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I have a pretty extensive blu-ray collection (almost 500 movies now, about 40 complete series). I almost never watch blu-rays directly, because I don't want to

I have a pretty extensive blu-ray collection (almost 500 movies now, about 40 complete series). I almost never watch blu-rays directly, because I don't want to muck with physical discs. Immediately after buying a movie, I remove the DRM with MakeMKV, and put it onto a Jellyfin server. I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies, but I think I'm ethically in the clear; I'm not distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for anyone to demonstrate any damages from my habits. Streaming is absolutely more convenient than physical discs, but it's also objectively horrible for a company to be able to arbitrarily remove my media. With my discs, I always have a physical copy, so it's more failure-proof. That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and it's something that really is limited to geeky people. Sure, as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten only worse. Blu-rays really aren't being produced anymore, so I suspect that the only sustainable preservation effort will end up being piracy, and this has been an issue long enough that the large media companies cannot pretend to not understand that.

krustyburger 3y ago
Isn’t ripping your own media the sort of use case where Plex really shines as a solution and is fairly user friendly?
- izacus 3y ago
  That's that the original poster means with "Jellyfin", it's just an OSS version of the same type of software.
- jokethrowaway 3y ago
  Nowhere near user friendly for a large part of the population
  - HumblyTossed 3y ago
    True, but given legal constraints on ripping, etc. it would be nearly impossible for anyone to make it drop dead simple.
  - account42 3y ago
    How much of that is just learned helplessness though? IME ordinary people can manage to surpass most technical hurdles if they have the motivation to do so.
- tombert 3y ago
  I mean, it's "user friendly" in the sense that it's the easiest solution, but it still requires understanding how servers work, knowing how to administer a RAID, knowing what kind of transcoding settings to set etc. Also, I think anyone that tells you that you can just have always-online media that you don't have to babysit is lying. As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. Your server will break at some point, for no apparent reason, and you're going to have to fix it. Usually the fixes are easy on their own, but you end up accidentally nuking the RAID and losing all your rips. It's hardly "user friendly". This isn't crapping on Plex, it's sort of the nature of the beast
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    You don't need a RAID. Just have 2 hard drives and copy stuff from one folder to another. Click skip all for identical files that already exist. I've had jellyfin serving my music, family videos and youtube rips (e.g. university lectures) for years. Haven't had to touch it since I set it up. I just plop files into folders and it picks them up. I got a lot of family videos from my mom, who keeps them on her computer plus an external hard drive, which she brought to me to copy. Copying files to USB drives as a backup and sharing that is pretty understandable for non tech people.
    - account42 3y ago
      If you don't have raid you at least should have some application-level checksums - ideally error correction codes.
  - mastax 3y ago
    There are NAS devices from a bunch of manufacturers where you can just buy them, plug them in, run through the setup wizard, and click install on the Plex app in their built in App Store. Not much more difficult than getting printer drivers installed. That’s certainly more than many people are able (or willing) to put up with, and it requires a several hundred dollar investment. But NAS ease of use for common tasks is pretty good theee days.
    - 3y ago
- m463 3y ago
  I think plex sort of sold out. Jellyfin is under your control.
dfee 3y ago
How big of a NAS do you have?
- compsciphd 3y ago
  a single 1080p bluray movie (not including extras on the disc) is generally going to be in the low to mid 20GBs to 40GB range. Lets take 40GB for a fairly conservative measure. a single 8TB drive can therefore fit 200 (or possibly more) movies (or double for 16GB drives). i.e. one doesn't need "crazy" (i.e. more than a handful of consumer hard drives) amount of storage to store a lot of bluray movies and tv shows and keep them online available to you.
  - vondur 3y ago
    I compress mine using Handbrake. It gets them down to the 2.5->8GB per movie range.
    - tombert 3y ago
      I used to compress them and generally that's fine, but honestly storage has gotten cheap enough to where I don't bother. Every now and then the compression would introduce artifacts, even at a relatively low CRF level in ffmpeg, and just for peace of mind I decided to keep the raw movies. That said, since I have an elaborate tape backup system now, I've debated keeping the "masters" as archives on the tapes, and keeping compressed versions for streaming, but laziness has kind of won out on that.
      - extragood 3y ago
        Agreed on your points about cheap storage and compression artifacts. I've entertained setting up a tape drive local backup for my NAS (4x 14 TB) for a few years. Is it worthwhile from your experience?
        tombert 3y ago
        Yes, the tape drive is something I am very happy that I ended up doing. I have two LTO-6 tape drives. They only connect via SAS, which is a little annoying, but I bought a 2-port used SAS card on ebay for $20. I ended up buying a pack of like 100 LTO-6 tapes on eBay two years ago for a steal, like $150 in total. Each tape is 2.5TB, so I can pretty easily back up my movies. Each movies is written to two separate tapes. I keep a spreadsheet of which tape every movie lives, in case I need to restore a specific backup. I would really like to get an LTO-7 or LTO-8 drive with Thunderbolt, but they cost an arm and a leg even used on eBay right now. If you get lucky, an external SAS LTO-6 drive can be had for about $200-$300. It's a slightly expensive up-front cost I'll admit, however, it came after I was using Google archive storage, and when I did a restore of 21TB of movies, the next day I had a bill for like $700! It's saved my ass one time thus far; I accidentally broke my ZFS RAID and lost everything, but fortunately I was able to restore all my blu-ray rips from tape, and it was pretty easy, and more importantly, didn't cost me anything extra. If you decide to go down this road, I do recommend getting one that has support for LTFS; otherwise you're going to be stuck using tar commands I think.
