Great video and your guide on ripping UHD Blu-Rays was great, but there are two ways you can improve this setup. Firstly I'd setup Tdarr for transcoding instead of Handbrake, Tdarr is much more suited towards automated transcoding and once you point it at your library you can very easily alter it however you want (transcoding, remove embedded subs, foreign language tracks etc.) and it's pretty much set and forget, Handbrake's watch folder needs a bit more manual intervention. Next I would suggest just spending a tiny bit more and getting a GPU which supports H.265 transcoding, you can get a Quadro P400 for less than $50. H.265 takes up significantly less space than H.264 at the same quality and allows you to really increase the size of your movie library on any given storage constraints.
What's the best method for just brute forcing my way through instead of using handbrake. I want to use a full fat mkv blu ray rip. I'll never be streaming to more than one tv at a time and almost always at native res.
Since you have nvidia card, I think you could use ffmpeg and nvenc to transcode the blu-ray. Decode the video with the CPU, then resize and encode to h264 with the GPU. Audio can be easily copied without re-encoding. At the same time, delete unnecessary tracks.
The issue with GPU encoding (e.g NVENC) is that the filesize is larger, and quality is lower. Software X264/X265 takes longer but gives the best result. He could still use MakeMKV if he finds it easier, and use MKVToolNix to remove unwanted tracks (audio streams, subs, etc...) as well.
@@jarsky Quality concerns are really miniscule nowadays, high motion footage like video games still suffer, but movies are more than okay to just transcode with the gpu.
I was thinking the same thing. Kind of, anyway. I messed with tdarr a little, but couldn't get it figured out without spending more time on it than I wanted to. I just use an unmanic container (again, couldn't get it working the way that I wanted it to) and I have a couple of bash scripts that I wrote, to encode files that I drop into an imports folder, and then process them with the hevc nvenc encoder, using a GTX1650 GPU in the NAS. Average speed is about 18 to 20x (compared to about 2x for CPU encoding, although, the Intel QSV encoder was around 10x, so would still be a good option if you didn't have a dedicated GPU to lean on) I know that I should just spend a little more time in tdarr, however, MOST of my old collection from pre Netflix days has now been imported, and transcoded, and more importantly, all renamed to have a consistent naming convention (I can't believe how little I used to care about filenames, and folder structures lmao, one of the reasons it's always fun to explore old HDD's)
ffmpeg is so much faster than handbrake for me. it doesn matter which preset I use or how custom I make it, a simple ffmpeg libx265 is at least twice as fast with the same CRF
I use a Chuwi Larkbox Pro Mini PC as my media center. Running on Windows 11. Hooked up to my library on an external hard drive. Considering transferring to an ssd for faster loading time. Perfect tiny setup if you ask me. I could use a "bigger" mini pc but I really wanted something ultra small and simple.
Was successfully able to shoehorn a GTX1060 into a SFF I7 dell 5050 by using a sata to 6-pin power adaptor. The 1060 supports H265, and has no issues rendering 4k. Used NVidia x060 GPUs can be found really cheap, and work extremely well for this. As for handbrake, your much better off leveraging a GPU than relying on a CPU for that task.
Cool setup. I would just add as a tip, if your streaming device or smart TV has support for H.265 playback already built-in (most do these days), I'd disable hardware transcoding on the Optiplex and just stream everything with direct play. You'll eliminate the stuttering and you can keep your video files as H.265, which is much more efficient storage-wise and will save you a TON of space over time.
i've been running Emby on my media PC that runs Windows 10 with about 45TB or so for my movies/tv shows. I have a GTX 1060 6GB that does the transcoding.That's all it does. My main computer does the Handbrake legwork. Its a first Gen Ryzen 7 1700x with 32GB/RAM. I use a virtual machine to download my media and use Handbrake to convert some movies and ALL of my tv shows to save space on the drives. I used to convert movies but since you can download the x265 version of everything nowadays, i just download those and convert only what i need to. I will say this also... if you're converting a 1080p to a 720p (for most tv shows), there's NO noticable video loss in the file. Just throwin that out there...
I also talked myself out of a cache pool on my server. I've found that it can stream multiple 4K videos at once without bogging down the drives or the basic gigabit ethernet I'm using, and my ARC hits are already pretty high. On a basic home media server, it's pretty overkill. Though the adapter card would allow you to have more disk space in the small form factor.
why don't you try making a NAS/media server with an old laptop like a thinkpad t420 or an affordable generic laptop. even though its not as configurable, you have low power draw, battery backup, and it saves a lot of space. would be an interesting video
If you have a Nvidia GPU you can encode much faster. Most Blu rays can be done in 10-15 mins. 4k bout 25ish. I encode everything on my main rig and transfer it over to my Plex server. I dig the setup though.
You should take a look at radarr/sonarr to automatically rename/manage and import your media files, this will save you time and it's easy to setup in unraid (or any other os)
@@HardwareHaven It sure is usefull for that haha, but I believe it can also be used for a legitimate media library. For torrenting stuff, prowlarr is also used in addition to those services to automate the whole process.
Your title made me think you was actually streaming the bluray 😕. Wish this was possible, would be great if somehow you could insert the bluray into th e pc/server/stream box and play it back on any device. As In, it's available on plex for example. Then you could still retain your bluray collection, but have it Streamable too without having to rip everything.
Well I like the idea of reusing old kit but the PSU is way to energy hungry. Ditch the paving stone and use a RPi they run all day / months / years without rebooting and consume very little power. I use them for art installation media players for months at a time and never have to reboot the things.
Why not use ffmpeg instead of handbreak as you can do the same thing. Also when dealing with 4k Blu-Rays usually they are in HDR. so usually when I try to transcode they come out all desaturated as it doesn't do the HDR to SDR conversion correctly.
Thanks for the videos. You mentioned near the top that you liked the form factor of these DT Optiplexes, "especially when lying flat". I had my 7010 SFF on its side for a couple of years before I realized the "DELL" logo on the bezel can be rotated 90 degrees. This is my primary work machine, maxed out with an I7-3770, 4x8 GB RAM, two Samsung EVO 1TB SATA SSDs (one in an optical drive bay adapter), and a 1 TB Inland NVME via a PCIe adapter. I'm driving two 27" 2560 x 1440 monitors from the I7's onboard graphics. I don't game or edit videos, just database conversions, software development, office tasks and web browsing. This little workhouse has been running nearly 24/7 for many, many years and has never let me down. I'm building a 12th gen Intel box now and will convert the "Little Dell that could" to a Linux server.
For what you are doing, you don't need a new machine, most of the new machines do the same stuff you are doing, at the same speed, if you are lucky...it seems like they've really tapered off in the way of speed increases until you get into high end productivity machines with multiple processors and such...but, like you, I just run what I have, and it works fine for my daily needs....those SFF Optiplex machines do pretty well...they were built for business, they were built to be upgraded/updated, rather than used a couple years and thrown away like so many of today's machines with everything onboard and not being able to upgrade RAM and sometimes even your storage drive isn't removable....what the heck LOL. I've salvaged a lot of the Dell Optiplex machines in recent months, cleaned them up, installed an SSD, fresh windows installation, and have given them away to families with school aged kids that can't afford to buy that stuff. They're not the latest and greatest but they'll get the job done pretty well when all you are doing is school work, web browsing, and a few youtube videos.
@@wildbill23c while I agree Intel has stagnated in recent years, you can't really ignore the single-thread performance in 12th gen is a huge upgrade over 3rd gen. Since many workloads are still single-threaded, you care about single-thread performance. A 12700 will run circles around a 3770, and more efficiently. iGPU performance is even more noticeable when you jump 8 or 9 generations forward.
It would be cool to see you do a video on the Automatic Ripping Machine (ARM) project. I don't think I've ever seen someone document setting it up and your videos are always so thorough! And I think you might enjoy all that sweet automation goodness
I agree, fully automating this process would be awesome. I know ARM gave me troubles in the past, but it’d be cool to see it take a 4K Blu-ray and rip/transcode/store for jellyfin all automatically
I'm sure I've seen something like this in the Unraid plug-ins. A Docker container that uses MakeMKV, but I haven't tried it since I store my Blu-Rays as decrypted isos, not as an mkv.
10 years isn’t really that old for a computer anymore. Anything from 10 years ago is a reasonable up-to-date and modern computer as far as I’m concerned. Even some computers from 15 years ago with the faster variants of C2D and C2Q aren’t too shabby for basic tasks. Good to see a computer like this put to good use rather than be wasted. I’m actually surprised by the performance issues you had.
