+1 for SlySoft (lifetimer)
Same here… Love thier software…
I gotta ask, and no offense, but I could never figure out how anyone has enough Time to watch tht many movies, that much TV or even BUY that many movies? It takes time to buy them, store them, and more time to watch them! I barely get things done as it is so about 15-20 hours of viewing a week is a big number for me most weeks. It may be more like 25 in peak season, but down to 10 otherwise. How in the @#$% could I possibly even watch that many movies, let alone OWN them?
I bet I could store all the movies i’ve ever watched in 1% of your disks.
Where does the time come from? I run a car forum, restore cars, take care of an acreage with a fairly long driveway, work a full-time job, restore and repair auto electric parts for people, do all my own electric, plumbing and remodeling work at home, take care of 5 cats, have a woodworking shop above my auto shop and barely have time to sit through 2 hours of TV in a single day. (thus a TV in my auto shop and a TV in my wood shop)
How do people do it? 1000 movies? REALLY? I’ve never SEEN that many in my almost 58 years! there’s simply no time for that.
@ShadowsPapa…you assume only one person watching all that media. There are three in my house.
Having said that I know I’ve watched at least 1000 movies in my 45 years, that averages to only 22.2 movies per year. In the last two weeks my wife and I have watched 7 movies on Netflix. My son watches at least two TV shows per day at dinner and before bed, and maybe 3-5 movies per month. It all adds up.
@ShadowPapa Your priorities are different from mine and it sounds like you like what you do. Isn't that all that matters? But here is what we do.
My wife and I enjoy movies. We usually watch 1 or 2 on the weekend in the evening and 1 during during the week. We are not home vegging on the couch either. I still work a full time retirement job as a consultant doing injection molding trouble shooting and my wife is a freelance photographer and is out most days on shoots. We spend every weekend outdoors doing something during the day. Watching movies is our time to decompress, usually with a couple glasses of wine. But that is also why we are cord cutters. We do not watch much TV, mostly movies. We really have the antenna and Tablo so my wife can catch up on Bones every once in a while. Currently I like The 100.
Don't get me wrong. I understand your dilemma. I obviously don't know your age but we are older, have a yard service and handyman, the house we live in is our retirement home and is just the way we want it (I do get frustrated that we live in a golf community and have no time to play golf). We raised the kids and the cats and the dogs so our priority is my wife and I, spoiling the 1 LITTLE dog we have, and the grandkids once in a while.
That's my story and I am sticking to it. :-)
I took me the better part of 2 1/2 years to transcode all my dvd’s that I have been collecting since 1997… (I was an early DVD adoptor)
I run plex on a Dual Core Celeron G1820. I’ve had it set up for a couple years now. It took me a long time to rip my whole collection as well. It really is the perfect solution if you are looking for a legit way to display everything inside and outside the house with ease.
@roraniel interesting enough the UK has made it legal to do this for personal use… I am guessing at some point the US will follow suit. The MPAA is way to involved with this just like the music industry was 
Plex is an amazing piece of software. Roku is not the best local streamer if you want DirectPlay to work (aka no transcoding which puts a CPU load on your server). But I’ve found the Fire TV Stick to be a great Plex player.
If you can minimize the transcoding, you don’t need a very powerful computer at all. A P4 would work.
AFAIK, the treasury dept (? maybe a stranger dept actually) determines “fair use” but there is no law. CDs were declared (and again, no law, so can be changed) to be “ok” if “backed up” for personal use.
But the same has never been true for DVDs. Each rip is a US Federal crime. I could list other Federal crimes if you like, but needless to say, it’s insane that you can’t copy a DVD for personal use in the good ole USA With that said, I’m still waiting for the Feds to take me to Guantanamo… and I’m assuming for now, that they won’t.
DMCA… bad law… very bad law.
In fact, decrypting a DVD for playback is a temporal right extended to you as an individual. The important word being “temporal”. That is, you really don’t own the right to playback, but it has been gifted to you (aren’t they nice?)
