Personal computing discussed
dashbarron wrote:Howdy Gerbils. Can't find anything that does this yet so deferring to your collective and vast wisdom.
I'm using a home server w/ Plex to stream to my TV. Need something I can pop in a DVD and stream too. Can't believe there's not a million different pieces of software that will do this? Apparently Plex used to 8 years ago but it's no longer supported.
Got a collection of about 550 DVDs and not enough HD space to convert them all to MKVs yet.
Chuckaluphagus wrote:VLC?
Waco wrote:Steam Link will do this pretty easily (just play in VLC and cast your desktop).
That said, a good quality rip of a DVD is only going to be 1-2 GB if you use a good codec. You're talking about a few TB at most for rips...
EzioAs wrote:How about Serviio?
EDIT: There's a way to stream DVDs but through VLC according to their wiki http://wiki.serviio.org/doku.php?id=stream_dvd
dashbarron wrote:I can't believe there aren't other people out there with media PCs trying to do the same thing.
just brew it! wrote:As a guess, most people either rip the DVDs, or just use a DVD drive/player located by the TV. Having to go pop a physical DVD into a drive on a media server somewhere else in the apartment/house kinda seems to defeat most of the purpose of having the media server in the first place? So yeah, I think your use case is an unusual one.
HERETIC wrote:
Which brings me to the question-
How is the media server connected to the TV???
Is the server headless or does it have a monitor???
If it has a monitor-or you have one you can hook up-does the DVD play with VLC???
If your trying to use some old slow wireless it's possible DVD bitrate/data is too much for it.
techguy wrote:I have nine 4TB drives in my Plex media server, storing approximately 1000 full quality Blu-ray rips.
The Egg wrote:That's some pretty serious home storage. I started doing the same thing (on a much smaller scale), but then became aware of another option. The Vudu service allows you to add movies to a digital collection for $1 each (provided you have the physical copy to insert for verification). You can then watch them on any Roku or streaming device with ease.
just brew it! wrote:The Egg wrote:That's some pretty serious home storage. I started doing the same thing (on a much smaller scale), but then became aware of another option. The Vudu service allows you to add movies to a digital collection for $1 each (provided you have the physical copy to insert for verification). You can then watch them on any Roku or streaming device with ease.
The problem with something like this is that if the service goes away, you're out the $1/movie. Unless I'm mistaken, doing what you're describing also puts their business model in a grey area with respect to copyright law and "fair use", so getting shut down by the courts is a very real possibility.
The Egg wrote:That's always a valid concern whenever you invest money with the expectation of continued service, though they look to be a pretty big name (owned by Walmart). Keep in mind that nine 4TB hard drives have a list price of roughly $1350 (plus the NAS unit, plus electricity costs), and will have depreciated in 5 years (if some haven't died outright). You've also got your time, and (if you're an average Joe) the difficulty in setting things up.
dashbarron wrote:On the programs I could get to cast, it couldn't buffer fast enough?
Redocbew wrote:That may be caused by the wireless. I've never had any trouble streaming from online services over wireless, but streaming directly from a disc at its native bitrate might be a different story. It should work given good conditions, but when I got a new TV I skipped the wireless and ran an ethernet cable to it just in case.
just brew it! wrote:The Egg wrote:That's always a valid concern whenever you invest money with the expectation of continued service, though they look to be a pretty big name (owned by Walmart). Keep in mind that nine 4TB hard drives have a list price of roughly $1350 (plus the NAS unit, plus electricity costs), and will have depreciated in 5 years (if some haven't died outright). You've also got your time, and (if you're an average Joe) the difficulty in setting things up.
Even if all 550 of OP's DVDs are full-length double-layer discs, the entire collection will still fit on a single 5TB HDD, and he's already running a media server. So you're looking at around $150 up front plus the incremental power usage of a single HDD. Even if he gets two HDDs (one for backup so he doesn't have to re-rip if the HDD goes south), that's still only $300 up front.