For many people a Thinkpad T420, or even a T410 can still handle their daily needs...although heavy compared to a brand new laptop...those old laptops and desktops will still do the job that many people actually use their computers for. Its when you get into heavy CPU/RAM usage needs like editing video, photos, ripping movies, etc. is when you really need the new hardware to support the new processes that some people are trying to do...although the old machine will handle it, it'll take way too long to get any meaningful use out of it for certain tasks. Most daily computing needs can be done on older machines for sure. I have a Thinkstation S20 for my desktop PC...still does all my daily computing needs....and the 10,000RPM 1TB hard drive can more easily keep up with tasks that many of today's drives can't due to their lower speeds...thinking of doing an SSD swap at some point though.
@Alexander Ratisbona A friend of mine has a PC I built for him out of stuff I had lying around, including a Core 2 Quad Q9650, slightly overclocked. He uses it to run DAW software to record his music and it works great for him. The machine is left on 24 hours a day, and it's been three years since I built it.
Thank you for mentioning Jeff Geerling! He's one of my favorite content creators. He's also local to where I live. Dude goes to the same Microcenter as me lol. He has some amazing Raspberry pi and Kubernetes videos, plus he literally wrote the book on Ansible.
the Quadro K1200 can't handle h.265 transcoding but the nVidia T400/600/1000 can... one of those might be a good option. Also the P620 can too, I think. And you can use nVenc with HandBrake. Also VCE or QuickSync.
Because of the Optiplex 790 being stuck on Sandy Bridge, I used the Optiplex 7010 as my starting point for my build. Unfortunately I grabbed the SFF and not the DT form factor, with the disappointing laptop optical drive. Now that time has moved on, Haswell and newer generation desktops are getting cheap. I'll use this as inspiration to play around with unRAID though. Thanks for the awesome content!
This is probably the best use case scenario for an old PC lying around; however, It's not for me specifically. I haven't jumped on the 4K bandwagon and probably never will. 1080P is perfectly fine for videos. I might upgrade to a 1440P display MAX for my desktop monitor...but I'll wait until one of my dual 1080P displays dies before a final decision. The live video stream transcoding is something I'd never use either. That's way too much power consumption just to watch a video. I'd just convert the source video into something more compatible before I'd ever consider doing that.
I have an Optiplex 990DT, also with a second gen i5. The local Microsoft TPR that sold it to me gave it Dell's stock/standard ATI AMD Radeon HD 6360. For arcade-emulation gaming and Final Fantasy XI Online, it's absolutely perfect. Dell Optiplex and Precision are the only desktops that I trust. In the passed, I've had ASUS and a few HP's. They were not as good as Dell. I have found that Optiplex and Precision have consistently come from the factory with the DVD drive set on territory 0. This is fantastic for people like me who hae have extensive library of territory 2 anime DVD's.
I use a rehoused 790 motherboard in a full height ATX case. I'm using it to run Automation software for a Radio Station. The Rehousing was to support a full height video card, and to add more storage bays. Dell was still using a standard ATX Power Supply in this design. So i replaced it with a larger one.
get a quadro a2000 card (or any newer quadros that support h265). also, get a proper storage, with like 20-40 TB space to store all those blurays in their untouched bitrate. it's worth it.
It's 2023, get a computer that can hardware encode H265, not H264. Recent phones, streaming boxes, smart TVs, and computers can decode H265. The H265 files can be smaller and/or of better quality than H264. The new AV1 codec is being implemented right now in some devices.
It’s 5AM and I’m just going to bed because I followed this guide earlier yesterday to flash my Blu-ray drive and started ripping 4K movies 😂😂 Huge thank you
Watching your videos gave me the confidence I needed to finally go Unraid on my server desktop. Just waiting for all my files to land on the NAS and then gotta set up Plex and we’re home 🤗 also for the last week have been trying different configs. Huge thank you man 🎉
In Unraid it's generally better to make separate shares for Movies and TV Shows. While this isn't a big deal if you're only running a single array drive, it can cause issues if you add more drives to your array. One of the main advantages of Unraid is that you can basically add another drive whenever you want to or whenever you need more capacity in your array. Having your Movies and TV Shows on different shares allows you to change the split level of each share individually. For movies you should set Split Level to only split the top level directory, that way all the contents of each movie's folder stay on the same drive. For TV Shows you want to set it to split the top two levels of the directory, that allows you to keep each season on the same drive, but allows different seasons of a TV Show to be written to different drives. TV Shows can take a significant amount of array space and if you have it set to only split the top level directory, Unraid will try to put the entire TV Show on a single drive, even if it is out of space, per your split level settings for that share. Keeping the whole season on a single drive avoids long load times when watching multiple episodes but also helps avoid trying to write large TV Shows with multiple seasons all to one drive even when that drive is out of space.
For sure. I just didn’t think it was worth diving into split levels on this video, especially since this system is about to get stripped down anyway. Great explanation of it though, and I hope other people come across this! Wish I could pin it 👍🏻
@@HardwareHaven For sure, that makes sense. Love the video though, seeing another nerd like myself figuring things out as we go! I'm mostly self taught when it comes to tech, but have learned a lot setting up 3 servers now that I have running in my homelab. I've made a bunch of mistakes over the years and just want to help other people avoid the pitfalls and frustrations from the mistakes I've made! I have two separate Unraid servers running and one that runs Proxmox, tons to learn with both OS's. Keep up the content!
Okay, that's too weird. At 3:57 There's a random image of my city (Calgary) for less than a second, and I'm just here to watch an old computer running 4K UHD discs! @Hardware Haven If you see this, please, can you tell me what this video of Calgary is? 😃
I’ll never understand why would anyone rip their own media. High quality encodes are already available on any public/private tracker, why waste time and energy doing it yourself? Just get a 80GB+ 4K HDR DV H265 encode and that’s it EDIT: seems you don’t event want/need the best quality. just get 4k remuxes online instead wasting hours transcoding and moving files
Yeah right I just watched the video again. The GPU does not supported the h265 codec. But I think at least the encoding part to h264 could be accelerated by the GPU
I've taken a few years off of tech to pursue other hobbies, but having limited budget for hobbies lately videos like yours have had me very intrigued to start spending time on PCs again. I should be picking up an optiplex 3060 SFF (i7-8700, 16GB RAM) for $100 this evening. Pretty stoked! I still need to find a another for a router/firewall box. I wish the USFF/Micro had a PCI-E slot for a NIC.
@@HardwareHaven Pro-tip- It's become an outdated marketplace these days but I find all the best deals on Craigslist. Project cars, Used furniture, old commercial PCs apparently too! Thanks for the videos!
I have an OptiPlex 3040 micro. I tried to use it for UHD Blu-rays, but I ran into the same speed issue you found. If you want hardware decode for 10-bit H265, you need at least Kaby Lake (7th gen). I have 6th gen Skylake, and the dell bios won’t allow me to upgrade, even though it’s the same socket. But otherwise, it’s very small, quiet, and pretty efficient.
You have inspired me to not be as scared about the flashing of the bluray drive. I have been putting off that part for...a bit. Since my current unraid tower is a full size desktop, I can just slap that drive in and call it a day once I format it.
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I was going to suggest getting a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter (e.g. Vantec Nexstar DX or similar) to make the ripping drive more portable. This is what I do and it works awesome - This way I am not tied up to a given PC and can rip the 4K movies (or any disc) I own on any of the computers around the house (Intel NUCs, Mid 2011 Mac Mini, etc.). But if it works best for your workflow for the drive to be in your main rig as you indicated towards the end of the video, that's great as well. I typically do not transcode as my clients (Nvidia shield, Google TV 4k etc.) have the necessary H.265 decoders but in the past have written automation scripts to run custom ffmpeg commands for transcoding (that's essentially what Handbrake does) any shows I may have recorded using my HDHomerun or movies ripped and saved to an "overnight transcoding" folder. Also, if you might be still considering adding more drives in the Optiples 790, check out 5.25" adapters that can be used in place of the DVD drive (I have used Icy dock but I believe other companies like Kingwin etc. might also make these). Wendl at Level1Techs has also made few videos on these adapters. In this scenario however, depending on how many drives you might be able to fit into the case, the limiting factor could be the number of SATA ports on the motherboard (which can be solved via add-on SATA cards) and by now the rabbit hole is getting quite deep 😃 In short, the 790 is not quite useless - in fact, I have quite a few PCs from that era still chugging along around the house. Just that the Intel Quicksync encoders/decoders in those processors are bit outdated if you try to use it for the latest and greatest video formats. Those processors and systems still make great learning computers, general purpose browsing and youtube playback upto 1080p, pfsense routers etc. Good luck and keep the videos coming - look forward to seeing what you come up with next.
