On deciding that enough is enough and buckling down to create a Digital Media Server- One Man's Journey

The tactile sensation of opening a new Record, or Cassette in my formative years or eventually a CD, popping it into a player and reading the liner has always held a tremendous pleasure for me.  But I find more and more that I just don't do it any longer.  Its easier to go on iTunes for the latest song or two that I want and we go out to Netflix or Amazon Prime or OnDemand for movies.  I've maintained a sizable collection of CDs (500+) and DVDs  (100+) for years now and they mostly take up space and gather dust.  Some of the CDs are in my iTunes library, but if we want to watch a DVD we have go all the way into the office, find the DVD we want, go and put in the player, pray that the DVD makes it back in to its case and goes back in to the office again (with my wife, this is a 50/50 proposition at best), and let it sit until we want it again.  Rough life, no?

I've kept these collections intact because of the simple pleasure of having them for years now.  But as I look at my life, where its going, and some changes that I'd like to make in the next couple of years, reducing Stuff is towards the top of my list.

That's not to say that I'm willing to just toss everything.  Its just time to go digital with my collection.  I free up space, I make my collections on demand, and hopefully I can actually make a little cash in the process.

My criteria was fairly simple.  I wanted to be able to stream my DVDs and CDs from a PC onto my Sharp LED 70" Flat Screen.  I further wanted to be able to copy  movies from my collection onto our iPads and my Windows Surface Tablet That Has Replaced My PC as desired for plane rides and other situations where we were offline (honestly, it was the latter that really proved to be the catalyst for this little project- we were heading to Florida and I wanted some entertainment to pass the red eye flight).  And as an added bonus, I wanted to figure out how to stream to the master and guest bedroom TVs.

What I discovered is that my criteria is fairly simply met with additional capabilities that I hadn't anticipated.  Here's what I learned during my journey through 100 DVDs.

You'll need a PC

This kind of goes without saying, but you'll need a PC for this project.  Mine is an older HP- AMD Dual Core Processor, 4GB RAM, 500 GB Hard Drive- and I'm doing just fine so far with running the requisite application and copying the data over.

Its going to be best if the PC you use is dedicated or at least partially dedicated to its new life as a media server.  This is also true when doing the copying- it is a resource intensive exercise and if you're streaming YouTube simultaneously with running half a dozen spreadsheets and Photoshop you're in for a crash methinks.

You'll need a lot of Hard Drive space

Count on about 1GB per DVD, 3-5GB per Blu-Ray.  CDs will generally go about 500-750MB a pop. So in other words, for my entire library I'm probably going to end up being in the 750GB range give or take.  That's a lot of dedicated space.  Nowadays hard drives are bigger and bigger, so this is less of a problem than it once was, but just understand that all those files have to go somewhere...

Right now I have the DVDs going to my local hard drive while my iTunes sits on an external 500GB hard drive.  I'll probably keep this configuration for a bit and see how it goes- I'm a bit concerned with latency with iTunes, but it may not be as much of a problem with music as it would be with movies.

You'll need some software

There are three key functions that you need software to help you with:

1.  Transcoding the disk

You need to convert the DVD format into a more universal format for streaming- usually MP4 or M4V.   For Transcoding, after a few clicks on Google, I quickly settled on Handbrake.  Its freeware, which for me was an added bonus.

Handbrake is intuitive and the default options are pretty much good to go out of the box

The UI is fairly intuitive; within a few minutes after installation I was scanning my first DVD and copying it over.  15 minutes later it was done!

At which point I found that Handbrake had copied exactly nothing.

Looking through the logs, I found the following error:  Device E:\ inaccessible, CSS authentication not available.  

After all the anticipation, a single line in a log spelled doom for my first copy

Back to Google we go, where I found out about the second function that you need software for:

2.  Decrypting the disk

Most DVDs are protected.  You need to decrypt the DVD in order for it to be transferred.  There are a number of applications out there that do this for you, most in the $50 range.  At this point I was ready to reconsider this project as I was looking to keep it as inexpensive as possible.  Then I found this article:  http://www.howtogeek.com/102886/how-to-decrypt-dvds-with-hardbrake-so-you-can-rip-them/

The article is actually a bit outdated as the software that they recommend, XBMC is called Kodi now.  But the remainder is actually, well, awesome.  In short, you can add a DLL to from Kodi to Handbrake and POOF!  Handbrake will decrypt DVDs.  Sounds difficult?  It isn't.  If you can use the Search, Copy, and Paste functions in Windows Explorer, you can add that DLL.

How To Geek does a great job of explaining the process on how to do this, so I'm not going to recreate it here.  But, here is the updated URL to go to to download Kodi:

https://kodi.tv/

And here is an updated screenshot showing you where the DLL is:

Updated screenshot of Kodi

Bottom line is by following the instructions you'll be able to get Handbrake to serve as an all in one application that decrypts and transcodes the DVDs into a more digestible format.

My second attempt at copying a disk with Handbrake was immediately successful.  It pulled right up in Windows Media Player and I was watching it right on my desktop.  Now to get it to other devices, which leads us to...

3.  Streaming the media

For most devices you need  a media server to organize and present your content for viewing/playing That said, you can turn your PC into a media server and stream to compatible devices; my TV will actually pick up my PC as a media server and would play home movies, etc from the paths that I specified.  But that only served to stream to one device.  I wanted something that I could stream to others.  Back to Google, Robin!

