Over a year ago I was tasked to create a small home server for some friends of mine.
They had about 600movies on DVD's and a whole cubboard full of TV shows on DVD's.
I used Handbrake to convert them to mp4 and downloaded the appropriate movie cover image from google to use in iTunes (if you are using plex you an skip this).
I was using a Mac Pro with two dvd drives for about half of the collection so converting for me was a bit quicker as I was able to either do 2 movies at once or start one and queue the other saving a trip back to the computer for exchanging dvds. For the rest of the collection I used a 2010 15" i7 MBP.
You need to be prepared to imvest a lot of time. Every movie takes about 1.5hrs (and that was on fast systems). Altogether I spent nearly two months converting the entire collection.
The files were stored on external drives. It was abouit 1.6TB of data.
If I were to do that again I would do the following differently:
The most annoying part was that you cant leave your computer running to rip DVD's through the night as you need to physically insert a new disk everytime. So afterwards I thought I should have just bought 2-3 or more cheap external DVD drives which I can all hook up and place a DVD in and queue them in handbrake. That way you can get several movies done while you are sleeping or at work etc.
The end setup was:
2012 Mac Mini base model with the external HDD connected to the home router my ethernet. This is runnign iTunes 24/7
3 Apple TV's all connected to the home network through Powerline Adapters.
Only on rare occasions do they get connectivity problems while over wifi they constantly had problems.
Since then these friends of mine have only ever bought movies and TV Shows on iTunes and usually in HD. Every movie is 4-7GB and a single episode is over 1GB so their storage need as increased rapidly. Currently they are running an external RAID system that has 8TB usable capacity. 6TB are full allready so they will upgrade soon again.
If you are thinking about doing it then I recommend the following hardware:
-Look for a refurbished mac mini on the apple store to save some cash.
-Get an externel 3 or 4TB USB 3.0 harddrive for storage
-Get yourself some Powerline adapters for ethernet connection of your Apple TV
-Buy 3-4 external DVD drives for faster ripping of the movies (you can always return the drives once you are done to get the money back. It shouldnt take longer then 2 weeks if you have 4 DVD drives and "only" 125 movies)
- You said you had iPads and iPhones. I recommend you use these with the Plex app if you are going the plex route or use the Apple remote app if you want to use iTunes.
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I own 17,745 movies and 6,981 episodes of television all on dvd and i also own 9,231 blue ray discs. I bought a system last year called the kaleidascape and i can download dvds then remove them and have them accsesible to any room in the house. It hosts a carousel that can download 300 dvds at once. My hard drive for my theatre has about 1.6 petabytes stored which is approximately 1,490,117 gigabytes. My system costed $60,000 but it retails for less.
Im glad the system works for you however I would recommend most normal people to stay WAY CLEAR FROM KALEIDASKAPE SYSTEMS!
I dealt quite a lot with them and they are pure utter frustration and insane prices
One big problem with the system in my oppinion is that the movies are encrypted on the system so you cant transfer them. Another is that you need so much hardware to run these.
They are relatively stable systems and you will experience little connection problems etc but you spend and arm and a leg for them.
They are good if you want a dedicated home theater and can live with the money you spend on them though.