I would try and find a top-of-the-line core i7 of that generation that would definitely help with things some and probably maybe even give you much better transcoding encoding speed for the videos because I remember trying to encode a 60-plus GB 4K file movie and take it down to a much more reasonable size on a 2600 k core i7 before I upgraded to a 2700x and I remember it saying it would take around six hours and that's quite a long time but lot less than that 16 hours you showed
I've being using an old AMD PC @2010 for home movie storage, plug into router and it shows on five samrt TVs in our home, works really well and its tucked away out of sight.
I don't know why but I clicked this video with a MJD vibe expectation and then I saw you and _where the hell I am bro_ I was certain this was from his channel, what a mind bug
Nvidia T400 is an alternative to the K2000, it will allow you to use HEVC encoding/decoding. I am currently using an old Dell rack server with 2 x E5-2667v2 CPUs, draws too much power, so I am in the midst of getting together a server (HP ML110 Gen9) that will use a single E5-2630L v3, paired with Nvidia T600 for transcoding requirements.
I haven't ripped a DVD in over 10 years. It's interesting to see a lot of the same tools are being used but is seems like the process has gotten much more complicated.
I have the same PC. Mine came with a bracket that holds a 3.5" Drive on the top, and a 2.5" on the underside (Dell 0R494D J132D). I put a i7 2600, 16GB Crucial DDR3-1600, 480GB Kingston SSD, and the same LG BD-ROM/DVD-RW drive. I also added in a Low Profile Radeon R7 450 4GB GDDR5.
Does Handbrake convert the original HDR video to a lower bitrate and also keep the HDR? That's interesting, I use ffmpeg from cmd and use hardware acceleration and the best I can do is tonemap it. Also in jellyfin I believe, tonemapping is not available for CPU, only hardware transcode can, which is why in 10:43 the lionsgate logo looks weird. I'm wondering if you can utilize the minisforum ryzen PC as a jellyfin or as a handbrake transcoder (via network share, though the share speed is not that fast), however I don't know the hardware transcoding capability and quality of Ryzen APU. Overall great video showcasing the potential of these hardware and tools.
Unless you want to watch it in a room with no blu ray player, or on your phone, or many other places where a Blu-ray player doesn’t really make sense… but if that works for you, great!
I'm doing something very similar to this but my older office PC of choice is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93P small form factor PC with the Intel Core i5-4590 (Quad core) It has served me well and has a total of 8 USB ports on it for expandability 6 of which are super speed. This was $100. I think it is a good 1st setup for me to get started and begin learning.
Handbrake does support hardware encoding & decoding so if you upgraded the GPU you could use handbrake on the same computer to do transcoding. I was running plex on a Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3220 CPU @ 3.30GHz 3.30 GHz 8.00 GB (7.88 GB usable) So a slightly newer CPU than what you mentioned, but I kept running into out of memory & CPU errors when my kids & I were all watching different shows. I decided if I was going to build a new plex server (GPUs were going for triple MSRP at the time) I would make it a relatively high-end system. I put in a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K with 128 GB of RAM. I used RAID 5 for my 4 drives, & boot off an M.2 drive with a DVD & Blu-ray drive in the system. Because the CPU includes a decent GPU it can hardware transcode h.264 & h.265 with no issues.
Most of the older processors don't have the encoders needed to encode, later model Intel chips (like 8th or later) do have H265 compression codex built in, otherwise they just chomp their way thru with regular processing..it is possible...but it's ALOT slower than using video card cuda cores :(
Try an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF. It uses 6th or 7th gen CPUs, DDR4, and has room for TWO 3.5" drives as well as an NVMe SSD. The down side? Slim DVD drive. But an external box for your BD drive will cure that.
Rip in lossless M2TS format using DVD fab and copy to a NAS (QNAP/Synology recommended) then use a media streamer like a Dune 4K or 8K player (8K is recommended for better performance across the board). This is THE best solution bar none for a networked home cinema solution. Make sure you have gigabit ethernet installed as 4K lossless streaming is over 100mbps.
I currently have an Optiplex 9020 w/Core i5-4590,16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Boot, & 16TB HDD media running Plex. While is it probably quite a bit more efficient than yours, it still gets pretty hot and uses about 30-40w at idle. I have an Optiplex 7050 Micro (Core i7-7700T - idles around 10w) that I plan on replacing the 9020 with. I am going to attempt to replace the M.2 wireless card with an M.2 PCIE riser to add a 4 port SATA controller. If it is a success, I will de-case the 7050 and 3d print a new case that can attach to a 4bay hot-swap SATA enclosure (originally meant to fit into a tower w/3x5.25" drive bays)If it fails, I will settle on a 7050 tower and lose the ability to remove the drives without shuttting everything down.
man i am definitely bouncing back and forth from TrueNAS and unRAID.. MY setup right now I'm running windows 10 with 15 2TB drives in RAID 6 on a LSI MEGA Raid card. the new server im working on is a 8x 3TB with an HBM that will run ZFS. But for any hand brake work I 100% just use my AMD R9 5900x with the RXT 3070ti that thing with blast a movie in a 1/4 the time my Dual Xeon X5660 with a 1050TI Server can..
OptiPlex's are pretty solid. I have two of them in my house, one is a i5 2500, maxed out ram/SSD/GT630 2gb (triple monitors), is on 24/7 and hasn't skipped a beat in the last 6yrs or so. It's mainly used for office work for my GF. I plan to do something like this video to repurpose it when I find something newer for her. Best part it was nearly free. I live in a tech sector, when the companies upgrade it just rains OptiPlex's and like office PC's...I got a Z640 workstation and 4 OptiPlex's in different conditions for $50, sold the Z640 for $120 during the pandemic when everyone wanted a gaming PC.
I don't get why you would re-encode Blu-rays and UHDs to another lossy format with handbrake just because files are big...... The whole reason of ripping Discs is to have the content 1:1 so you don't have to make sacrifices for the Picture and audio quality because otherwise you would be using streaming. That's the whole point of watching Blu-rays and UHDs, to be able to watch High Quality Encodes with high bitrates. Otherwise it would be like buying SACDs, DVD-Audio, BD-Pure Audio or CDs only to all rip them to OGG, MP3 or AAC, just because "thE fiLes ArE tOO bIG". Being able to play MKVs from your Blu-rays and UHDs is still giving you the multi-audio tracks and subtitle options too. Thankfully you don't have to flash every Optical drive as many support LibreDrive mode already, like the Pioneer BD-R XD07TS for example, if you prefer a USB solution. However you do safe more money if you go with a BD-ROM of course, if you do not plan to burn BDs yourself since Burners cost a bit more. And the great thing is if you use MakeMKV you can even use it as an adapter for VLC to directly playback Blu-rays so you don't even need to rip anything.
Meh, very meh. H264 for 4K is really not ideal. I switched almost my whole collection to H265, for the sake of space and efficiency. All my clients support H265, and my poor and super cheap i3-8100 does H265 transcoding natively with its iGPU anyway, and power consumption is great. Additionally, I can encode to H265 using the iGPU: it's super fast and the CPU is free for other tasks. GPU transcoding isn't quality perfect, but it's good enough for the average user. I think you've chosen the wrong hardware, which led to very wrong media choices.
Holy shit, this all seems overly complicated just to play movies and tv shows. I have many streaming sites bookmarked, and with IDM I can download whatever I want, all free too. A good vpn and some time spent researching will do this for significantly less money and time
I have the exact same optiplex also running a 2nd gen i5 which I converted to a home jellyfin and file/torrent server. I too, love the look of the optiplex lol. There is an additional slot for a 2.5 inch drive at the bottom part of the stock HDD holder(light blue plastic part). I was able to mount a 2.5" Sata SSD as boot drive and 2 units of 2.5" 1TB HDD on a 3.5 to 2.5 converter mount as well as a 3.5" 3TB low power HDD in a 5.75" HDD hot swap caddy. Total of 3x mechanical drive and 1x SSD. So far the PSU is able to keep running without any sudden shut down.
Ha my file server is a 21 year old AMD (Sempron I think? Mobo is from 2002 anyhow) and it works just fine - It does get hot with 6 hard drives in there though - tons of fans everywhere. And early 2000s blue LED (case came that way, I didn't remove them).
