Your input on movie storage - BluRay

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ottozylch46

Weaksauce
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Oct 7, 2009
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I know that storage has become fairly cheap, but was wondering what most people are doing for movie storage. Was curious if you are taking the time to encode to H264 to save on some space or just keeping the full BD rip. The movies I have encoded using RipBot264, at least to my eye, seem identical to the original BD disc in quality. Is it worth it to keep encoding each movie or just keep buying HD's as necessary? Don't really want to end up with 10-15-20 HD's if I don't have to. Pros/Cons on encoding vs keeping full rip, future wise?
Thanks.
 
My setup - WHS, keep the full rip, add hard drives as needed. The time to re-encode is not worth it IMO.
 
Keeping the full rip = waste of space, requires more drives as already noted, uses more electricity to keep all those drives working, etc

Encoding = get 4-6x as many movies on the server, maybe even more, spend less money on more drives, uses less electricity to keep it all up and running, and lets you actually put your machine to use for the encoding tasks...

It's a never ending debate and you'll get both sides chiming in I'd guess. I haven't made the move to Blu-ray yet as I don't have a "home theater" - my laptop fulfills that functionality and 1080p stuff is irrelevant to me as 720p looks just damned fine too and is basically half the size in terms of the rips, sometimes 3x smaller than the equivalent 1080p rip.

I watch movies with headphones on 99% of the time anyway so, I dump the surround soundtracks too and mix down to just stereo. No need for the rest of that stuff on Blu-rays either, just the main movie and stereo sound and I'm happy.

If I was building an HTPC machine these days it would still be full of encodings I made myself - I just can't see using full rips on drives regardless of how cheap the physical hard disks are becoming. On a single 1TB hard drive I can put 200+ DVD5-sized Blu-ray encodes done with x264 and a stereo soundtrack - that's Blu-ray rips, not DVD rips, and I have my encoding "methodology" workflow down to creating 4.37GB (DVD5) sized rips and they're backed up on blank DVD+R single layer media when they're created. Compare that with maybe 40-50 "typical" full rips of Blu-ray content (which can be anywhere from 18 to 40GB or more per rip) on the same drive.

They look fantastic, only took about 3 hours per movie to create so not much more time than watching most of them, and it's done now and won't need to be done ever again. As stated, I've got them backed up on DVD+R media (verified burns at half the speed of the burner so they are solid burns), and they're on the hard drive for instant access as well.

But that's just me... :D
 
I've been re-encoding all of my DVDs and Blu-Rays. As you said, the quality is the same for a noticeably smaller file size which means you don't have to add nearly as much hardware as time moves along. For me, the time to encode doesn't matter because I only encode when I'm either sleeping or at work and I'm not using the system.
 
I figured that, with most of the setups I see here, that many are just keeping the full rips. Wasn't looking for a debate of encoding vs full rips. Just wondering if any were doing the encoding thing. Appreciate your responses.
 
Oh yeah, there's a ton of folks doing the encodings. The better subforum for this question might have been the Home Theater PCs & Equipment one actually... might ask a Mod to move it over there as it could get more views/responses in light of the topic.
 
As others have mentioned, a big part of it is personal preference, i.e. is the difference in quality noticeable to you and worth the additional cost? The other thing to keep in mind is how you're planning to play these back and on what setup. Most of the media streaming devices out there will play 1080p Blu Ray video no problem, but the support for things like menus and HD Audio bitstreaming is flaky on all but one or two higher end streamers.

If it were me, I would encode (in 1080p to a high bitrate, say 8-10GB per movie) if I'm watching on a 42" or less TV and didn't care about top end audio quality. But if you're watching on a bigger screen and with a really good audio setup, I'd take some time to investigate the best options for playback and do full quality rips.
 
If you want to keep the video quality at >90% with an HD Audio track (converted to FLAC), it still costs about 20-25GB (depending on audio). So the real compression rate is about 1:1.5 (correct me if I'm wrong), when you strip previews by default.
 
I tried a few encoded movies and found that the quality is questionable. I ALWAYS strive for highest possible picture and sound quality. Even some Blu-ray movies have horrible picture or sound quality.
Right from when Blu-rays became available I always stored the entire original content as ISO images on HDDs for easier access.

There is a huge difference between 720p and 1080p especially if you watch it on a 120 inch screen or even on a 52+ inch TV. I like the sharpness of 1080p Blu-rays over the somewhat fuzzy looking picture quality of DVDs.

