assuming nothing goes wrong) but for me it wasn't worth the sacrifice. I seldom watch the same movie more than once in 6 months. So for the extra 2 minutes per year to load a disk up, vs 3-4 hours ripping, it was a no brainer. Plus even when I ripped DVDs I still kept and stored them all, so I couldn't even use the space argument.

exponential

Of course.... apologies.

Sloppy Bob

I don't think it is. Do check with a mod if you need clarification though.

exponential

I have an HP Envy and the spec is as follows:

Intel® Core™ i7-8550U ProcessorMemory: 8 GB RAM / 16 GB Intel® Optane™Storage: 1 TB HDDGraphics: NVIDIA GeForce MX150 4 GBI'm unsure if the above would be adequate for ripping stuff at a reasonable speed?
Having said that, reading the recent comments has made me doubt this.
The time, effort, fail rates etc etc has kind of opened my eyes to the reality of it all.

I'm still on the fence looking in though...

Sloppy Bob

Ripping doesn't need much processor speed, it's more important that the Bluray drive has a decent read speed.

Compressing video, which is what the other posters are talking about, is very processor intensive and can be a hit or miss. Ripping to an MKV is simple and just takes an initial bit of trial and error or reading to make sure you're ripping what you need and leaving what you don't.

exponential

Hi.

The link you posted earlier was very very helpful.
It scared me at first as it all seemed incredibly complicated but then I noticed the post date..
.2009.

I skipped forward a good few pages (to the end) and realised that technology and time taken to burn has improved dramatically. Thank god!

I have my wife on board now.
Not for the NAS though, but the external HDD connected to the shield. I think that may be the way forward....

I haven't completely discounted a NAS though...