I've got a few similar machines at home that make pretty good retro gaming PCs. I've also used them for ripping DVDs as the included optical drives tend to rip quicker than USB drives. However when it comes to converting - even with a gen 2 i7 it can take quite a few hours. Although it's fine to leave it going overnight and they'll be done when you get up. These days I tend to lean towards x265 encodes for my collections because of the smaller file sizes. While the machines are fine for ripping and software encoding DVDs to x265, I'm not too sure whether they'll play them natively. I suppose using something like Kodi or Jellyfin player should work. I also tried encoding a 20GB Bluray and it was going to take about 3 days LOL. Personally for media centres I'd probably go a newer mini PC like those from Lenovo, HP and Dell (even though they don't have room for a DVD drive without the extension). 7 & 8th Gen tend to have x265 encoding.
VERBATIM 43888 is an external USBC drive that supports 4k/uhd Discs and has libre enabled by default. Thought mabey someone would appreciate the info 😅
To be honest, having a dedicated Media PC as a player for everything, instead of a regular BD, DVD player, is basically the ONLY logical choice nowdays. You have a LOT more control over the hardware and software which means you are a lot more flexible when it comes to problems. You also don't get this abundance of crap apps that comes bundled with all these new BD players nowdays... The only real downside is a Media PC consumes a lot more power than a standalone BD / DVD player. So i'd probably rather opt for a Laptop-hardware solution that is more easy on the energy consumption.
3:10 if you look closely, you'll see that the blue drive bracket in the top right of the picture, holds a 3.5" as well as a 2.5" drive so you don't need to buy a bracket if you're just using an SSD and a spinning SATA drive. The first SATA port on the motherboard supports 6GB/s SATA 3 for an SSD, but the second and third SATA ports only do 3GB/s, so don't expect miracles. For a real increase in speed, a PCIe adapter with an MVME stick would probably help (I think the motherboard can do PCI mode 3 but not mode 4). You probably also want a USB3 adapter but since there are no 5.25" style Molex connectors on the power supply, that will take some improvisation.
I have Optiplex 9020 micro. I replaced the original 128 GB SSD with 750 GB HDD (horrible for speed, great for capacity) and added one more external USB HDD. Runs just Windows and Plex server. Low power consumption, streams 4K video. No complaints at all.
Thanks, I think I will try this. I have a lot of not so old used pc’s I need to find something to do with and this seems like a worthwhile project. Thanks.
Got my answer…the files size isn’t reasonable and its buffering by softwsre transcoding is ridiculous..thanks had to watch whole video to find out ota not worth jack TO MUCH WORK FOR SMALL YEILD. Even self supprted its to sliw and too may programs and work for nothing
I get size limitations, but why would you encode a 4k files from 50-60mbps to 20-25mbps? your loosing half the quality, and at that point its probally better to store the uncompressed 1080p blu-ray at around 20-30gb vs the compressed 4K
all you gotta do is throw in an i7 2600, 16GB 1333 RAM, and something like a LP 750 TI (all these are super cheap on ebay) and those old 790s can still do lotsa stuff
I just stole one of these 9070s from my dad. He upgraded it to an i7 3770, 3.4GHz with 4 cores. For some reason its got 14gb of ram, idk how that decision was made. Honestly this thing is pretty good so far and I'm going to be doing a simar setup with jellyfin as my second homelab pc I've ever built.
I started my Unraid "career" with a Dell i5-4500, which has a little more power than your system. All my ripping is done on another computer (that has the LibreDrive enabled drive) and the subsequent transcoding for the server, though I will transcode the occasional "oversize" download on the server. I've seen some nice Unraid/Plex server setups with low power Atom/Celeron CPUs and an Nvidia A2000 GPU to do the heavy lifting.
I use the Dell 9020 for a pfsense box. Works very nice with 2 x 30GB Intel SSDs in raid. PS, sata SSDs fit firmly between the PSU and the case lip nicely.
Sell the K1200 and get a P400 or P600. Both are low profile, both low power, both can do HEVC/H265 perfectly. It’s a better codec anyway. Half the file size of H264 while retaining quality. Plus, there’s already advancements to get to H266 within the next couple years. H264 was great in its hayday but it’s getting a bit long in the tooth these days.
question, if I rip 4k UHD movies to a NAS pc with MKV- the pc nas will not perform any transcoding, simply hold the movie files - can I watch them without losing bitrate or UHD sound quality from a Nvidia Sheild Pro with PLEX on the Nvidia Shield PRO. ? Also does the NAS host pc have to have a good CPU and RAM to stream more than one 4k UHD movie at at time ?
I rip all the contents from my UHD collections to my NAS, and stream them straight using an app called Infuse. This way I don’t have to recompress any files
Forget the server. Rip your movies to the biggest drive you can afford. Then get an external drive to copy them to, plug that into your TV's USB. Done, watch. Repeat with other movies with another drive.
I have an Optiplex 7010 with an I7 3770 and GTX 1050 ti. No problems streaming 4k video. A 2nd gen I5 just doesn't have enough power to run a server if you have multiple streams going.
That's a lot of work to setup to then have to do more work of actually ripping your library. For someone who owns dozens or hundreds of movies/shows, that might not look appealing. If I own the content, I have no problem downloading a torrent as a backup/stream file. There's generally a variety of quality versions (including Blu-ray and 4K) available, and I can have whatever I need in a matter of minutes.
A tip on handbrake, use an nvidia gpu (in my case a 2070) and it will do it in minutes with H.265 nvenc (or H.264 if prefered). I have not had the chance to use it but there are AMD versions of nvenc as well as intels quicksync and now av1 with intel gpus.
i have TrueNAS set with Plex as my media server with an i5 4590mhz CPU. i want to change this set up though. i have two LG blu-ray’s and would prefer to have all of the ripping done there instead of my main PC.
its not a bad Video - but lets be clear - I use my own password and you got the wrong Dell - Get a 3050 with a 7th Gen chip - £64.50 in the UK, and lose the SATA optical drive and add an addionion SSD - you are showing a lack of knowledge
I've ripped my share of DVDs and Blu-ray discs with MakeMKV and Handbrake. Are you saying you were able to get a regular Blu-ray disc drive to read 4K Blu-ray discs to rip them?
Great video and your guide on ripping UHD Blu-Rays was great, but there are two ways you can improve this setup. Firstly I'd setup Tdarr for transcoding instead of Handbrake, Tdarr is much more suited towards automated transcoding and once you point it at your library you can very easily alter it however you want (transcoding, remove embedded subs, foreign language tracks etc.) and it's pretty much set and forget, Handbrake's watch folder needs a bit more manual intervention. Next I would suggest just spending a tiny bit more and getting a GPU which supports H.265 transcoding, you can get a Quadro P400 for less than $50. H.265 takes up significantly less space than H.264 at the same quality and allows you to really increase the size of your movie library on any given storage constraints.
What's the best method for just brute forcing my way through instead of using handbrake. I want to use a full fat mkv blu ray rip. I'll never be streaming to more than one tv at a time and almost always at native res.
@MolendinarI bought one on ebay for $27 2 weeks ago off ebay
@Molendinarif you are in the us you can get these for 15 to 30 dollars
Since you have nvidia card, I think you could use ffmpeg and nvenc to transcode the blu-ray. Decode the video with the CPU, then resize and encode to h264 with the GPU. Audio can be easily copied without re-encoding. At the same time, delete unnecessary tracks.
The issue with GPU encoding (e.g NVENC) is that the filesize is larger, and quality is lower. Software X264/X265 takes longer but gives the best result. He could still use MakeMKV if he finds it easier, and use MKVToolNix to remove unwanted tracks (audio streams, subs, etc...) as well.
@@jarsky Quality concerns are really miniscule nowadays, high motion footage like video games still suffer, but movies are more than okay to just transcode with the gpu.
I was thinking the same thing. Kind of, anyway. I messed with tdarr a little, but couldn't get it figured out without spending more time on it than I wanted to. I just use an unmanic container (again, couldn't get it working the way that I wanted it to) and I have a couple of bash scripts that I wrote, to encode files that I drop into an imports folder, and then process them with the hevc nvenc encoder, using a GTX1650 GPU in the NAS. Average speed is about 18 to 20x (compared to about 2x for CPU encoding, although, the Intel QSV encoder was around 10x, so would still be a good option if you didn't have a dedicated GPU to lean on)
I know that I should just spend a little more time in tdarr, however, MOST of my old collection from pre Netflix days has now been imported, and transcoded, and more importantly, all renamed to have a consistent naming convention (I can't believe how little I used to care about filenames, and folder structures lmao, one of the reasons it's always fun to explore old HDD's)
ffmpeg is so much faster than handbrake for me. it doesn matter which preset I use or how custom I make it, a simple ffmpeg libx265 is at least twice as fast with the same CRF
@@raulgalets Perhaps this is due to the fact that ff means fast forward, and handbrake is a device for slowing down😁
I use a Chuwi Larkbox Pro Mini PC as my media center. Running on Windows 11. Hooked up to my library on an external hard drive. Considering transferring to an ssd for faster loading time. Perfect tiny setup if you ask me. I could use a "bigger" mini pc but I really wanted something ultra small and simple.
