cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/484144
I recently started buying movies on Vudu. I was struggling for a long time with whether or not I wanted to collect media on physical disks or digitally.
Right now that’s what I’m doing but there’s always the looming fear of anything I buy being taken away if the service gets shut down.
I’m curious how others keep their media collections. Are you a Blu-ray or 4k UHD collector? Do you use a digital service like Vudu or something similar?
Tell me your thoughts!
I mostly collect Blu-Rays. Though, I increasingly find myself buying 4K Blu-Rays. I buy DVDs when they’re the only option.
I store them in 5-tier Atlantic Mitsu racks. I currently have four of these racks. I use them because they’re cheap and flexible in terms of placement.
With movies and shows that I’m viewing for the first time, I’ll use the Blu-Ray player. Otherwise, I’ll pop them in my PC, run them through MakeMKV and Handbrake, and then copy the files over to my server. I have two WD Red 8TB hard drives in my server, though I’ve only just about filled up the first one.
What is your Handbrake process, out of curiosity?
I have a few presets, but it’s mostly the HQ 480P30 preset for SD, HQ 1080P30 preset for HD video, the H.265 MKV 2160 4K preset for 4K video - with some modifications: RF18 - Keeps the quality very close to the original while shrinking file sizes significantly Same Framerate as Source - Otherwise, Handbrake ends up going with 30 FPS, which isn’t quite right, and your video will play a scosche faster than it should. Subtitle Passthrough - Though I often extract Blu-Ray subtitles with gMKVExtractGUI and convert them to text-based SRT files so Jellyfin apps on mobile devices and streaming boxes can show subititles without my server having to transcode. HD Audio to FLAC - Most devices can’t play formats like DTS, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. Though, depending on your situation, it might be a good idea to also have audio converted to AAC for devices which don’t support FLAC, like Apple devices.
I also have the speed preset in the Video tab set to Medium for HD video because I have a fast 12-core CPU - the AMD 5900X, but if you have a slower CPU, you can just set it to Fast. This preset just makes the file size smaller without affecting quality, but it it’s more computationally-expensive the higher you set it.
Or is this not what you meant?
How big is the usual Blu-ray and UHD file at maximum uncompressed quality when ripped? And how big is it with some level of unnoticable compression?
For a Blu-Ray movie, the uncompressed size will usually be 15-25GB and sometimes as large as 35GB. An uncompressed UHD movie will usually be around 60GB. Since Blu-Rays are usually encoded in H.264 and UHD Blu-Rays are usually encoded as H.265, you can usually expect a file size of around 7GB without any noticeable compression.