How big was your DVD collection and how long did it take to rip and convert for ATV?

A couple months is probably a good estimate if you do it casually in your spare time. I did about 350 movies. If they are dvd (not blu-rays), it will be a lot faster. I could transcode about 10 dvd/night using handbrake and I have a pretty slow (2009) MBP. If I was doing a BR, it was 1 BR/night. My process was:

1) Create mkv using MakeMKV
2) Transcode mkv to mp4 using Handbrake (aTV3 preset, web optimized, anamorphic strict)
3) Add metadata using Subler
4) Add to iTunes

I store the mkv's on a 2TB external HDD and the mp4's on a 1TB external HDD.

I have over 1000 DVD's and Blu-rays and I used the same process as mic j. I found that the ripping and encoding can be automated and they would pile up waiting for metadata to be added. This was the tedious part as I was very particular in how metadata was added, including things like chapter titles. Sometimes movies with subtitles (most infamously, the Na'vi dialog in Avatar) would take considerable effort to be done correctly.

I found that if I tried to do too much I would get tired of it very quickly and would not be able to get back to it for awhile. What worked for me was to add metadata to one encoded movie/night on weekdays and do several on weekends. This way I managed to go through my entire collection in less than 2 years! Of course, you may be able to proceed faster, especially if you are not very particular about the metadata.

I have about 500 DVDs, 300 Blurays, and who knows how many TV shows. They are all the main feature bit for bit MKV rips.

It all resides on a 20TB RAIDZ2 with roughly 14TB usable that is almost full. I am about to start filling my new 15TB RAIDZ2 box.

brand said:

I have about 500 DVDs, 300 Blurays, and who knows how many TV shows. They are all the main feature bit for bit MKV rips.

It all resides on a 20TB RAIDZ2 with roughly 14TB usable that is almost full. I am about to start filling my new 15TB RAIDZ2 box.

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did you just say 20 TB??? LOL

cgoodwin22 said:

did you just say 20 TB??? LOL

Click to expand...

Yep. I have been eyeballing this SuperMicro chassis for my next BSD or solaris build. It will be configured with two RAIDZ2 arrays each consisting of eight drives. What I had saved for the chassis went towards a Canon 6D so I will have to wait a little longer.

Movies from DVD with HandBrake, and movies from Blu-Ray via MakeMKV then HandBrake, are pretty straightforward. I used IDentify but iFlicks is probably just as easy.

TV shows are a little trickier, and the Sticky thread regarding automation has some good tips in that regard, even if you don't want to totally automate the process. What I ended up doing was building my HandBrake queue manually for each disc (which might be 3-6 episodes, depending on show), then used a utility called NameChanger to get them all named properly so that IDentify would process them more or less automatically.

mic j said:

A couple months is probably a good estimate if you do it casually in your spare time. I did about 350 movies. If they are dvd (not blu-rays), it will be a lot faster. I could transcode about 10 dvd/night using handbrake and I have a pretty slow (2009) MBP. If I was doing a BR, it was 1 BR/night. My process was:

1) Create mkv using MakeMKV
2) Transcode mkv to mp4 using Handbrake (aTV3 preset, web optimized, anamorphic strict)
3) Add metadata using Subler
4) Add to iTunes

I store the mkv's on a 2TB external HDD and the mp4's on a 1TB external HDD.

Click to expand...

It will take much longer if you include subtitles.

brand said:

I have about 500 DVDs, 300 Blurays, and who knows how many TV shows. They are all the main feature bit for bit MKV rips.

It all resides on a 20TB RAIDZ2 with roughly 14TB usable that is almost full. I am about to start filling my new 15TB RAIDZ2 box.

Click to expand...

Are you using something like a drobo , how do you have 20tb hooked up to the computer

I've done my DVDs over many years, updating the quality as needed. I think I first started for my iPod w/video, which didn't do anything better than 320x240. Then hard disks get bigger and you can do better quality. Now I've got a BD-ROM drive so I can rip all my BDs (except for anything with Robert Langdon in it). It's been about 45 days so far because, I cannot stress this too much, the encoding is a bitch on resources. I have an i3 3.06Ghz with 12MB of RAM, and ti still takes forever to do these encodes. I was almost as 1:1 ratio on DVDs of length to encode time (90 minute movie in 90 minutes).