After some digging, I came across Plex.  My initial criteria to copy movies to the iPads and Surface had been satisfied just by transferring the content to my PC- from there, its basically drag and drop to networked/connected devices.  In order to get my movies onto the other non smart TVs in my house though, I needed another solution.  Plex is the answer, combined with Chromestick.  Let's start with Plex.

For the PC, Plex is freeware.  You download it, point it to the paths where your content resides, and create an account for authentication.  Plex then reads the data in the specified paths, and populates it UI with content in a matter of minutes:

Plex even adds metadata to give you cool icons for most of your titles.  The UI is intuitive and looks great

Once its setup, you can then download the Plex App for your iPads, iPhones, and and Android devices.  For the Apple products, the App is $4.99, well worth it in my opinion.  You now have a similar interface on you devices, you can stream your music and movies to your devices, and you can pause a movie on one device and pick it up right where you left off on another.  Slick, huh?

The Chromestick works similarly, using the Plex App and aforementioned authentication you setup, you can now stream to "dumb" TVs provided they have an open HDMI port (I think I've read that you can get an HDMI to USB adaptor, but I didn't need it).  Same deal- watch a movie on your dumb TV, pause it, fire it right back up on your iPhone.

I'm also using Plex on my Smart TV now.  While it picked up the DLNA server that I'd turned my PC into, I find that Plex is more responsive and that streaming is more seamless with it.

Your Blu-Ray movies might be out of scope

Take a Blu-Ray movie and place it in a DVD player.  What happens?  Chances are very good that it spins and spins, but no movie ever appears on your screen.

It's the same with PCs.  Unless you have a Blu-Ray drive in your PC, you won't be able to copy Blu-Ray movies to your digital library.  Since you're in the process of migrating your library to your PC, it may not make a lot of sense to buy a new drive just for this purpose, but I'll let you make that call. For me, my Blu-Ray collection is currently out of scope until I can find someone with a drive they're letting go for uber-cheap or that they will let me borrow; thankfully I only have about 20 titles so I'm not too worried about it.

You'll need patience

Plan on each title taking anywhere from 30-120 minutes to complete; an hour on average is probably a good guide.

But that's just for the movie.

If you want all the special features on the disk or on additional disks, you need to load them separately.  This could greatly increase the amount of time you need for your project.  For me, I've never seen a special feature that I couldn't live without so I omitted them entirely.

Knowing this, I decided to see what would happen if I wanted to load up the 8 seasons of Entourage I have lying around.

Sure enough, one 30 minute episode took about 50 minutes to copy over.  Kind of a pain, no?

Not to fear Special Feature or TV aficionados.  Handbrake offers a Queue feature.  This allows you to select multiple items off of a disk, (and indeed presumably multiple disks), click start, and let 'er rip. Much more efficient way to move multiple files from a single disk.  In order for this to work, you have to allow Handbrake to Auto Name the files copied and set a default directory to copy to. Handbrake will tell you this and point you to Preferences to make the change; I actually found the appropriate settings at Tools->Options.

With the Queue option in Handbrake, I can load multiple episodes with one job; this also works to load Special Features

You'll need to check your work periodically

When I was looking at the files in Windows Explorer, I notices that a couple of the titles had generic "AV File" icons instead of the traditional icon showing a snippet of the movie.  When I tried to play these titles from Windows Explorer via Windows Media Player, I received errors; same with Plex.  I ended up having to rerun those titles through Handbrake.  Second time was a charm- could be any number of things that caused them to fail.  2 titles out of 114 was an acceptable fail rate to me.

See how one of the Star Trek and The Princess Bride files have different icons?  These threw errors when played

Epilogue

With some elbow grease, patience, and perseverance, you can setup your home as a digital empire the envy of all the neighbors.  I haven't found an all in one guide anywhere; hopefully this will serve as getting the Internet one step closer to that.

Are there other solutions?  You bet.  But I've been very happy with the applications that I chose for this project and definitely recommend them to anyone looking to go digital.

I've copied 114 DVDs so far which I put on Craigslist yesterday for $114.  I got an offer this morning of $100, which I will likely accept.

So I'm in $4.99 for Plex, $29.99 for a Chromestick so far.  I have two dumb TVs but for now I am content moving the stick from TV to TV if I need to.  So call it 40 bucks with tax and whatnot.  If I clear $100 on the DVDs I'll have made $60 on this project, cleared space, got rid of Stuff, and created an OnDemand environment in my house.  As a Project Manager, it doesn't get any better than that ROI!


I bought a bourgeois house in the Hollywood hills
With a truckload of hundred thousand dollar bills
Man came by to hook up my cable TV
We settled in for the night my baby and me
We switched 'round and 'round 'til half-past dawn
There was fifty-seven channels and nothin' on
Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on
Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on

Well now home entertainment was my baby's wish
So I hopped into town for a satellite dish
I tied it to the top of my Japanese car
I came home and I pointed it out into the stars
A message came back from the great beyond
There's fifty-seven channels and nothin' on
Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on
Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on

        -Bruce Springsteen, 57 Channels (And Nothin' On) 

The Boss wrote 57 Channels for the Human Touch album, released in 1992.  Really, I think you just add a 0 to that number and you have an accurate reflection of the Cable situation in my house these days.  With my own On Demand collection now though I have one more option to choose from when I tire of Big Bang Theory reruns on four different channels.

One last note- my record collection, which ironically takes up the same amount of space as the DVDs and CDs combined, ain't going anywhere.  We'll get into the great debate of digitizing vinyl some other day, but for now suffice it to say that in my opinion there's just no substitute for hot stax of wax for the true audiophile and it satisfies my need to get hands on with my music.