screamingninja 3y ago
Do you watch those movies / series more than once? I have always thought of Blu-ray disks like books. You consume it and then lend it to a friend. I get that this is not what the media companies would want, but purchasing media/books and not using them more than once just feels wrong.
- tombert 3y ago
  My rule of thumb has generally been "if there's any chance I'll want to watch the movie more than once, I'll buy the blu-ray." Until about two years ago, I was happy enough to pay for two streaming services (HBO Max and Hulu), along with Amazon Prime, and I treated that like my "rental store". The first viewing would be to see if I like the movie, and if I did then I would immediately order the blu-ray. Now I've canceled all my streaming services because I don't want to pay for a million of them. Just a note, I will very frequently put a movie or TV series on in the background while I work on other things, probably even more frequently than I turn on music. I just like having noise from a movie or show that's familiar for me.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    mostly the same... still have Amazon Prime and Netflix for my SO... I'd be fine dropping them all.
    - tombert 3y ago
      It's just gotten farcical. I am not opposed to paying for my entertainment, but I'm not going to pay in perpetuity $15 a month to ten different services when they will happily delete the content I like for a tax writeoff and replace it with reality TV. I haven't even used Amazon Prime streaming since they started forcing ads on us. It's how I justify running a server 24/7; the increased power costs are lower than what I'd need to pay to have all the major streaming services every month.
- nox101 3y ago
  I am slightly embarrassed to say that yes, I watch movies over and over. All of them off of a shared hard drive using Kodi on an Apple TV to watch. I recently through away all my CDs, DVDs, and BluRay after carrying them from apartment to apartment for years (in notebooks) and never once opening them during those years. As for the embarrassment. I get from some POV it's a waste of time but I easily have a list of ~400 movies all of which I've watched 3-20 times each. Examples might be a movie like The Matrix I'm sure I've watch 10+ times. A movie like Harvey, 2 or 3.
lloeki 3y ago
> I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies At least in France (possibly EU) it is (droit à la copie privée), there's even a tax for that, paid on every storage device, whether or not it's intended to store such media. Yup the tax is about paying for a copy of something you already own. You can rip anything all you want from a source medium you own. But you can't fetch it from another source even if you do own an original medium and the resulting data is 1:1 identical down to the last literal bit. The bits have a legal colour depending on where they come from!
- thfuran 3y ago
  In the US, you're legally entitled to create a backup copy, but breaking the encryption on the disc to actually do so is illegal.
- tombert 3y ago
  I believe in the states, it's technically illegal to break DRM most of the time, though I think there's a million possible exceptions, and I don't know how much it has actually been tested in court. I figure, though, that if I'm buying a legit copy of the blu-ray, and I'm not distributing copies to people, I'm probably not very high up on Disney's "sue them" list, even if I am technically breaking a rule.
  - sp332 3y ago
    Ripping your own media is a civil violation, small stakes for a blu-ray collection. Where people really get in trouble is distribution. Private sharing like a Plex server among friends could get you in more trouble, but public sharing like bittorrent, or anything commercial like charging for access to your Plex, is where it really starts to attract attention from the lawyers.
    - tombert 3y ago
      Yeah, more or less what I figured. Right now at least, I don't even have the port opened on my network, so the only way to watch it is to be logged in via my network, or do some kind of VPN/proxy into the network. I really doubt that it would be worth it for a company to sue me for it. To be honest, I think that it's a pretty stupid law; obviously distributing the media makes sense to be illegal, but I think it's idiotic to make breaking DRM illegal.
wnevets 3y ago
does the iOS Jellyfin client have Chromecast support yet? That is my main roadblock to switching to jellyfin for everything.
AzzyHN 3y ago
As far as I'm aware, it's perfectly legal (in America) to make copies of media for your own use, even if that means removing the DRM.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  You're probably right, because the part of DMCA 1201 that criminalizes individual acts of breaking DRM has about 40 different exceptions, plus a general "this is not intended to overturn fair use" clause, plus a rule-making process that lets the Copyright Office add more exceptions if they feel they are necessary. Given that there is already caselaw in favor of format shifting (e.g. RIAA v. Diamond) it's highly unlikely a court is going to say format shifting is wrong if DRM is involved. None of that matters because nobody is going to try and litigate against individual disc rippers, they are going to litigate against the people who actually wrote the ripping software, and DMCA 1201 is far more harsh to them. There is basically no exception to the prohibition on DRM-breaking tools - I'm not even 100% sure that, say, verifying each individual's usecase before letting them break DRM is enough to escape DMCA 1201's ire.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- cmgbhm 3y ago