Was successfully able to shoehorn a GTX1060 into a SFF I7 dell 5050 by using a sata to 6-pin power adaptor.
The 1060 supports H265, and has no issues rendering 4k. Used NVidia x060 GPUs can be found really cheap, and work extremely well for this.
As for handbrake, your much better off leveraging a GPU than relying on a CPU for that task.
Cool setup. I would just add as a tip, if your streaming device or smart TV has support for H.265 playback already built-in (most do these days), I'd disable hardware transcoding on the Optiplex and just stream everything with direct play. You'll eliminate the stuttering and you can keep your video files as H.265, which is much more efficient storage-wise and will save you a TON of space over time.
Dude that BIOS splash screen intro is so creative.
i've been running Emby on my media PC that runs Windows 10 with about 45TB or so for my movies/tv shows. I have a GTX 1060 6GB that does the transcoding.That's all it does. My main computer does the Handbrake legwork. Its a first Gen Ryzen 7 1700x with 32GB/RAM. I use a virtual machine to download my media and use Handbrake to convert some movies and ALL of my tv shows to save space on the drives. I used to convert movies but since you can download the x265 version of everything nowadays, i just download those and convert only what i need to. I will say this also... if you're converting a 1080p to a 720p (for most tv shows), there's NO noticable video loss in the file. Just throwin that out there...
I try so hard to watch your videos fully, but I end up getting sleepy. Your voice would be great as a monotone acoustic torture method.
I also talked myself out of a cache pool on my server. I've found that it can stream multiple 4K videos at once without bogging down the drives or the basic gigabit ethernet I'm using, and my ARC hits are already pretty high. On a basic home media server, it's pretty overkill. Though the adapter card would allow you to have more disk space in the small form factor.
I know this is an older video but just found your channel. I Handbrake transcode with my Threadripper 2950x takes minutes instead of hours.
why don't you try making a NAS/media server with an old laptop like a thinkpad t420 or an affordable generic laptop. even though its not as configurable, you have low power draw, battery backup, and it saves a lot of space. would be an interesting video
Don't forget you need to remerge the videos files with the original mkv to keep the original audio intact, as audio is far more important than video
"audio is far more important than video"
That certainly is... an opinion one could possibly have, I suppose.
If you have a Nvidia GPU you can encode much faster. Most Blu rays can be done in 10-15 mins. 4k bout 25ish. I encode everything on my main rig and transfer it over to my Plex server. I dig the setup though.
I did a very similar setup except I run makemkv and handbrake in an unraid windows VM!….cool video
I have 4 of these laying in my house storage.
You should take a look at radarr/sonarr to automatically rename/manage and import your media files, this will save you time and it's easy to setup in unraid (or any other os)
I think I was under the impression that was only really for torrenting stuff. I guess I could be very wrong haha, thanks!
@@HardwareHaven It sure is usefull for that haha, but I believe it can also be used for a legitimate media library. For torrenting stuff, prowlarr is also used in addition to those services to automate the whole process.
Love your videos! You actually try out really cool ideas, love it!
Great video. The i7-2600 or i7-2700k would have been a decent little upgrade to help speed some of that up. They're fairly cheap now.
Your title made me think you was actually streaming the bluray 😕.
Wish this was possible, would be great if somehow you could insert the bluray into th e pc/server/stream box and play it back on any device. As In, it's available on plex for example.
Then you could still retain your bluray collection, but have it Streamable too without having to rip everything.
Maybe the motherboard supports a cpu with less power draw or maybe a more powerful cpu
Btw i love the new orange font theme thing
Well I like the idea of reusing old kit but the PSU is way to energy hungry. Ditch the paving stone and use a RPi they run all day / months / years without rebooting and consume very little power. I use them for art installation media players for months at a time and never have to reboot the things.
I would be using 2 -2 TB SATA SSD's a Spinning Hard Drive is more likely to fail.
Why not use ffmpeg instead of handbreak as you can do the same thing.
Also when dealing with 4k Blu-Rays usually they are in HDR. so usually when I try to transcode they come out all desaturated as it doesn't do the HDR to SDR conversion correctly.
Handbrake is a front end for ffmpeg.
Just picked up an optiplex 7010 - and this series is perfect for my situation! Idk why mine doesn't come with a Blu-ray drive so I'm jealous haha
Oh NVM I see it was a separate addition
Good catch haha
7010s unfortunately only come with a slim line drive
I have the same idea for my Dell optiplex 7010 sff
4:37 What items have you got on steam xD. Love the video
Hahaha I don’t know but I definitely didn’t care at that moment
Handbrake can use the gpu and that's very fast
You don't use a cpu to recode
Thanks for the videos. You mentioned near the top that you liked the form factor of these DT Optiplexes, "especially when lying flat". I had my 7010 SFF on its side for a couple of years before I realized the "DELL" logo on the bezel can be rotated 90 degrees. This is my primary work machine, maxed out with an I7-3770, 4x8 GB RAM, two Samsung EVO 1TB SATA SSDs (one in an optical drive bay adapter), and a 1 TB Inland NVME via a PCIe adapter. I'm driving two 27" 2560 x 1440 monitors from the I7's onboard graphics. I don't game or edit videos, just database conversions, software development, office tasks and web browsing. This little workhouse has been running nearly 24/7 for many, many years and has never let me down. I'm building a 12th gen Intel box now and will convert the "Little Dell that could" to a Linux server.
For what you are doing, you don't need a new machine, most of the new machines do the same stuff you are doing, at the same speed, if you are lucky...it seems like they've really tapered off in the way of speed increases until you get into high end productivity machines with multiple processors and such...but, like you, I just run what I have, and it works fine for my daily needs....those SFF Optiplex machines do pretty well...they were built for business, they were built to be upgraded/updated, rather than used a couple years and thrown away like so many of today's machines with everything onboard and not being able to upgrade RAM and sometimes even your storage drive isn't removable....what the heck LOL.
I've salvaged a lot of the Dell Optiplex machines in recent months, cleaned them up, installed an SSD, fresh windows installation, and have given them away to families with school aged kids that can't afford to buy that stuff. They're not the latest and greatest but they'll get the job done pretty well when all you are doing is school work, web browsing, and a few youtube videos.
@@wildbill23c while I agree Intel has stagnated in recent years, you can't really ignore the single-thread performance in 12th gen is a huge upgrade over 3rd gen. Since many workloads are still single-threaded, you care about single-thread performance. A 12700 will run circles around a 3770, and more efficiently. iGPU performance is even more noticeable when you jump 8 or 9 generations forward.
It would be cool to see you do a video on the Automatic Ripping Machine (ARM) project. I don't think I've ever seen someone document setting it up and your videos are always so thorough! And I think you might enjoy all that sweet automation goodness
Yeah that could be interesting… seems like a lot of work though haha
he is apple,
you need old PC too ?
I agree, fully automating this process would be awesome. I know ARM gave me troubles in the past, but it’d be cool to see it take a 4K Blu-ray and rip/transcode/store for jellyfin all automatically
@@jonathanschober1032 me too! i even tried the docker containers but in the end it just 'never worked'.
I'm sure I've seen something like this in the Unraid plug-ins. A Docker container that uses MakeMKV, but I haven't tried it since I store my Blu-Rays as decrypted isos, not as an mkv.
10 years isn’t really that old for a computer anymore. Anything from 10 years ago is a reasonable up-to-date and modern computer as far as I’m concerned. Even some computers from 15 years ago with the faster variants of C2D and C2Q aren’t too shabby for basic tasks. Good to see a computer like this put to good use rather than be wasted. I’m actually surprised by the performance issues you had.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by “Basic tasks”?
@@sportzbomb120 emails, basic word processing, light shopping or video watching, etc
Doncha know if it can't do 4k@900000000000000000000000000000000FPS it's a piece of shit that should be trashed? (SARCASM)
For many people a Thinkpad T420, or even a T410 can still handle their daily needs...although heavy compared to a brand new laptop...those old laptops and desktops will still do the job that many people actually use their computers for. Its when you get into heavy CPU/RAM usage needs like editing video, photos, ripping movies, etc. is when you really need the new hardware to support the new processes that some people are trying to do...although the old machine will handle it, it'll take way too long to get any meaningful use out of it for certain tasks. Most daily computing needs can be done on older machines for sure. I have a Thinkstation S20 for my desktop PC...still does all my daily computing needs....and the 10,000RPM 1TB hard drive can more easily keep up with tasks that many of today's drives can't due to their lower speeds...thinking of doing an SSD swap at some point though.