Mind you this might be a bit over the top, but I recently (beginning of the year) started a dedicated media storage server (100TB) for all my movies and music collection. I decided not to put my DVD collection (1400+ movies) on the server but keep it for Blu-rays only. I just put 300+ Blu-ray movies on the server and still have another 150 or so to go.
In terms of sound quality, for Blu-ray movies I prefer DTS-HD Master tracks especially if they are 6.1 or 7.1. For my music collection, all my music CDs are ripped as complete albums (850+) and encoded as loss-less mp4.

Anyway, I personally prefer to keep the original quality and not mess with the data if I can help it.
 
This is slightly off the main topic, but for those that use WHS, it seems that the drives are 'pooled' together to appear as one drive. For the time being, I am using Win7 and was wondering if it would be better to keep the drives separate (D:, E: etc) or put them in a JBOD to appear as one drive?
 
treadstone said:
I tried a few encoded movies and found that the quality is questionable. I ALWAYS strive for highest possible picture and sound quality. Even some Blu-ray movies have horrible picture or sound quality.
Right from when Blu-rays became available I always stored the entire original content as ISO images on HDDs for easier access.

There is a huge difference between 720p and 1080p especially if you watch it on a 120 inch screen or even on a 52+ inch TV. I like the sharpness of 1080p Blu-rays over the somewhat fuzzy looking picture quality of DVDs.

Mind you this might be a bit over the top, but I recently (beginning of the year) started a dedicated media storage server (100TB) for all my movies and music collection. I decided not to put my DVD collection (1400+ movies) on the server but keep it for Blu-rays only. I just put 300+ Blu-ray movies on the server and still have another 150 or so to go.
In terms of sound quality, for Blu-ray movies I prefer DTS-HD Master tracks especially if they are 6.1 or 7.1. For my music collection, all my music CDs are ripped as complete albums (850+) and encoded as loss-less mp4.

Anyway, I personally prefer to keep the original quality and not mess with the data if I can help it.
Click to expand...

Same here,

Space isn't and won't be an issue the way things are shaping up for the future so archiving in the best quality is what I do for music and movies. Just like you I too have stopped ripping DVD's and really have fell in-love with the experience of 1080p Content so that is all I store on my server now, FLAC and RAW-RIP Blu-ray.:cool:
 
Not sure about you guys but blu ray sound kicks dvd sounds ass.

So if you are spending the $ on blu-rays I would (personally) rip in the highest possible quality audio and video.

I haven't started doing this but plan to soon.
 
ToddW2 said:
Not sure about you guys but blu ray sound kicks dvd sounds ass.

So if you are spending the $ on blu-rays I would (personally) rip in the highest possible quality audio and video.

I haven't started doing this but plan to soon.
Click to expand...

Agreed, that's precisely why I keep the original file and don't mess with down sampling picture or sound quality to save a few gigabytes. Whenever you do that, you DO loose something.
 
After reading everyones opinion here and in other threads, I've decided to say the heck with spending time encoding and just save the full rip. You're right, storage is cheap.
 
Why re-encode, just download the rip. Someone already did the work for you. Personally, I just get up and grab the disc. I use a standalone player for BD's as the PC is too much a PITA for playback.
 
ottozylch46 said:
This is slightly off the main topic, but for those that use WHS, it seems that the drives are 'pooled' together to appear as one drive. For the time being, I am using Win7 and was wondering if it would be better to keep the drives separate (D:, E: etc) or put them in a JBOD to appear as one drive?
Click to expand...

Separate.
 
danman said:
Why re-encode, just download the rip. Someone already did the work for you. Personally, I just get up and grab the disc. I use a standalone player for BD's as the PC is too much a PITA for playback.
Click to expand...

Remote + WMC/MediaBrowser + Arcsoft TMT + AnyDVD HD

Store Blu-Ray isos on a network share. Have MediaBrowser configured to mount the ISO and play it in Arcsoft TMT Plugin for WMC. I never leave the couch and I can switch between 60+ movies without needing to change the disc. Furthermore, the load time on Blu-Ray over GbE ethernet is ridiculously faster than your standard settop BD player.

And I'm pretty sure we went over why the "rip" isn't good enough for some people. The 10-12GB MKV's you find on the Internet are encoded at ~60% image quality (depending on movie length) and do not contain any lossless audio format.
 