Blu-ray is worse of course, just because it’s current hard to “break” (to do the illegal thing). The media producers were very concerned about it, but maybe not as much now because Blu-ray effectively tanked (did not succeed at displacing DVD). With that said, if they could, they rip the entrails out of people ripping Blu-ray, while merely poking out they eyes of people ripping DVDs… :-) … and then ideally the Feds would ship you (the media terrorist) to Guantanamo
IMHO, the USA has bigger fish to fry… but you never know…
But… they (?) will go after Slysoft, especially since the decryption code isn’t printed on every T-shirt…the Blu-ray decryption stuff (because their are multiples) is still the stuff of secret (mostly). Oh well… next war, send the media producers. Less mercy…
I found this interesting article.
In the US, a controversial law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has criminalized any attempt to decrypt protected content, even if the consumer has legally purchased the content. The problem is that this “anti-circumvention” provision of the DMCA conflicts with the long-standing “Fair Use” provision of copyright law. The courts have yet to rule on which portion of the law should prevail.
Because of this legal uncertainly, it is legally risky for any software company to market DVD or Blu-ray disc-related tools that include decryption capabilities. Commercial software companies that attempt to sell decryption or ripping products have been threatened with legal action, or in some cases taken to court. The same situation holds whether in the US, Europe, or Japan after great efforts by the movie industry to put in place similar laws to the DMCA in the US. The companies with the most success in avoiding legal action have been those based in countries with weak copyright protection laws, including China, Russia, Antigua, and Panama.
Many believe that removing DVD and Blu-ray disc encryption is reasonable and lawful because they feel the “fair use” provision of copyright law should override any provisions against removing encryption. In fact, to our knowledge no individual has ever been prosecuted for removing DVD or Blu-ray disc copy protection.
In 2010, the US Librarian of Congress specified several exemptions from the anti-circumvention provision of the DMCA law. These are described as:
- The incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment
- Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students
- Documentary filmmaking
- Noncommercial videos
Individuals that meet these exemptions are permitted to circumvent the copy protection on DVD discs. Whether this applies in the case of Blu-ray discs is unclear. In most aspects, however, these exemptions follow the standard “fair use” provisions of traditional copyright law.
Plex is an amazing piece of software. Roku is not the best local streamer if you want DirectPlay to work (aka no transcoding which puts a CPU load on your server). But I've found the Fire TV Stick to be a great Plex player.If you can minimize the transcoding, you don't need a very powerful computer at all. A P4 would work.
If your media on the plex server is in a “compatible format” for the playback device … you can opt to DIRECT STREAM it which does not require transcoding and yup will work fine on a P4 which is what I use for my PLEX server… the weak point however is to make sure it always defaults to DIRECT STREAM and doesn’t try to transcode … which it can based on many various factors… such as media/bitrate compatibility with playback device … and what value you set for your network bandwith (note it DOES NOT dynamically calculate your current bandwith and just assumes the value you have set is truth) … so for my PLEX server (even family who occasionally access it remotely) I ask them to change on their end their bandwith settings to whatever maximum setting is available on their playback device’s PLEX settings (i.e. 20mbps) (yes I know thats crazy high) … but if PLEX senses the video you are trying to playback wont play over the bandwith limits it will try to transcode the video on the fly to “fit” your bandwith settings… (it took a lot of pain and anguish for me to discover this fact).
@roraniel - Yep, I use handbrake to do my encodes mostly - it handles forced pretty well…usually it is finding the right subtitle track on the bluray that is the challenge, rather than encoding them into the media file. I burn them in too. Nothing more irritating than getting halfway through the movie, and the big scene in Klingon isn’t subtitled (luckily I speak Klingon…but the wife doesn’t).
@Shadowpapa - We don’t generally go to the Movies, but prefer to buy the DVD/BluRay and watch it at home. 2 people with popcorn and a drink at our local megaplex is close to $50 now. I can buy 3 BluRays for that. We often rummage through the discount bin when we are out shopping - amazing what you can find in there sometimes. We like to binge-watch too - We did the entire Battlestar Galactica remake series in a couple weeks, Breaking Bad a season at a time. A lot are available on Netflix / Amazon, but some aren’t. I have all the Monty Python series, all the Black Adder series, and so on. It’s kind of 25% hobby, 25% addiction, 25% convenience and 25% economics…Like I said, my Grandson can’t destroy a DVD he can’t touch
We’ll probably buy the GoT box set in the next week or two…rip it all onto the server, then rewatch last season before the new season starts. We might even go back and watch from Season 1. Thats the beauty…if we want to watch something, we can…on our schedule, on whatever device we like, wherever we like.