  IANAL but things are still like they were with DeCSS. One of the problems the DMCA made is breaking media copy protection (like makemkv) is separate from why (making the legal backup copy)
- mlrtime 3y ago
  Until there is a court case on this (I don't know if there is) nobody will know.
rrix2 3y ago
> as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten only worse. Jellyfin supports multiple users, she can mail you some disks ;)
- xyst 3y ago
  Now op has to teach mom how to access vpn.
  - baby_souffle 3y ago
    > Now op has to teach mom how to access vpn. Or OP can just host public; I've got some disks I can send in, too. I'll chip in $/month for OP's troubles.
    - generalizations 3y ago
      And suddenly GP's ethics are no longer in the clear.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
        Yep, the moment money changes hands, things become messy. It is relatively easy to argue 'personal use, fuck off', but it is much harder to defend 'I am only getting $x for this'.
      - account42 3y ago
        That's your opinion. Anything to back it up?
        generalizations 3y ago
        Why don't you tell me why you think I'm wrong.
    - 3y ago
SamuelAdams 3y ago
I tried JellyFin but I cannot get Dolby Digital sound to play to my Denon receiver. Plex handles this fine on the same speaker setup and configuration and film. The last time I tried this was maybe 2 months ago. Is this something you are able to work around?
- weberer 3y ago
  I play videos on LibreElec using the Jellyfin plug-in and everything seems to work fine. The audio signal goes to the TV via HDMI, then from TV to the sound system via optical cable. Are you connecting directly from the player to the sound system?
davidmurdoch 3y ago
> masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break This should be the tag line for those of us building homelabs for little to no practical reason.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  There is some pleasure to be derived from bending matter to one's will.
  - transpute 3y ago
    TS-435XeU NAS configured because it "should exist": 1U short-depth (12") chassis Low-power Arm SoC 4x3.5HDD, 2xM.2 storage 2x10GbE, 2x2.5GbE NICs QNAP OS replaced by Devuan (no systemd) serial port ECC SODIMM
  - aoeusnth1 3y ago
    Well put, I like doing things because I can, because it’s something I can control and own fully myself. It’s a playground, and the more challenges I overcome, the more fulfilling it is. Any practicality and ease is irrelevant or even counterproductive to its true purpose.
javajosh 3y ago
Isn't this a device waiting to happen? A small form factor PC with a blu ray reader that lets you watch blu rays. But it also rips them (ideally while playing!) such that you never need to put the disc in again. Slap a couple 20T drives in there, charge $1k for it. Don't even let it connect to the internet.
- tombert 3y ago
  That would be cool but I suspect a legal nightmare. It's one thing to have a personal collection of movies that you painstakingly ripped on your own, but if you were to try and sell a machine that automatically circumvented DRM, I cannot imagine that I wouldn't get sued and/or arrested by multiple entities. This of course, makes me sad, because it would be nice to have a system that wasn't just a nerdy custom setup.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    So why not a machine with everything but the ripping part (being pre-installed)? Why must running a media server be such a chore when it's just TBs of movie files?
    - aembleton 3y ago
      Because it's more than just some movie files. I think most media servers also have an operating system, software to transcode and serve the media files. You will also want a client to be able to read the served content and your server needs to stay up to date with the client.
      - account42 3y ago
        I think you misunderstood the parent post. No one is denying the complexity of a full-featured media server. The question is why there is no one providing a solution to manage that complexity for you (ideally by providing a pre-configured device) even if that couldn't legally include the ripping part of the workflow and you had to provide it with your own ripped media files.
prepend 3y ago
I did something similar with all my kids movies. I just ripped their dvds because they were destroying them every few months and I probably bought Madagascar three times before ripping it. The UX is better than any streaming service. Fortunately I had a synology nas already as a backup server so I just installed Plex on it and it was so easy. This was probably 15 years ago and I still have all those video files and the dvds are in a box somewhere untouched.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Jellyfin + Infuse + Apple TV is so easy even the kids can find their movies instantly. Only real maintenance I’ve done is replace the DVD rips with Blu-ray rips slowly over time as I figure out which ones are most watched.
  - Kerbonut 3y ago
    What is Infuse?
    - sussmannbaka 3y ago
      Think Kodi but made to be useable by users instead of by people who will edit xmls
    - CobaltFire 3y ago
      It’s a very slick app on AppleTV. It can operate as a front end for media servers or it can act as a player for a network share. Super easy to run as a player for a network share, you just lose by account things (save your spot and pickup anywhere, content filtering, etc).
GauntletWizard 3y ago
My plan is to make backup copies of the DVDs whole, so I have all of the features and extras, and am certain that I can verify that they are the exact blu-rays that other people have. We don't exactly have a list of hashes of the entire contents of the discs, but the volume keys will decrypt the data, and there's checksums on that, so we should be able to verify all the way down the chain. (If anyone knows how to do the actual checking, I'm all ears - I'm an Exact Audio Copy guy for my CDs)
- bombcar 3y ago
  The problem is that Blu-ray codecs stink. A 4K Blu-ray rip can be like 80gb, whereas a recode will fit on a dvd.
  - GauntletWizard 3y ago