Alas, my next Mac purchase would probably be a MacBook Air, meaning I'm not going to get anything that speeds it up -- unless someone wants to contribute to my Mac Pro fund. Please?

The best thing is to just pace yourself. Get the movies ripped to a drive with plenty of space and then set up the encoding queue in HandBrake with a bunch of titles. I've started to use just Subler for my tagging, which isn't perfect but does tag videos as HD and provides a ton of options.

I have probably done half my BDs in the 45 days. That includes a few TV series discs. The problem with those is when the episodes are out of order or all in one file. Then you have to spend extra time figuring out what you're looking at.

My holy grail project is going to be getting my Lord of the Rings flicks into one file from the BDs so I can replace the video file from my digital copy but keep the iTunes Extras. Between that and getting my Robert Langdon flicks to work, I have only had a couple of real issues doing this.

Saying all of that, I think I'm a total devotee to Apple. First movies/TV shows, now books. If they start selling sandwiches, I'm in trouble.

When I started it took me a few months to do my collection as it was at the start of the project. Think I might have had around 200 DVD's and Blu Rays at the time. After some real cheap sales and blockbusters going out of business I am now up to about 320 of DVD's and Blu Rays.

I have about 400 DVDs/Blu-Rays ripped. I ripped them over time. I'd rip a few in the morning and evening every day. I think it took me 2 months to get through the initial 300 or so.

Honestly, I wouldn't do it again and I stopped ripping my new movies about a year ago. It's not worth the time and effort in both ripping and building/maintaining a server for everything. Take your entire collection and take away all the movies you won't watch more than twice. Now take away all the movies that are available via Netflix streaming where you don't necessarily care about Blu-Ray quality. How many movies are left? For me, that's a very small subset of my collection. Maybe 10% if that (most of the rest were purchased very cheaply... it's very rare that I buy a movie at full price). If I had to do it again, I'd only rip those. Even then I don't know if I'd bother. I'd probably just put them in a nice binder.

The first time I ever had a CD that got too scratched to play I realized that optical media is going to die a welcome, hopefully violent death. It's taken longer than I expected, but it's happening. I skipped DVD's and Blurays altogether. I've got a server that is just about ready to upgrade. Transferring 4TB over wifi is a time intensive task, though not something you do in your free time over the course of months.

Che Castro said:

Are you using something like a drobo , how do you have 20tb hooked up to the computer

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Both the 20TB and 15TB boxes are running FreeBSD with AFP shares to my Macs.

elfy said:

Hey all. After having my Apple TV for a few weeks I have decided I'd like to rip my entire DVD collection and add it to my library. I absolutely love having stuff available at the touch of a button. I have about 500 DVDs (movies and TV show box sets) and was wondering if anyone has done this with a similar size of collection. What kind of timescale am I looking at to get this done? I'm thinking a couple of months at least.

I'm also going to have to invest in a bigger hard drive, a 2TB maybe, and another for backup. It'll be worth it in the end though, and I can think about getting those DVDs out of the way. They take up precious space in the living room and are very tempting for two sixteen month old girls to pull off the shelves!

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I hated the idea of having my laptop constantly running transcode jobs, with the processor at 100 degrees C, and the fans running full blast. So, a couple of years ago, I built a bare-bones PC based on a quad-core AMD processor. At the time, I was able to build the machine for about $300. It was 2-3 times faster than the 2007 Core2-duo MBP I had at the time.

My current 15" rMBP is definitely faster than that PC, but I still use it as my transcoding machine. Eventually, I will upgrade it to an i5 (Haswell or Broadwell), but it still works well enough. Blu-Ray transcodes run at about 1X playing time and DVD transcodes are 2-3 times faster.