If I can get Tablo working nicely through Plex, SlingTV might be the last nail in the Cable-coffin. The only downside I see with SlingTV is the single-device/no-DVR issue - for $20/mo I want to be able to DVR my favorite shows to watch on my schedule…and watch as many of them at once as I like. It will be interesting to see what HBO does with its service too.
@cjcox - To quote K from MIB - "This is gonna replace CD’s soon; guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again."
Well, for one, I’m tired of buying the White Album.
I bought Betamax, VHS, LaserDisc, CD, SACD, DVD, HD-DVD, now BluRay. What about M-Disc…BDXL etc. While I respect McCartney et al, I don’t believe even they would expect me to pay 9 times for the same version of Rocky Racoon…
Now with 4K (and now 8K) video standards coming, you know there is going to be yet another format change…am I supposed to keep nine different players handy just to be able to play my stuff ? I literally have Peter Pan in 4 different formats…what do I get for buying it on a holocube ? Lets not even start with Usage Caps, average bandwidth and so on.
I had a big rant post written, but I’ll leave it with this - Until DCMA vs Fair Use as it relates to personal backups/portability is properly tested in the courts, it’ll still keep happening. Last I looked, I couldn’t find a single conviction of an individual who made a copy of a dvd or bluray for the sole purposes of streaming it on their own personal network. I buy more DVDs and BluRays now than I ever did, mostly because I can enjoy them more easily.
A 3 year old with a tablet playing Lion King is a happy 3 year old…and he never has to go online.
@sjp, I’m surprised you missed Video Disc (CED Video on Vinyl). One of my neighbors across the hall in college had one. Otherwise, I would have never believed they existed. 
And I do agree that it’s a worthless thing… with regards to making (presumably) fair use copying for home use a Federal crime. But it is a Federal crime, not some kind of low misdemeanor (just saying). Like I said, the Feds haven’t moved in across the street yet.
I have been a video junky all my life. One way or another, I have dip far more than just my toes into that ocean of unreality turning it into my reality I escape to as often as I can. I have also been a videographer since before VHS came about. I have spent a small fortune in this and I really do not feel any sadness because of it. The experiences, education, travel, and equipment have evolved into my life and added so much to what my life has been. Now, I relax more, but I’m still active in so many things my days are always filled with good times and most of all good family and friends to share it with.
This past year I decided to build a home theater in our basement. Along with that, I am also building a sauna and bathroom. Doing all of it myself, I am about halfway done and expect to finish up in a few months if I keep at it. This last whole month or so, I have been fighting off some kind of flu bug that just does not want to leave. Because of that, my energy levels are quite low, so I have started putting together some of the equipment down here and setting up a useable theater that is really getting used. I cannot believe I didn’t do this 15 or 20 years ago. It is so nice to come down here, make some nice popcorn and whatever else, set down and watch movies on the big (137") screen.
PLEX is the center point to all of this. Without it, I would not be able to stream all of my Blu-Ray, DVD’s, even 3D Blu-Ray files through my BD player and to the 3D projector without a whole lot more work. I’ve had all the kids and grandkids here a few times already and we have such fun watching movies, visiting and eating. Great times, and a nice size piece of it is due to having a home theater. Still building my content, but when everything is converted, I will have somewhere over 1000 movie titles, perhaps a 300 hours of edited video, and if this tablo transfer to PLEX gets going, quite a bit of commercial free TV Shows and TV Movies.
It will be really fun when everything get finish down here. Right now, the theater is working, but only just. Bathroom and Sauna are built, but still need to be finished as well. I think I need to get back to work!
-Rodger
What about younity? It handles all of my different video files great, and doesn’t require any setup hassle or rearranging your current file structure on your home media server. Give it a try, it’s free lol
You load Ubuntu on the box and install Plex into that.