    I don't disagree, but at the same time - a 20tb HD is $300, and it can store 250 disks. Even with a 500 disk collection, and redundancy, I'm looking at only about $1200 in storage costs. Even assuming replacing one of those disks per year, the price of storage is only going down. Not that I'm not planning on re-encoding for everyday use, but I'll take the hit in storage costs to keep the "originals" around.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      My originals are the Blu-rays themselves; ready to be ripped again if needed.
      - account42 3y ago
        If you only have one backup copy of the originals then you'll have zero backup copies of the originals when you need them.
    - account42 3y ago
      Somewhat agree. I do still re-encode most Blu-Rays to get rid of the black bars that are encoded in the video stream because apparently mandating players support arbitrary video aspect ratios would make too much sense.
rakoo 3y ago
> I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, That's why we have to post individualistically and learn that everything is social, that solutions are societal. Your mom might never be able to self-host, and you might never be able to make the wine that you drink. That's fine, and that's why we share responsibilities as a group. Be the one that "knows how to do that king of things" for your group, host services for you, your mom, your friends... It's fun to do and a very good way to collectively re-appropriate our digital lives. You'll be the technical person, but all governance, directions, values can be decided collectively: that's what democratic societies are, after all. If you can't/don't want to be there 24/7, let the group know that it might break but maybe the group will decide that it's fine enough.
- tombert 3y ago
  I am that person for my parents. I actually did set up a small Jellyfin instance for their house to serve their home movies. I'm also the person they usually call with any kind of tech support questions.
  - rakoo 3y ago
    Good, then you have a group of people being able to have this service thanks to you ! That's the goal, and already much more than what many of us here are doing.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  I agree with you and unfortunately if me and some friends decide to rip our media to a server and share it, there’s some men with guns that might decide to interfere with our cooperation. In practice I see plenty of people sharing access to plex servers, but it is unsettling that someone could somewhat arbitrarily be subject to violent interference for sharing media with friends.
- amrangaye 3y ago
  lol - just out of curiosity: are you doing this yourself? Provide tech support to all your aunties and uncles, cousins, friends etc (already bad enough - now formalized) then you add installation and maintenance (including on all their devices), keeping everything updated etc. And having to troubleshoot every single problem they run into. “make decisions as a group” sounds great and democratic - but you really think anyone cares about this enough amongst non-techies to be part of all this “decision making” about what apps to use? And this is in addition to your day job. And please don’t say well we can evangelize - again: no one has time for that. It sounds great esp to us techies - that’s how WE would solve the problem as a group. Doing that with non-techies esp with family and friends would be HORRIBLE in practice. Unfortunately I have a feeling I’ll get responses of the type “well you never know till you try” and “maybe YOU can’t / don’t want to do it but others will”. To which I say more power to you :) but this is def not a solution outside of hacker forums where we can pore over tech surveillance and freedom etc. and create a bubble where everything is libertarian and can be solved if only we had the right systems in place for the normies.
Bluestrike2 3y ago
> ... I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten only worse. I setup a Jellyfin server for my parents. It works, but ripping blu-rays--even with my efforts to largely automate and simplify things--is a nuisance they tend not to bother with. You can expect some phone calls and/or stacks of discs that were "forgotten" when you're around :). Even then, it's still a more pleasant experience for them than the fragmented mess streaming has become, where added friction and annoyance are the glue that hold streaming apps together. IMO, setting up your own server is worth the occasional added hassle. Not that it eliminates streaming, sadly. Now, if you're willing to spend a large sum of money to make the process painless, Kaleidescape[0] makes home media servers for the ultra high-end home theater/home AV market. They originally sold massive 300 Blu-ray disc changers you'd hook up to their system, adding more as your collection grew, but now you buy servers from them and download movies with with Blu-Ray-level bitrates from their store. Of course, the same ~$300-500/TB for just the servers alone will buy you a hell of a lot of tech support for a Plex/Jellyfin setup. 0. https://www.kaleidescape.com/ https://www.kaleidescape.com/
Dalewyn 3y ago
>I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies, but I think I'm ethically in the clear; I'm not distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for anyone to demonstrate any damages from my habits. Obligatory IANAL. You should be in the clear (including the circumvention of DRM) since all you're doing is making an archival copy for your own personal use. Legalese: * https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 * https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
GTP 3y ago
>That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and it's something that really is limited to geeky people But the others could just put the disk in the reader, without needing any server. Is it so inconvinient?
account42 3y ago
Same here, except my collection is about an order of magnitude smaller. Seems absolutely dystopian to me to have to maintain a continuous relationship with some company to re-watch your favorite movies. Unless your collection gets as big as yours you don't really need to maintain a server - a harddrive full of media files works pretty well. > Blu-rays really aren't being produced anymore. Wait what - since when?

