4 ms·

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 cons

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.
      - extragood 3y ago
        Thanks for the detailed response! That's really encouraging to hear, and I think thats enough to push me over the edge. Had a close call recently and lost a disk as I was preparing to migrate to my current hardware. I may adopt your 2 tape system as well. It'd be heartbreaking to lose my collection
- Retric 3y ago
  Why bother? You're spending time saving ~50 cents per blue ray and you get some artifacts. You could just buy DVD's if you want to save space and are willing to take a hit to image quality.
  - compsciphd 3y ago
    I think many people dont get this. Let's do simple math. Let's imagine an 8TB drive costs $100 and can store 200 movies as their raw bluray encoding. that means each movie costs 50 cents to store without any real work. If one can divide the space needed by half, one only saved 25c. But how much did it cost to save that 25c. Lets imagine one can encode a movie with x264/5, but it will consume 100watts of cpu power over 10 hours to do that (or a kilowatt total). If one is paying 20c a killowat hour (US national average is 19c a kilowatt hour, california is 33c per google) one just paid 20c more to encode it, so if one cut the size in half, one in practice only saved 5c. If one spent 5-10 minutes setting up the encode, did one spend 5c of one's time doing that? Personally, the setup for me was also 25c worth of time. Now, one can "save more", if one is storing duplicate copies. (i.e. I'm storing it on 2 or more hard drives, not 1), but its still not really that significant. Now, if one isn't spending one's own time and energy to encode it (i.e. is pirating it as others did the work), then perhaps one can argue that a "good" encode vs the raw is better and makes more efficient usage of one's space. But the argument here isn't about pirating, but about storing one's own legally obtained media. As I've argued elsewhere, the only reasonable reason I've found for encoding is that one runs into "physical" space limitations (i.e. how many hard drives one can keep online). I'm just unconvinced that should override the time and cost of doing the encoding oneself.
- vundercind 3y ago
  4.5-10GB in h.265, depending on the movie (length, how many low-contrast scenes, how much quick movement) and how well-tuned the encoder was, is indistinguishable from the 1080p blu ray on my 10’ diagonal screen at 6-10’ viewing distance. 4k, something like 25GB-45GB, depending, but I have several in the teens of GB that I wouldn’t guess weren’t full quality. I reserve full-quality rips for movies I both care about a lot and that benefit from it. I don’t need more than 4.5GB dedicated to Happy Gilmore or what have 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.
    - extragood 3y ago
      Thanks for the detailed response! That's really encouraging to hear, and I think thats enough to push me over the edge. Had a close call recently and lost a disk as I was preparing to migrate to my current hardware. I may adopt your 2 tape system as well. It'd be heartbreaking to lose my collection
Retric 3y ago
Why bother? You're spending time saving ~50 cents per blue ray and you get some artifacts. You could just buy DVD's if you want to save space and are willing to take a hit to image quality.
- compsciphd 3y ago
  I think many people dont get this. Let's do simple math. Let's imagine an 8TB drive costs $100 and can store 200 movies as their raw bluray encoding. that means each movie costs 50 cents to store without any real work. If one can divide the space needed by half, one only saved 25c. But how much did it cost to save that 25c. Lets imagine one can encode a movie with x264/5, but it will consume 100watts of cpu power over 10 hours to do that (or a kilowatt total). If one is paying 20c a killowat hour (US national average is 19c a kilowatt hour, california is 33c per google) one just paid 20c more to encode it, so if one cut the size in half, one in practice only saved 5c. If one spent 5-10 minutes setting up the encode, did one spend 5c of one's time doing that? Personally, the setup for me was also 25c worth of time. Now, one can "save more", if one is storing duplicate copies. (i.e. I'm storing it on 2 or more hard drives, not 1), but its still not really that significant. Now, if one isn't spending one's own time and energy to encode it (i.e. is pirating it as others did the work), then perhaps one can argue that a "good" encode vs the raw is better and makes more efficient usage of one's space. But the argument here isn't about pirating, but about storing one's own legally obtained media. As I've argued elsewhere, the only reasonable reason I've found for encoding is that one runs into "physical" space limitations (i.e. how many hard drives one can keep online). I'm just unconvinced that should override the time and cost of doing the encoding oneself.
vundercind 3y ago
4.5-10GB in h.265, depending on the movie (length, how many low-contrast scenes, how much quick movement) and how well-tuned the encoder was, is indistinguishable from the 1080p blu ray on my 10’ diagonal screen at 6-10’ viewing distance. 4k, something like 25GB-45GB, depending, but I have several in the teens of GB that I wouldn’t guess weren’t full quality. I reserve full-quality rips for movies I both care about a lot and that benefit from it. I don’t need more than 4.5GB dedicated to Happy Gilmore or what have you.