@Alexander Ratisbona A friend of mine has a PC I built for him out of stuff I had lying around, including a Core 2 Quad Q9650, slightly overclocked. He uses it to run DAW software to record his music and it works great for him. The machine is left on 24 hours a day, and it's been three years since I built it.
Thank you for mentioning Jeff Geerling! He's one of my favorite content creators. He's also local to where I live. Dude goes to the same Microcenter as me lol. He has some amazing Raspberry pi and Kubernetes videos, plus he literally wrote the book on Ansible.
Jeff’s the best! He’s like half the reason I got into this space
@@HardwareHaven you AND Jeff are the reasons I have my home Lab. So thank you brotha!
with handbrake, try encoding to " H.264 (Nvidia NVEnc) " it should use some of the GPU power and cut down on render times
Makes the files massive though. I'd rather CPU encode
@@StephenDeTomasi Not true. Encoding is encoding - same settings on GPU and CPU should give you same file size. Its just faster using GPU .
the Quadro K1200 can't handle h.265 transcoding but the nVidia T400/600/1000 can... one of those might be a good option. Also the P620 can too, I think. And you can use nVenc with HandBrake. Also VCE or QuickSync.
Yes, no idea why I didn’t look for nvenc in handbrake
@@HardwareHaven I was going to say the same like the guy above 👍👍
Because of the Optiplex 790 being stuck on Sandy Bridge, I used the Optiplex 7010 as my starting point for my build. Unfortunately I grabbed the SFF and not the DT form factor, with the disappointing laptop optical drive. Now that time has moved on, Haswell and newer generation desktops are getting cheap. I'll use this as inspiration to play around with unRAID though. Thanks for the awesome content!
Yeah, the lack of full 5.25” bay is a huge bummer… wish there were more newer prebuilts with one
I have an HP Envy desktop with a laptop DVD burner. It's so annoying how they designed the case to only support a slim drive!
There are slim UHD-capable drives available, as well as USB external ones.
This is probably the best use case scenario for an old PC lying around; however, It's not for me specifically. I haven't jumped on the 4K bandwagon and probably never will. 1080P is perfectly fine for videos. I might upgrade to a 1440P display MAX for my desktop monitor...but I'll wait until one of my dual 1080P displays dies before a final decision. The live video stream transcoding is something I'd never use either. That's way too much power consumption just to watch a video. I'd just convert the source video into something more compatible before I'd ever consider doing that.
I have an Optiplex 990DT, also with a second gen i5. The local Microsoft TPR that sold it to me gave it Dell's stock/standard ATI AMD Radeon HD 6360. For arcade-emulation gaming and Final Fantasy XI Online, it's absolutely perfect. Dell Optiplex and Precision are the only desktops that I trust. In the passed, I've had ASUS and a few HP's. They were not as good as Dell. I have found that Optiplex and Precision have consistently come from the factory with the DVD drive set on territory 0. This is fantastic for people like me who hae have extensive library of territory 2 anime DVD's.
Sooooo... it's 2023 and the streaming options have fragmented so much that we're looking at building media servers as an option again 😅
I use a rehoused 790 motherboard in a full height ATX case. I'm using it to run Automation software for a Radio Station. The Rehousing was to support a full height video card, and to add more storage bays. Dell was still using a standard ATX Power Supply in this design. So i replaced it with a larger one.
get a quadro a2000 card (or any newer quadros that support h265). also, get a proper storage, with like 20-40 TB space to store all those blurays in their untouched bitrate. it's worth it.
This isn’t my actual setup to be clear
It's 2023, get a computer that can hardware encode H265, not H264. Recent phones, streaming boxes, smart TVs, and computers can decode H265. The H265 files can be smaller and/or of better quality than H264. The new AV1 codec is being implemented right now in some devices.
It’s 5AM and I’m just going to bed because I followed this guide earlier yesterday to flash my Blu-ray drive and started ripping 4K movies 😂😂 Huge thank you
Watching your videos gave me the confidence I needed to finally go Unraid on my server desktop. Just waiting for all my files to land on the NAS and then gotta set up Plex and we’re home 🤗 also for the last week have been trying different configs. Huge thank you man 🎉
Unraid is a pretty decent home server/NAS system...I bought pro becuase I have 10+ drives at 6TB setup...
In Unraid it's generally better to make separate shares for Movies and TV Shows. While this isn't a big deal if you're only running a single array drive, it can cause issues if you add more drives to your array. One of the main advantages of Unraid is that you can basically add another drive whenever you want to or whenever you need more capacity in your array. Having your Movies and TV Shows on different shares allows you to change the split level of each share individually. For movies you should set Split Level to only split the top level directory, that way all the contents of each movie's folder stay on the same drive. For TV Shows you want to set it to split the top two levels of the directory, that allows you to keep each season on the same drive, but allows different seasons of a TV Show to be written to different drives. TV Shows can take a significant amount of array space and if you have it set to only split the top level directory, Unraid will try to put the entire TV Show on a single drive, even if it is out of space, per your split level settings for that share. Keeping the whole season on a single drive avoids long load times when watching multiple episodes but also helps avoid trying to write large TV Shows with multiple seasons all to one drive even when that drive is out of space.
For sure. I just didn’t think it was worth diving into split levels on this video, especially since this system is about to get stripped down anyway. Great explanation of it though, and I hope other people come across this! Wish I could pin it 👍🏻
@@HardwareHaven For sure, that makes sense. Love the video though, seeing another nerd like myself figuring things out as we go! I'm mostly self taught when it comes to tech, but have learned a lot setting up 3 servers now that I have running in my homelab. I've made a bunch of mistakes over the years and just want to help other people avoid the pitfalls and frustrations from the mistakes I've made! I have two separate Unraid servers running and one that runs Proxmox, tons to learn with both OS's. Keep up the content!
Nice! Love the attitude and sounds like an awesome setup!
Thank you for sharing 🙂
Okay, that's too weird. At 3:57 There's a random image of my city (Calgary) for less than a second, and I'm just here to watch an old computer running 4K UHD discs! @Hardware Haven If you see this, please, can you tell me what this video of Calgary is? 😃
I’ll never understand why would anyone rip their own media. High quality encodes are already available on any public/private tracker, why waste time and energy doing it yourself? Just get a 80GB+ 4K HDR DV H265 encode and that’s it
EDIT: seems you don’t event want/need the best quality. just get 4k remuxes online instead wasting hours transcoding and moving files
Have you tried using hardware encoding in Handbrake over the GPU. At least in my case I can reduce the encoding time significantly.
some hardware can't handle the encoding...I believe those processors do have h264 built in
Yeah right I just watched the video again. The GPU does not supported the h265 codec. But I think at least the encoding part to h264 could be accelerated by the GPU
I've taken a few years off of tech to pursue other hobbies, but having limited budget for hobbies lately videos like yours have had me very intrigued to start spending time on PCs again.
I should be picking up an optiplex 3060 SFF (i7-8700, 16GB RAM) for $100 this evening. Pretty stoked!
I still need to find a another for a router/firewall box. I wish the USFF/Micro had a PCI-E slot for a NIC.
Woah nice deal!! Enjoy it
@@HardwareHaven Pro-tip-
It's become an outdated marketplace these days but I find all the best deals on Craigslist. Project cars, Used furniture, old commercial PCs apparently too!
Thanks for the videos!
I have an OptiPlex 3040 micro. I tried to use it for UHD Blu-rays, but I ran into the same speed issue you found. If you want hardware decode for 10-bit H265, you need at least Kaby Lake (7th gen). I have 6th gen Skylake, and the dell bios won’t allow me to upgrade, even though it’s the same socket. But otherwise, it’s very small, quiet, and pretty efficient.
let the Nvidia driver do it !
Yay new Hardware Haven video
You have inspired me to not be as scared about the flashing of the bluray drive. I have been putting off that part for...a bit. Since my current unraid tower is a full size desktop, I can just slap that drive in and call it a day once I format it.
7:14 once again, HaRdwAre HabeN meRCh?!?!?!
edit: OMG I FOUND IT!!!