krustyburger 3y ago

Isn’t ripping your own media the sort of use case where Plex really shines as a solution and is fairly user friendly?

izacus 3y ago
That's that the original poster means with "Jellyfin", it's just an OSS version of the same type of software.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
Nowhere near user friendly for a large part of the population
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  True, but given legal constraints on ripping, etc. it would be nearly impossible for anyone to make it drop dead simple.
- account42 3y ago
  How much of that is just learned helplessness though? IME ordinary people can manage to surpass most technical hurdles if they have the motivation to do so.
tombert 3y ago
I mean, it's "user friendly" in the sense that it's the easiest solution, but it still requires understanding how servers work, knowing how to administer a RAID, knowing what kind of transcoding settings to set etc. Also, I think anyone that tells you that you can just have always-online media that you don't have to babysit is lying. As far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. Your server will break at some point, for no apparent reason, and you're going to have to fix it. Usually the fixes are easy on their own, but you end up accidentally nuking the RAID and losing all your rips. It's hardly "user friendly". This isn't crapping on Plex, it's sort of the nature of the beast
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  You don't need a RAID. Just have 2 hard drives and copy stuff from one folder to another. Click skip all for identical files that already exist. I've had jellyfin serving my music, family videos and youtube rips (e.g. university lectures) for years. Haven't had to touch it since I set it up. I just plop files into folders and it picks them up. I got a lot of family videos from my mom, who keeps them on her computer plus an external hard drive, which she brought to me to copy. Copying files to USB drives as a backup and sharing that is pretty understandable for non tech people.
  - account42 3y ago
    If you don't have raid you at least should have some application-level checksums - ideally error correction codes.
- mastax 3y ago
  There are NAS devices from a bunch of manufacturers where you can just buy them, plug them in, run through the setup wizard, and click install on the Plex app in their built in App Store. Not much more difficult than getting printer drivers installed. That’s certainly more than many people are able (or willing) to put up with, and it requires a several hundred dollar investment. But NAS ease of use for common tasks is pretty good theee days.
  - 3y ago
m463 3y ago
I think plex sort of sold out. Jellyfin is under your control.

dfee 3y ago

How big of a NAS do you have?

compsciphd 3y ago
a single 1080p bluray movie (not including extras on the disc) is generally going to be in the low to mid 20GBs to 40GB range. Lets take 40GB for a fairly conservative measure. a single 8TB drive can therefore fit 200 (or possibly more) movies (or double for 16GB drives). i.e. one doesn't need "crazy" (i.e. more than a handful of consumer hard drives) amount of storage to store a lot of bluray movies and tv shows and keep them online available to you.
- vondur 3y ago
  I compress mine using Handbrake. It gets them down to the 2.5->8GB per movie range.
  - tombert 3y ago
    I used to compress them and generally that's fine, but honestly storage has gotten cheap enough to where I don't bother. Every now and then the compression would introduce artifacts, even at a relatively low CRF level in ffmpeg, and just for peace of mind I decided to keep the raw movies. That said, since I have an elaborate tape backup system now, I've debated keeping the "masters" as archives on the tapes, and keeping compressed versions for streaming, but laziness has kind of won out on that.
    - extragood 3y ago
      Agreed on your points about cheap storage and compression artifacts. I've entertained setting up a tape drive local backup for my NAS (4x 14 TB) for a few years. Is it worthwhile from your experience?
      - tombert 3y ago
        Yes, the tape drive is something I am very happy that I ended up doing. I have two LTO-6 tape drives. They only connect via SAS, which is a little annoying, but I bought a 2-port used SAS card on ebay for $20. I ended up buying a pack of like 100 LTO-6 tapes on eBay two years ago for a steal, like $150 in total. Each tape is 2.5TB, so I can pretty easily back up my movies. Each movies is written to two separate tapes. I keep a spreadsheet of which tape every movie lives, in case I need to restore a specific backup. I would really like to get an LTO-7 or LTO-8 drive with Thunderbolt, but they cost an arm and a leg even used on eBay right now. If you get lucky, an external SAS LTO-6 drive can be had for about $200-$300. It's a slightly expensive up-front cost I'll admit, however, it came after I was using Google archive storage, and when I did a restore of 21TB of movies, the next day I had a bill for like $700! It's saved my ass one time thus far; I accidentally broke my ZFS RAID and lost everything, but fortunately I was able to restore all my blu-ray rips from tape, and it was pretty easy, and more importantly, didn't cost me anything extra. If you decide to go down this road, I do recommend getting one that has support for LTFS; otherwise you're going to be stuck using tar commands I think.