I don't mind using a PC for this task since the tools I need (MakeMKV and HandBrake) run on both Mac and PC platforms. I used to do the metadata tagging on the PC with MetaX, but now I do it on the Mac with Identify.

After the transcodes are done on the PC, I copy them to my Mac where they live on a pair of 2TB drives (primary and backup). I'm not a fan of RAID boxes like the Drobo. A single point failure of the RAID controller or it's firmware could still cause complete data loss, so the RAID box really needs a backup. At that point, it's just stupidly expensive. A pair of 2TB (or 3TB, or 4TB) hard drives are pretty darn cheap.

I did 180 a while back but never watch any longer. I decided over time to re-purchase the small percent that I watch many times in HD on iTunes. Just not worth the effort and cost for the machines and disk storage. I still keep a local copy of the purchased movies for easy sync to my iOS devices. I also have Netflix and HBO and more so most of my older movies I ripped are available there as well.

I had about 500 movies on DVDs in binders that I wanted to convert and store on my NAS. Have an Apple TV and a Mac Mini running Plex, so the goal was to have my media made available on all my devices.

Used Handbrake and did batch converting, and during my free time it took about 2 1/2 to 3 months to complete. Found it a bit easier to rip each disc into its own folder then run the batch job.

its a painful project, but worth it because now I have my media tagged with metadata and readily available.

Blu-Rays and Subtitles??Can't do it!

I'm missing something that a lot of you have figured out: When I use MakeMKV on foreign Blu-Rays, I can't seem to check the correct box for English subtitles, such that when I Handbrake the MKV-result, the english subtitles are THERE in the final .mp4. -- What am I doing wrong? I'm not doing SOMETHING right in getting the .mkv ready for Handbrake....

I converted 600 movies and about 30 season of TV series for someone I know with Handbrake.
It took me several weeks.

I always converted them with the ATV 3 preset, Quality at 19-18.
Sadly on a lot of them I forgot about the subtitles

fishdav said:

I'm missing something that a lot of you have figured out: When I use MakeMKV on foreign Blu-Rays, I can't seem to check the correct box for English subtitles, such that when I Handbrake the MKV-result, the english subtitles are THERE in the final .mp4. -- What am I doing wrong? I'm not doing SOMETHING right in getting the .mkv ready for Handbrake....

Click to expand...

Try the free version of DVDFab HD Decrypter. Then you can skip the MakeMKV process so every feature on the disk should be available for you to chose in Handbrake.

fishdav said:

I'm missing something that a lot of you have figured out: When I use MakeMKV on foreign Blu-Rays, I can't seem to check the correct box for English subtitles, such that when I Handbrake the MKV-result, the english subtitles are THERE in the final .mp4. -- What am I doing wrong? I'm not doing SOMETHING right in getting the .mkv ready for Handbrake....

Click to expand...

If you search the forum you will find several threads with detailed instructions on how to do this. Basically you need to make sure that the subtitles are selected in MakeMKV and then proceed with the ripping. The subtitles will be in PGS format. Next you will have to extract the subtitles using MKVTools and view them using BDSup2Sub in order to select the correct one. Finally, handbrake the MKV file with the correct PGS subtitle checked in the subtitles tab.

The Subler program is also quite capable of OCR-ng DVD/BD bitmapped subs into plaintext and adds the result on the fly to MP4 container.

Too much too much

People: thanks for your answers: why doesn't Handbrake simply make it easy for Blu-Ray English subtitles, as they do already for DVD subtitles? Are there not enough people working on/for Handbrake? What you all have proposed is too much work even for me: I love 1080p, but on an iPad, I'll take the DVD rip with subtitles, rather than do all that work... until Handbrake gets it together for Blu-Rays, that is! (And by the time they do, everything will be online, right!?)

iTunes issue

Hey guys, a lot of good info in this thread. But howdo I que up DVD's to be ripped via handbrake over night? I have a 2009 iMac and I can only insert one DVD at a time which takes an hour each movie. Also does your iTunes slow down and become unreponsive with the more movies and TV Shows you add? Mine has. I will be doing a clean install soon when Mavericks comes out.