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I was going to suggest getting a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter (e.g. Vantec Nexstar DX or similar) to make the ripping drive more portable. This is what I do and it works awesome - This way I am not tied up to a given PC and can rip the 4K movies (or any disc) I own on any of the computers around the house (Intel NUCs, Mid 2011 Mac Mini, etc.). But if it works best for your workflow for the drive to be in your main rig as you indicated towards the end of the video, that's great as well.
I typically do not transcode as my clients (Nvidia shield, Google TV 4k etc.) have the necessary H.265 decoders but in the past have written automation scripts to run custom ffmpeg commands for transcoding (that's essentially what Handbrake does) any shows I may have recorded using my HDHomerun or movies ripped and saved to an "overnight transcoding" folder.
Also, if you might be still considering adding more drives in the Optiples 790, check out 5.25" adapters that can be used in place of the DVD drive (I have used Icy dock but I believe other companies like Kingwin etc. might also make these). Wendl at Level1Techs has also made few videos on these adapters. In this scenario however, depending on how many drives you might be able to fit into the case, the limiting factor could be the number of SATA ports on the motherboard (which can be solved via add-on SATA cards) and by now the rabbit hole is getting quite deep 😃
In short, the 790 is not quite useless - in fact, I have quite a few PCs from that era still chugging along around the house. Just that the Intel Quicksync encoders/decoders in those processors are bit outdated if you try to use it for the latest and greatest video formats. Those processors and systems still make great learning computers, general purpose browsing and youtube playback upto 1080p, pfsense routers etc. Good luck and keep the videos coming - look forward to seeing what you come up with next.
I would try and find a top-of-the-line core i7 of that generation that would definitely help with things some and probably maybe even give you much better transcoding encoding speed for the videos because I remember trying to encode a 60-plus GB 4K file movie and take it down to a much more reasonable size on a 2600 k core i7 before I upgraded to a 2700x and I remember it saying it would take around six hours and that's quite a long time but lot less than that 16 hours you showed
I've being using an old AMD PC @2010 for home movie storage, plug into router and it shows on five samrt TVs in our home, works really well and its tucked away out of sight.
I don't know why but I clicked this video with a MJD vibe expectation and then I saw you and _where the hell I am bro_ I was certain this was from his channel, what a mind bug
Nvidia T400 is an alternative to the K2000, it will allow you to use HEVC encoding/decoding. I am currently using an old Dell rack server with 2 x E5-2667v2 CPUs, draws too much power, so I am in the midst of getting together a server (HP ML110 Gen9) that will use a single E5-2630L v3, paired with Nvidia T600 for transcoding requirements.
Handbrake couldn't use the CPU to decode the h.265 and the GPU to encode to h.264? That shouldn't take nearly as long.
Yeah I probably could’ve selected the nvenc option. The UI was different than the version I’ve used and I might’ve just missed the option
I haven't ripped a DVD in over 10 years. It's interesting to see a lot of the same tools are being used but is seems like the process has gotten much more complicated.
Right!! And not to mention over 60GB for an uncompressed UHD. Assuming you have a back up server, thats 120GB for 1 movie. Insane
I have the same PC. Mine came with a bracket that holds a 3.5" Drive on the top, and a 2.5" on the underside (Dell 0R494D J132D). I put a i7 2600, 16GB Crucial DDR3-1600, 480GB Kingston SSD, and the same LG BD-ROM/DVD-RW drive. I also added in a Low Profile Radeon R7 450 4GB GDDR5.
Does Handbrake convert the original HDR video to a lower bitrate and also keep the HDR? That's interesting, I use ffmpeg from cmd and use hardware acceleration and the best I can do is tonemap it. Also in jellyfin I believe, tonemapping is not available for CPU, only hardware transcode can, which is why in 10:43 the lionsgate logo looks weird. I'm wondering if you can utilize the minisforum ryzen PC as a jellyfin or as a handbrake transcoder (via network share, though the share speed is not that fast), however I don't know the hardware transcoding capability and quality of Ryzen APU. Overall great video showcasing the potential of these hardware and tools.
Ha, I just dug the mini tower version of this out of a corner and dismantled it. Thought about reviving it for some purpose but nah. 😊
I think it would be easier to just get up off the couch, grab the 4k blue ray disk and put it in a player to watch it.
Unless you want to watch it in a room with no blu ray player, or on your phone, or many other places where a Blu-ray player doesn’t really make sense… but if that works for you, great!
Click on the vpn timeline then after it says “is” click on the next one
I'm doing something very similar to this but my older office PC of choice is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93P small form factor PC with the Intel Core i5-4590 (Quad core)
It has served me well and has a total of 8 USB ports on it for expandability 6 of which are super speed. This was $100. I think it is a good 1st setup for me to get started and begin learning.
Handbrake does support hardware encoding & decoding so if you upgraded the GPU you could use handbrake on the same computer to do transcoding.
I was running plex on a
Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3220 CPU @ 3.30GHz 3.30 GHz
8.00 GB (7.88 GB usable)
So a slightly newer CPU than what you mentioned, but I kept running into out of memory & CPU errors when my kids & I were all watching different shows.
I decided if I was going to build a new plex server (GPUs were going for triple MSRP at the time) I would make it a relatively high-end system.
I put in a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K with 128 GB of RAM. I used RAID 5 for my 4 drives, & boot off an M.2 drive with a DVD & Blu-ray drive in the system. Because the CPU includes a decent GPU it can hardware transcode h.264 & h.265 with no issues.
Most of the older processors don't have the encoders needed to encode, later model Intel chips (like 8th or later) do have H265 compression codex built in, otherwise they just chomp their way thru with regular processing..it is possible...but it's ALOT slower than using video card cuda cores :(
NAS+Apple TV 4k+Infuse Pro can’t be beat for simplicity and reliability.
I have my 2010 eMachines 720 laptop on an Ubuntu server with UI installed running jellyfin and a file server with my 2 4TB HDD on a USB dock.
Try an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF. It uses 6th or 7th gen CPUs, DDR4, and has room for TWO 3.5" drives as well as an NVMe SSD. The down side? Slim DVD drive. But an external box for your BD drive will cure that.
Rip in lossless M2TS format using DVD fab and copy to a NAS (QNAP/Synology recommended) then use a media streamer like a Dune 4K or 8K player (8K is recommended for better performance across the board). This is THE best solution bar none for a networked home cinema solution. Make sure you have gigabit ethernet installed as 4K lossless streaming is over 100mbps.
I currently have an Optiplex 9020 w/Core i5-4590,16GB RAM, 512GB SSD Boot, & 16TB HDD media running Plex. While is it probably quite a bit more efficient than yours, it still gets pretty hot and uses about 30-40w at idle. I have an Optiplex 7050 Micro (Core i7-7700T - idles around 10w) that I plan on replacing the 9020 with. I am going to attempt to replace the M.2 wireless card with an M.2 PCIE riser to add a 4 port SATA controller. If it is a success, I will de-case the 7050 and 3d print a new case that can attach to a 4bay hot-swap SATA enclosure (originally meant to fit into a tower w/3x5.25" drive bays)If it fails, I will settle on a 7050 tower and lose the ability to remove the drives without shuttting everything down.
man i am definitely bouncing back and forth from TrueNAS and unRAID..
MY setup right now I'm running windows 10 with 15 2TB drives in RAID 6 on a LSI MEGA Raid card. the new server im working on is a 8x 3TB with an HBM that will run ZFS.
But for any hand brake work I 100% just use my AMD R9 5900x with the RXT 3070ti that thing with blast a movie in a 1/4 the time my Dual Xeon X5660 with a 1050TI Server can..
OptiPlex's are pretty solid. I have two of them in my house, one is a i5 2500, maxed out ram/SSD/GT630 2gb (triple monitors), is on 24/7 and hasn't skipped a beat in the last 6yrs or so. It's mainly used for office work for my GF. I plan to do something like this video to repurpose it when I find something newer for her. Best part it was nearly free. I live in a tech sector, when the companies upgrade it just rains OptiPlex's and like office PC's...I got a Z640 workstation and 4 OptiPlex's in different conditions for $50, sold the Z640 for $120 during the pandemic when everyone wanted a gaming PC.