screamingninja 3y ago

Do you watch those movies / series more than once? I have always thought of Blu-ray disks like books. You consume it and then lend it to a friend. I get that this is not what the media companies would want, but purchasing media/books and not using them more than once just feels wrong.

tombert 3y ago
My rule of thumb has generally been "if there's any chance I'll want to watch the movie more than once, I'll buy the blu-ray." Until about two years ago, I was happy enough to pay for two streaming services (HBO Max and Hulu), along with Amazon Prime, and I treated that like my "rental store". The first viewing would be to see if I like the movie, and if I did then I would immediately order the blu-ray. Now I've canceled all my streaming services because I don't want to pay for a million of them. Just a note, I will very frequently put a movie or TV series on in the background while I work on other things, probably even more frequently than I turn on music. I just like having noise from a movie or show that's familiar for me.
- tracker1 3y ago
  mostly the same... still have Amazon Prime and Netflix for my SO... I'd be fine dropping them all.
  - tombert 3y ago
    It's just gotten farcical. I am not opposed to paying for my entertainment, but I'm not going to pay in perpetuity $15 a month to ten different services when they will happily delete the content I like for a tax writeoff and replace it with reality TV. I haven't even used Amazon Prime streaming since they started forcing ads on us. It's how I justify running a server 24/7; the increased power costs are lower than what I'd need to pay to have all the major streaming services every month.
nox101 3y ago
I am slightly embarrassed to say that yes, I watch movies over and over. All of them off of a shared hard drive using Kodi on an Apple TV to watch. I recently through away all my CDs, DVDs, and BluRay after carrying them from apartment to apartment for years (in notebooks) and never once opening them during those years. As for the embarrassment. I get from some POV it's a waste of time but I easily have a list of ~400 movies all of which I've watched 3-20 times each. Examples might be a movie like The Matrix I'm sure I've watch 10+ times. A movie like Harvey, 2 or 3.

lloeki 3y ago

> I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies At least in France (possibly EU) it is (droit à la copie privée), there's even a tax for that, paid on every storage device, whether or not it's intended to store such media. Yup the tax is about paying for a copy of something you already own. You can rip anything all you want from a source medium you own. But you can't fetch it from another source even if you do own an original medium and the resulting data is 1:1 identical down to the last literal bit. The bits have a legal colour depending on where they come from!

thfuran 3y ago
In the US, you're legally entitled to create a backup copy, but breaking the encryption on the disc to actually do so is illegal.
tombert 3y ago
I believe in the states, it's technically illegal to break DRM most of the time, though I think there's a million possible exceptions, and I don't know how much it has actually been tested in court. I figure, though, that if I'm buying a legit copy of the blu-ray, and I'm not distributing copies to people, I'm probably not very high up on Disney's "sue them" list, even if I am technically breaking a rule.
- sp332 3y ago
  Ripping your own media is a civil violation, small stakes for a blu-ray collection. Where people really get in trouble is distribution. Private sharing like a Plex server among friends could get you in more trouble, but public sharing like bittorrent, or anything commercial like charging for access to your Plex, is where it really starts to attract attention from the lawyers.
  - tombert 3y ago
    Yeah, more or less what I figured. Right now at least, I don't even have the port opened on my network, so the only way to watch it is to be logged in via my network, or do some kind of VPN/proxy into the network. I really doubt that it would be worth it for a company to sue me for it. To be honest, I think that it's a pretty stupid law; obviously distributing the media makes sense to be illegal, but I think it's idiotic to make breaking DRM illegal.

wnevets 3y ago

does the iOS Jellyfin client have Chromecast support yet? That is my main roadblock to switching to jellyfin for everything.

AzzyHN 3y ago

As far as I'm aware, it's perfectly legal (in America) to make copies of media for your own use, even if that means removing the DRM.

kmeisthax 3y ago
You're probably right, because the part of DMCA 1201 that criminalizes individual acts of breaking DRM has about 40 different exceptions, plus a general "this is not intended to overturn fair use" clause, plus a rule-making process that lets the Copyright Office add more exceptions if they feel they are necessary. Given that there is already caselaw in favor of format shifting (e.g. RIAA v. Diamond) it's highly unlikely a court is going to say format shifting is wrong if DRM is involved. None of that matters because nobody is going to try and litigate against individual disc rippers, they are going to litigate against the people who actually wrote the ripping software, and DMCA 1201 is far more harsh to them. There is basically no exception to the prohibition on DRM-breaking tools - I'm not even 100% sure that, say, verifying each individual's usecase before letting them break DRM is enough to escape DMCA 1201's ire.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cmgbhm 3y ago
IANAL but things are still like they were with DeCSS. One of the problems the DMCA made is breaking media copy protection (like makemkv) is separate from why (making the legal backup copy)
mlrtime 3y ago
Until there is a court case on this (I don't know if there is) nobody will know.