Power usage of the HDD will be around $10/year (assuming $0.15/kWH), even if it spins 24x7 (no power management).
At $1 a pop it's $550 to do it thru Vudu.
Redocbew wrote:Being owned by someone big just makes it easier for the parent company to cut the cord and throw them to the wolves. I've no idea if that's what Walmart would do, but I doubt the revenue brought in by Vudu is anything more than a rounding error in comparison.
just brew it! wrote:Even if all 550 of OP's DVDs are full-length double-layer discs, the entire collection will still fit on a single 5TB HDD, and he's already running a media server. So you're looking at around $150 up front plus the incremental power usage of a single HDD. Even if he gets two HDDs (one for backup so he doesn't have to re-rip if the HDD goes south), that's still only $300 up front.
dashbarron wrote:Yes, has a monitor. Tried VLC and while I can play another stream services I wasn't able to figure out how to stream from it. I see the options for the different protocols and have tried a dozen configurations. It's wirelessly connected to a TV via a new Archer C7 router. There's no other Wi-Fi signals. On the programs I could get to cast, it couldn't buffer fast enough? I assume the DVD playback being slow is the largest problem. Not sure how bitrate, bandwidth, and file size play into the rest of it. If I ripped it, then it would be OK.
The JBI has spoken. Assume there's no resolution to it. Thanks anyways guys.
ludi wrote:I have trouble seeing why a disk upgrade is impractical for this situation, unless you're thinking about archiving the actual VOB files from your discs. Compressed DVD rips need not exceed 800MB/hour or thereabouts for casual viewing. Some types of flicks (especially anything animated) may be even less.
just brew it! wrote:Redocbew wrote:That may be caused by the wireless. I've never had any trouble streaming from online services over wireless, but streaming directly from a disc at its native bitrate might be a different story. It should work given good conditions, but when I got a new TV I skipped the wireless and ran an ethernet cable to it just in case.
Native bitrate of DVD is 11 Mb/s.
The Egg wrote:techguy wrote:I have nine 4TB drives in my Plex media server, storing approximately 1000 full quality Blu-ray rips.
That's some pretty serious home storage. I started doing the same thing (on a much smaller scale), but then became aware of another option. The Vudu service allows you to add movies to a digital collection for $1 each (provided you have the physical copy to insert for verification). You can then watch them on any Roku or streaming device with ease.
dashbarron wrote:I have a full fledged older PowerEdge server. It has relatively no storage. Per my meter, the energy usages for 24/7 are about $50 on the monstrosity, which seems steep?
dashbarron wrote:Media service stemming from main PC used for other tasks. Besides the other minor things on the Board, the CPU fan only kicks on about 10% of the time, at random. Not sure how much more heat abuse the CPU will take, especially as summer approaches. In need of dire replacement, but I digress.
Have been using handbrake
just brew it! wrote:That said, if we assume 12 cents per kilowatt hour (the US national average) and 250W for the idle power draw of the server (wild-ass guess), that works out to 72 cents/day, or $21.60 per month. So yeah $50 seems kind of high, but not outrageously so.
Waco wrote:just brew it! wrote:That said, if we assume 12 cents per kilowatt hour (the US national average) and 250W for the idle power draw of the server (wild-ass guess), that works out to 72 cents/day, or $21.60 per month. So yeah $50 seems kind of high, but not outrageously so.
250 watts idle? Jeebus, it's not 2003!
Waco wrote:My somewhat outdated (in terms of generation) Haswell quad-core Xeon server with dual LSI RAID cards, 16 2 TB 7200 RPM HDDs, and a few sticks of RAM idles at around 50 watts.
JBI wrote:For all I know it's got a RAID array of 10K SCSI drives and a half dozen leafblower-level fans, which would push the power usage way up. My dually Athlon MP idled at around 150W, and that was without any storage devices. (I measured it because I was thinking of firing it back up and re-purposing it as a server; decided not to when I saw the power numbers.)