I don't get why you would re-encode Blu-rays and UHDs to another lossy format with handbrake just because files are big...... The whole reason of ripping Discs is to have the content 1:1 so you don't have to make sacrifices for the Picture and audio quality because otherwise you would be using streaming. That's the whole point of watching Blu-rays and UHDs, to be able to watch High Quality Encodes with high bitrates. Otherwise it would be like buying SACDs, DVD-Audio, BD-Pure Audio or CDs only to all rip them to OGG, MP3 or AAC, just because "thE fiLes ArE tOO bIG". Being able to play MKVs from your Blu-rays and UHDs is still giving you the multi-audio tracks and subtitle options too. Thankfully you don't have to flash every Optical drive as many support LibreDrive mode already, like the Pioneer BD-R XD07TS for example, if you prefer a USB solution. However you do safe more money if you go with a BD-ROM of course, if you do not plan to burn BDs yourself since Burners cost a bit more. And the great thing is if you use MakeMKV you can even use it as an adapter for VLC to directly playback Blu-rays so you don't even need to rip anything.
Meh, very meh.
H264 for 4K is really not ideal.
I switched almost my whole collection to H265, for the sake of space and efficiency.
All my clients support H265, and my poor and super cheap i3-8100 does H265 transcoding natively with its iGPU anyway, and power consumption is great.
Additionally, I can encode to H265 using the iGPU: it's super fast and the CPU is free for other tasks. GPU transcoding isn't quality perfect, but it's good enough for the average user.
I think you've chosen the wrong hardware, which led to very wrong media choices.
Holy shit, this all seems overly complicated just to play movies and tv shows. I have many streaming sites bookmarked, and with IDM I can download whatever I want, all free too. A good vpn and some time spent researching will do this for significantly less money and time
I have the exact same optiplex also running a 2nd gen i5 which I converted to a home jellyfin and file/torrent server. I too, love the look of the optiplex lol.
There is an additional slot for a 2.5 inch drive at the bottom part of the stock HDD holder(light blue plastic part). I was able to mount a 2.5" Sata SSD as boot drive and 2 units of 2.5" 1TB HDD on a 3.5 to 2.5 converter mount as well as a 3.5" 3TB low power HDD in a 5.75" HDD hot swap caddy.
Total of 3x mechanical drive and 1x SSD. So far the PSU is able to keep running without any sudden shut down.
Nice! Yeah I totally missed the 2.5” mount on the caddy haha
Ha my file server is a 21 year old AMD (Sempron I think? Mobo is from 2002 anyhow) and it works just fine - It does get hot with 6 hard drives in there though - tons of fans everywhere. And early 2000s blue LED (case came that way, I didn't remove them).
I've got a few similar machines at home that make pretty good retro gaming PCs. I've also used them for ripping DVDs as the included optical drives tend to rip quicker than USB drives. However when it comes to converting - even with a gen 2 i7 it can take quite a few hours. Although it's fine to leave it going overnight and they'll be done when you get up.
These days I tend to lean towards x265 encodes for my collections because of the smaller file sizes. While the machines are fine for ripping and software encoding DVDs to x265, I'm not too sure whether they'll play them natively. I suppose using something like Kodi or Jellyfin player should work. I also tried encoding a 20GB Bluray and it was going to take about 3 days LOL. Personally for media centres I'd probably go a newer mini PC like those from Lenovo, HP and Dell (even though they don't have room for a DVD drive without the extension). 7 & 8th Gen tend to have x265 encoding.
VERBATIM 43888 is an external USBC drive that supports 4k/uhd Discs and has libre enabled by default. Thought mabey someone would appreciate the info 😅
To be honest, having a dedicated Media PC as a player for everything, instead of a regular BD, DVD player, is basically the ONLY logical choice nowdays. You have a LOT more control over the hardware and software which means you are a lot more flexible when it comes to problems. You also don't get this abundance of crap apps that comes bundled with all these new BD players nowdays... The only real downside is a Media PC consumes a lot more power than a standalone BD / DVD player. So i'd probably rather opt for a Laptop-hardware solution that is more easy on the energy consumption.
3:10 if you look closely, you'll see that the blue drive bracket in the top right of the picture, holds a 3.5" as well as a 2.5" drive so you don't need to buy a bracket if you're just using an SSD and a spinning SATA drive. The first SATA port on the motherboard supports 6GB/s SATA 3 for an SSD, but the second and third SATA ports only do 3GB/s, so don't expect miracles. For a real increase in speed, a PCIe adapter with an MVME stick would probably help (I think the motherboard can do PCI mode 3 but not mode 4). You probably also want a USB3 adapter but since there are no 5.25" style Molex connectors on the power supply, that will take some improvisation.
I have Optiplex 9020 micro. I replaced the original 128 GB SSD with 750 GB HDD (horrible for speed, great for capacity) and added one more external USB HDD. Runs just Windows and Plex server. Low power consumption, streams 4K video. No complaints at all.
Thanks, I think I will try this. I have a lot of not so old used pc’s I need to find something to do with and this seems like a worthwhile project. Thanks.
Good luck!
Got my answer…the files size isn’t reasonable and its buffering by softwsre transcoding is ridiculous..thanks had to watch whole video to find out ota not worth jack TO MUCH WORK FOR SMALL YEILD. Even self supprted its to sliw and too may programs and work for nothing
I get size limitations, but why would you encode a 4k files from 50-60mbps to 20-25mbps? your loosing half the quality, and at that point its probally better to store the uncompressed 1080p blu-ray at around 20-30gb vs the compressed 4K
all you gotta do is throw in an i7 2600, 16GB 1333 RAM, and something like a LP 750 TI (all these are super cheap on ebay)
and those old 790s can still do lotsa stuff
I just stole one of these 9070s from my dad. He upgraded it to an i7 3770, 3.4GHz with 4 cores. For some reason its got 14gb of ram, idk how that decision was made. Honestly this thing is pretty good so far and I'm going to be doing a simar setup with jellyfin as my second homelab pc I've ever built.
DDR3 memory card is still better than DDR2 turn as NAS, like you can put 32GB as server
I started my Unraid "career" with a Dell i5-4500, which has a little more power than your system. All my ripping is done on another computer (that has the LibreDrive enabled drive) and the subsequent transcoding for the server, though I will transcode the occasional "oversize" download on the server.
I've seen some nice Unraid/Plex server setups with low power Atom/Celeron CPUs and an Nvidia A2000 GPU to do the heavy lifting.
I use the Dell 9020 for a pfsense box. Works very nice with 2 x 30GB Intel SSDs in raid. PS, sata SSDs fit firmly between the PSU and the case lip nicely.
Sell the K1200 and get a P400 or P600. Both are low profile, both low power, both can do HEVC/H265 perfectly. It’s a better codec anyway. Half the file size of H264 while retaining quality. Plus, there’s already advancements to get to H266 within the next couple years. H264 was great in its hayday but it’s getting a bit long in the tooth these days.
question, if I rip 4k UHD movies to a NAS pc with MKV- the pc nas will not perform any transcoding, simply hold the movie files - can I watch them without losing bitrate or UHD sound quality from a Nvidia Sheild Pro with PLEX on the Nvidia Shield PRO. ? Also does the NAS host pc have to have a good CPU and RAM to stream more than one 4k UHD movie at at time ?
I rip all the contents from my UHD collections to my NAS, and stream them straight using an app called Infuse. This way I don’t have to recompress any files
Forget the server. Rip your movies to the biggest drive you can afford. Then get an external drive to copy them to, plug that into your TV's USB. Done, watch. Repeat with other movies with another drive.
I have an Optiplex 7010 with an I7 3770 and GTX 1050 ti. No problems streaming 4k video. A 2nd gen I5 just doesn't have enough power to run a server if you have multiple streams going.
That's a lot of work to setup to then have to do more work of actually ripping your library. For someone who owns dozens or hundreds of movies/shows, that might not look appealing. If I own the content, I have no problem downloading a torrent as a backup/stream file. There's generally a variety of quality versions (including Blu-ray and 4K) available, and I can have whatever I need in a matter of minutes.
A tip on handbrake, use an nvidia gpu (in my case a 2070) and it will do it in minutes with H.265 nvenc (or H.264 if prefered). I have not had the chance to use it but there are AMD versions of nvenc as well as intels quicksync and now av1 with intel gpus.
Yes, I always use my GPU for handbrake encoding. So much faster than CPU.
i have TrueNAS set with Plex as my media server with an i5 4590mhz CPU. i want to change this set up though. i have two LG blu-ray’s and would prefer to have all of the ripping done there instead of my main PC.
its not a bad Video - but lets be clear - I use my own password and you got the wrong Dell - Get a 3050 with a 7th Gen chip - £64.50 in the UK, and lose the SATA optical drive and add an addionion SSD - you are showing a lack of knowledge
I've ripped my share of DVDs and Blu-ray discs with MakeMKV and Handbrake. Are you saying you were able to get a regular Blu-ray disc drive to read 4K Blu-ray discs to rip them?