rrix2 3y ago

> as a software engineer I know enough to install NixOS and Jellyfin and I even get some kind of masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break, but I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten only worse. Jellyfin supports multiple users, she can mail you some disks ;)

xyst 3y ago
Now op has to teach mom how to access vpn.
- baby_souffle 3y ago
  > Now op has to teach mom how to access vpn. Or OP can just host public; I've got some disks I can send in, too. I'll chip in $/month for OP's troubles.
  - generalizations 3y ago
    And suddenly GP's ethics are no longer in the clear.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
      Yep, the moment money changes hands, things become messy. It is relatively easy to argue 'personal use, fuck off', but it is much harder to defend 'I am only getting $x for this'.
    - account42 3y ago
      That's your opinion. Anything to back it up?
      - generalizations 3y ago
        Why don't you tell me why you think I'm wrong.
  - 3y ago

SamuelAdams 3y ago

I tried JellyFin but I cannot get Dolby Digital sound to play to my Denon receiver. Plex handles this fine on the same speaker setup and configuration and film. The last time I tried this was maybe 2 months ago. Is this something you are able to work around?

weberer 3y ago
I play videos on LibreElec using the Jellyfin plug-in and everything seems to work fine. The audio signal goes to the TV via HDMI, then from TV to the sound system via optical cable. Are you connecting directly from the player to the sound system?

davidmurdoch 3y ago

> masochistic enjoyment from fixing things when they inevitably break This should be the tag line for those of us building homelabs for little to no practical reason.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
There is some pleasure to be derived from bending matter to one's will.
- transpute 3y ago
  TS-435XeU NAS configured because it "should exist": 1U short-depth (12") chassis Low-power Arm SoC 4x3.5HDD, 2xM.2 storage 2x10GbE, 2x2.5GbE NICs QNAP OS replaced by Devuan (no systemd) serial port ECC SODIMM
- aoeusnth1 3y ago
  Well put, I like doing things because I can, because it’s something I can control and own fully myself. It’s a playground, and the more challenges I overcome, the more fulfilling it is. Any practicality and ease is irrelevant or even counterproductive to its true purpose.

javajosh 3y ago

Isn't this a device waiting to happen? A small form factor PC with a blu ray reader that lets you watch blu rays. But it also rips them (ideally while playing!) such that you never need to put the disc in again. Slap a couple 20T drives in there, charge $1k for it. Don't even let it connect to the internet.

tombert 3y ago
That would be cool but I suspect a legal nightmare. It's one thing to have a personal collection of movies that you painstakingly ripped on your own, but if you were to try and sell a machine that automatically circumvented DRM, I cannot imagine that I wouldn't get sued and/or arrested by multiple entities. This of course, makes me sad, because it would be nice to have a system that wasn't just a nerdy custom setup.
- Solvency 3y ago
  So why not a machine with everything but the ripping part (being pre-installed)? Why must running a media server be such a chore when it's just TBs of movie files?
  - aembleton 3y ago
    Because it's more than just some movie files. I think most media servers also have an operating system, software to transcode and serve the media files. You will also want a client to be able to read the served content and your server needs to stay up to date with the client.
    - account42 3y ago
      I think you misunderstood the parent post. No one is denying the complexity of a full-featured media server. The question is why there is no one providing a solution to manage that complexity for you (ideally by providing a pre-configured device) even if that couldn't legally include the ripping part of the workflow and you had to provide it with your own ripped media files.

prepend 3y ago

I did something similar with all my kids movies. I just ripped their dvds because they were destroying them every few months and I probably bought Madagascar three times before ripping it. The UX is better than any streaming service. Fortunately I had a synology nas already as a backup server so I just installed Plex on it and it was so easy. This was probably 15 years ago and I still have all those video files and the dvds are in a box somewhere untouched.

bombcar 3y ago
Jellyfin + Infuse + Apple TV is so easy even the kids can find their movies instantly. Only real maintenance I’ve done is replace the DVD rips with Blu-ray rips slowly over time as I figure out which ones are most watched.
- Kerbonut 3y ago
  What is Infuse?
  - sussmannbaka 3y ago
    Think Kodi but made to be useable by users instead of by people who will edit xmls
  - CobaltFire 3y ago
    It’s a very slick app on AppleTV. It can operate as a front end for media servers or it can act as a player for a network share. Super easy to run as a player for a network share, you just lose by account things (save your spot and pickup anywhere, content filtering, etc).