Man there must be some rich ass people here to be able to afford hard drives like that.. A terabyte sized drive is going to hold what... say 50 blu-ray rips at the most (Assuming 25GB a movie). Shoooooot... hard drives are cheap but not THAT cheap. :D
 
I average about 25 Blu-ray ISOs per terabyte. Sometimes more sometimes less, it really depends on what movie it is and what additional content they included on the original disc. In general, the newer movies tend to be around the 35 to 45GB range whereas older movies that just got transferred to Blu-ray recently, tend to be around the 18 to 25GB range (those usually also don't include much in terms of additional content).
 
treadstone said:
I average about 25 Blu-ray ISOs per terabyte. Sometimes more sometimes less, it really depends on what movie it is and what additional content they included on the original disc. In general, the newer movies tend to be around the 35 to 45GB range whereas older movies that just got transferred to Blu-ray recently, tend to be around the 18 to 25GB range (those usually also don't include much in terms of additional content).
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Utilizing a WD Green that's about $2.5/Movie for storage.
Not too bad.
 
Im surprised noone mentioned a remux? I remux all my blu-rays, keeping the intact A/V quality with primary video stream and loosless original language (dtshd-ma, truehd, pcm-->encoded to dtshd-ma) + english pgs subs in TS container.

I for one like to have single files, starting with movie instantly , without any trailers, fbi warnings, menus, etc. which drags the nice relaxed mood before starting the movie.

All this is really simple with tsmuxer (takes arround 5 mins) and for seamless branching titles I use eac3to for correcting a/v gaps.

All files stored on central WHS server and streamed to my PCHs in the house.
 
Home server works OK. I rip to file mode but whatever you play back with is going to determine this. My movies is a clusterfrack but when it works it presents nice lists of movies to look at.
 
MaxBurn said:
Home server works OK. I rip to file mode but whatever you play back with is going to determine this. My movies is a clusterfrack but when it works it presents nice lists of movies to look at.
Click to expand...

How is MyMovies a CF? I've been using for over a year without any issue. Originally the 7MC plugin sucked, but that was fixed with version 3.0. The latest stuff is great, makes management dead simple. The only thing I wished they had now is an Android app that I could use to enter new titles with the barcode scanner.
 
epimetheus said:
How is MyMovies a CF? I've been using for over a year without any issue. Originally the 7MC plugin sucked, but that was fixed with version 3.0. The latest stuff is great, makes management dead simple. The only thing I wished they had now is an Android app that I could use to enter new titles with the barcode scanner.
Click to expand...

I have been using MyMovie for the past 3-4 years. I rarely have issues with it myself! :)

I prefer ISO rip of the main movie only. I rarely if ever check out the extras. that can trim down some movies 5-20GB.

I prefer ISO rip because of the chapter skips. I am sorry when your on the couch and you need to continue from the middle of the movie and all you have is fast forward it a PITA.

Plus storage is cheap. Recently i just bought 4 2TB hard drive for around 110 a piece.
 
epimetheus said:
How is MyMovies a CF? I've been using for over a year without any issue. Originally the 7MC plugin sucked, but that was fixed with version 3.0. The latest stuff is great, makes management dead simple. The only thing I wished they had now is an Android app that I could use to enter new titles with the barcode scanner.
Click to expand...

It randomly stops working for new titles, have to reboot the server to bring it back. That's just an occasional annoyance.

The index folder has never worked for me, EVER. It never puts any links in to my movies at all. Using the last two versions of my movies for home server AND the one based on your computer, none of them worked for making the index folder work and have links to my movie files. Talked with a bunch of people with the same problem for a good month back when I cared and just gave up. So now I just browse the movies folder directly and ignore the useless index folder. This feature "just works" for a lot of people too, no one seems to know why.

I only really care about the artwork and movie info it puts in with the movies which does work unless it can't find something. The dune player profile works nicely too.
 
This is kind of a philosophical question, but after dumping and/or compressing all of these movies and spending all of the money and time do it, do any of you kind of have that moment when you think there isn't enough time in 10 years to watch all of it again? With Netflix rentals and streaming, satellite TV and recorded material, and free on-demand content, I would have time to re-watch maybe 1 or 2 movies a year tops. Even a conventional, physical movie collection seems impractical these days. This is taking it to another level.
 