GauntletWizard 3y ago

My plan is to make backup copies of the DVDs whole, so I have all of the features and extras, and am certain that I can verify that they are the exact blu-rays that other people have. We don't exactly have a list of hashes of the entire contents of the discs, but the volume keys will decrypt the data, and there's checksums on that, so we should be able to verify all the way down the chain. (If anyone knows how to do the actual checking, I'm all ears - I'm an Exact Audio Copy guy for my CDs)

bombcar 3y ago
The problem is that Blu-ray codecs stink. A 4K Blu-ray rip can be like 80gb, whereas a recode will fit on a dvd.
- GauntletWizard 3y ago
  I don't disagree, but at the same time - a 20tb HD is $300, and it can store 250 disks. Even with a 500 disk collection, and redundancy, I'm looking at only about $1200 in storage costs. Even assuming replacing one of those disks per year, the price of storage is only going down. Not that I'm not planning on re-encoding for everyday use, but I'll take the hit in storage costs to keep the "originals" around.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    My originals are the Blu-rays themselves; ready to be ripped again if needed.
    - account42 3y ago
      If you only have one backup copy of the originals then you'll have zero backup copies of the originals when you need them.
  - account42 3y ago
    Somewhat agree. I do still re-encode most Blu-Rays to get rid of the black bars that are encoded in the video stream because apparently mandating players support arbitrary video aspect ratios would make too much sense.

rakoo 3y ago

> I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, That's why we have to post individualistically and learn that everything is social, that solutions are societal. Your mom might never be able to self-host, and you might never be able to make the wine that you drink. That's fine, and that's why we share responsibilities as a group. Be the one that "knows how to do that king of things" for your group, host services for you, your mom, your friends... It's fun to do and a very good way to collectively re-appropriate our digital lives. You'll be the technical person, but all governance, directions, values can be decided collectively: that's what democratic societies are, after all. If you can't/don't want to be there 24/7, let the group know that it might break but maybe the group will decide that it's fine enough.

tombert 3y ago
I am that person for my parents. I actually did set up a small Jellyfin instance for their house to serve their home movies. I'm also the person they usually call with any kind of tech support questions.
- rakoo 3y ago
  Good, then you have a group of people being able to have this service thanks to you ! That's the goal, and already much more than what many of us here are doing.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
I agree with you and unfortunately if me and some friends decide to rip our media to a server and share it, there’s some men with guns that might decide to interfere with our cooperation. In practice I see plenty of people sharing access to plex servers, but it is unsettling that someone could somewhat arbitrarily be subject to violent interference for sharing media with friends.
amrangaye 3y ago
lol - just out of curiosity: are you doing this yourself? Provide tech support to all your aunties and uncles, cousins, friends etc (already bad enough - now formalized) then you add installation and maintenance (including on all their devices), keeping everything updated etc. And having to troubleshoot every single problem they run into. “make decisions as a group” sounds great and democratic - but you really think anyone cares about this enough amongst non-techies to be part of all this “decision making” about what apps to use? And this is in addition to your day job. And please don’t say well we can evangelize - again: no one has time for that. It sounds great esp to us techies - that’s how WE would solve the problem as a group. Doing that with non-techies esp with family and friends would be HORRIBLE in practice. Unfortunately I have a feeling I’ll get responses of the type “well you never know till you try” and “maybe YOU can’t / don’t want to do it but others will”. To which I say more power to you :) but this is def not a solution outside of hacker forums where we can pore over tech surveillance and freedom etc. and create a bubble where everything is libertarian and can be solved if only we had the right systems in place for the normies.

Bluestrike2 3y ago

> ... I cannot imagine my mom going through anything like this, so for her the media landscape has gotten only worse. I setup a Jellyfin server for my parents. It works, but ripping blu-rays--even with my efforts to largely automate and simplify things--is a nuisance they tend not to bother with. You can expect some phone calls and/or stacks of discs that were "forgotten" when you're around :). Even then, it's still a more pleasant experience for them than the fragmented mess streaming has become, where added friction and annoyance are the glue that hold streaming apps together. IMO, setting up your own server is worth the occasional added hassle. Not that it eliminates streaming, sadly. Now, if you're willing to spend a large sum of money to make the process painless, Kaleidescape[0] makes home media servers for the ultra high-end home theater/home AV market. They originally sold massive 300 Blu-ray disc changers you'd hook up to their system, adding more as your collection grew, but now you buy servers from them and download movies with with Blu-Ray-level bitrates from their store. Of course, the same ~$300-500/TB for just the servers alone will buy you a hell of a lot of tech support for a Plex/Jellyfin setup. 0. https://www.kaleidescape.com/ https://www.kaleidescape.com/

Dalewyn 3y ago

>I know it's (probably) not strictly legal for me to break the DRM of my movies, but I think I'm ethically in the clear; I'm not distributing the movies on ThePirateBay or anything, I just watch them within my home network...I think it would be pretty hard for anyone to demonstrate any damages from my habits. Obligatory IANAL. You should be in the clear (including the circumvention of DRM) since all you're doing is making an archival copy for your own personal use. Legalese: * https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117 * https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

GTP 3y ago

>That said, maintaining a server is a huge pain in the ass, and it's something that really is limited to geeky people But the others could just put the disk in the reader, without needing any server. Is it so inconvinient?

account42 3y ago

Same here, except my collection is about an order of magnitude smaller. Seems absolutely dystopian to me to have to maintain a continuous relationship with some company to re-watch your favorite movies. Unless your collection gets as big as yours you don't really need to maintain a server - a harddrive full of media files works pretty well. > Blu-rays really aren't being produced anymore. Wait what - since when?