Yeah that's one of the reasons I just rip and shove it to the server, much less work and retains all features and quality. There are even ways you can automate all these tasks but the setup for it is rather complicated.
 
treadstone said:
I average about 25 Blu-ray ISOs per terabyte. Sometimes more sometimes less, it really depends on what movie it is and what additional content they included on the original disc. In general, the newer movies tend to be around the 35 to 45GB range whereas older movies that just got transferred to Blu-ray recently, tend to be around the 18 to 25GB range (those usually also don't include much in terms of additional content).
Click to expand...

Just on this point... $100 for a 2TB drive = 50 full rips. Even using Raid 1/ WHS style redundancy you are talking $4/ movie which is not that bad.

Best of breed, encoding wise, right now, is probably full + a lower res (aka portable on flash media based storage/ player) encode. How this changes with Vail and adaptive streaming will be interesting.
 
Bottom line if you have the storage for it always keep the 1:1 rips. From what I have learned its always better to build a collection with the highest quality available, so you aren't missing anything when the new hardware comes out down the road.
 
JonTa said:
Im surprised noone mentioned a remux? I remux all my blu-rays, keeping the intact A/V quality with primary video stream and loosless original language (dtshd-ma, truehd, pcm-->encoded to dtshd-ma) + english pgs subs in TS container.

I for one like to have single files, starting with movie instantly , without any trailers, fbi warnings, menus, etc. which drags the nice relaxed mood before starting the movie.

All this is really simple with tsmuxer (takes arround 5 mins) and for seamless branching titles I use eac3to for correcting a/v gaps.

All files stored on central WHS server and streamed to my PCHs in the house.
Click to expand...

This is what I do as well and I would suggest you check out Clown_BD. It combines tsmuxer and eac3to and a few other things into one easy to use application.
 
Personally I rip almost everything to a max size bit rate of 7000Kbps if BR or @ 4000Kbps if DVD.
I find no difference in overall experience vs commerical disks. I'm not saying there is no difference but rather none that I can detect. (Playback via C-200 Popcorn Hour/Pioneer Elite Kuro 60" Plasma) The size is important as backup overhead can reduce your usable total system size quickly depending on storage methods.
A 50gig Blu-Ray would actually cost you 100gig on the new "Vail" WHS. I switched to a ZFS raidz with vdevices made up of 5 x 2TB drives which uses only 20% parity.

In the end there is a trade off of money vs quality. If I had unlimited money I could have unlimited quality... I'm sure there is an encoding setting at which you will save space without sacrificing your standards. Remember the new Sony, Tohoku University developed blue-violet laser will make 1TB burnable disks a reality in a few short years. http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/24/sony-tohoku-university-develop-blue-violet-laser-with-100-watt/
 
with 2TB being a $100 bucks its just not worth the time required to encode to a high quality. Plus I like knowing i can watch the highest quality on 50" Plasma.

My computer stay plenty busy running F@H :D
 
Krazypoloc said:
Bottom line if you have the storage for it always keep the 1:1 rips. From what I have learned its always better to build a collection with the highest quality available, so you aren't missing anything when the new hardware comes out down the road.
Click to expand...

+1 That's exactly why I rip the original to ISO and don't bother with taking stuff out... Storage is cheap these days and getting cheaper...

wingfat said:
Personally I rip almost everything to a max size bit rate of 7000Kbps if BR or @ 4000Kbps if DVD.
I find no difference in overall experience vs commerical disks. I'm not saying there is no difference but rather none that I can detect. (Playback via C-200 Popcorn Hour/Pioneer Elite Kuro 60" Plasma) The size is important as backup overhead can reduce your usable total system size quickly depending on storage methods.
A 50gig Blu-Ray would actually cost you 100gig on the new "Vail" WHS. I switched to a ZFS raidz with vdevices made up of 5 x 2TB drives which uses only 20% parity.

In the end there is a trade off of money vs quality. If I had unlimited money I could have unlimited quality... I'm sure there is an encoding setting at which you will save space without sacrificing your standards. Remember the new Sony, Tohoku University developed blue-violet laser will make 1TB burnable disks a reality in a few short years. http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/24/sony-tohoku-university-develop-blue-violet-laser-with-100-watt/
Click to expand...

Since Blu-ray movies are already compressed, if you try to use additional compression, you inevitably loose something (lower quality). Besides why bother with compressing the movies, as previously mentioned, storage is cheap :)

nitrobass24 said:
with 2TB being a $100 bucks its just not worth the time required to encode to a high quality. Plus I like knowing i can watch the highest quality on 50" Plasma.

My computer stay plenty busy running F@H :D
Click to expand...

100% agree with you there :)
 
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