It's 2023, get a computer that can hardware encode H265, not H264. Recent phones, streaming boxes, smart TVs, and computers can decode H265. The H265 files can be smaller and/or of better quality than H264. The new AV1 codec is being implemented right now in some devices.

Great video and your guide on ripping UHD Blu-Rays was great, but there are two ways you can improve this setup. Firstly I'd setup Tdarr for transcoding instead of Handbrake, Tdarr is much more suited towards automated transcoding and once you point it at your library you can very easily alter it however you want (transcoding, remove embedded subs, foreign language tracks etc.) and it's pretty much set and forget, Handbrake's watch folder needs a bit more manual intervention. Next I would suggest just spending a tiny bit more and getting a GPU which supports H.265 transcoding, you can get a Quadro P400 for less than $50. H.265 takes up significantly less space than H.264 at the same quality and allows you to really increase the size of your movie library on any given storage constraints.

@gmooney77

11 ай бұрын

What's the best method for just brute forcing my way through instead of using handbrake. I want to use a full fat mkv blu ray rip. I'll never be streaming to more than one tv at a time and almost always at native res.

@Cripples23

10 ай бұрын

​@MolendinarI bought one on ebay for $27 2 weeks ago off ebay

@CollynPlayz

6 ай бұрын

⁠@Molendinarif you are in the us you can get these for 15 to 30 dollars

Thanks for the videos. You mentioned near the top that you liked the form factor of these DT Optiplexes, "especially when lying flat". I had my 7010 SFF on its side for a couple of years before I realized the "DELL" logo on the bezel can be rotated 90 degrees. This is my primary work machine, maxed out with an I7-3770, 4x8 GB RAM, two Samsung EVO 1TB SATA SSDs (one in an optical drive bay adapter), and a 1 TB Inland NVME via a PCIe adapter. I'm driving two 27" 2560 x 1440 monitors from the I7's onboard graphics. I don't game or edit videos, just database conversions, software development, office tasks and web browsing. This little workhouse has been running nearly 24/7 for many, many years and has never let me down. I'm building a 12th gen Intel box now and will convert the "Little Dell that could" to a Linux server.

@wildbill23c

Жыл бұрын

For what you are doing, you don't need a new machine, most of the new machines do the same stuff you are doing, at the same speed, if you are lucky...it seems like they've really tapered off in the way of speed increases until you get into high end productivity machines with multiple processors and such...but, like you, I just run what I have, and it works fine for my daily needs....those SFF Optiplex machines do pretty well...they were built for business, they were built to be upgraded/updated, rather than used a couple years and thrown away like so many of today's machines with everything onboard and not being able to upgrade RAM and sometimes even your storage drive isn't removable....what the heck LOL. I've salvaged a lot of the Dell Optiplex machines in recent months, cleaned them up, installed an SSD, fresh windows installation, and have given them away to families with school aged kids that can't afford to buy that stuff. They're not the latest and greatest but they'll get the job done pretty well when all you are doing is school work, web browsing, and a few youtube videos.

@theglowcloud2215

9 ай бұрын

@@wildbill23c while I agree Intel has stagnated in recent years, you can't really ignore the single-thread performance in 12th gen is a huge upgrade over 3rd gen. Since many workloads are still single-threaded, you care about single-thread performance. A 12700 will run circles around a 3770, and more efficiently. iGPU performance is even more noticeable when you jump 8 or 9 generations forward.

It would be cool to see you do a video on the Automatic Ripping Machine (ARM) project. I don't think I've ever seen someone document setting it up and your videos are always so thorough! And I think you might enjoy all that sweet automation goodness

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Yeah that could be interesting… seems like a lot of work though haha

@lucasRem-ku6eb

Жыл бұрын

he is apple, you need old PC too ?

@jonathanschober1032

Жыл бұрын

I agree, fully automating this process would be awesome. I know ARM gave me troubles in the past, but it’d be cool to see it take a 4K Blu-ray and rip/transcode/store for jellyfin all automatically

@JohnTHQ

Жыл бұрын

@@jonathanschober1032 me too! i even tried the docker containers but in the end it just 'never worked'.

@michael.andreae

Жыл бұрын

I'm sure I've seen something like this in the Unraid plug-ins. A Docker container that uses MakeMKV, but I haven't tried it since I store my Blu-Rays as decrypted isos, not as an mkv.

Since you have nvidia card, I think you could use ffmpeg and nvenc to transcode the blu-ray. Decode the video with the CPU, then resize and encode to h264 with the GPU. Audio can be easily copied without re-encoding. At the same time, delete unnecessary tracks.

@jarsky

Жыл бұрын

The issue with GPU encoding (e.g NVENC) is that the filesize is larger, and quality is lower. Software X264/X265 takes longer but gives the best result. He could still use MakeMKV if he finds it easier, and use MKVToolNix to remove unwanted tracks (audio streams, subs, etc...) as well.

@sacha1916

Жыл бұрын

​@@jarsky Quality concerns are really miniscule nowadays, high motion footage like video games still suffer, but movies are more than okay to just transcode with the gpu.

@stonesfan285

9 ай бұрын

Ehh I think it might be worthwhile to go to NVENC H265. The quality is actually quite good compared with the standard x264 CPU (non-GPU) encoding. And the encoding of NVENC H265 can be more efficient in some cases vs x264 just because of H265 v H264 encoding. More and more hardware being 4K capable means H265 will be more widely supported.

@V8VRUte

6 ай бұрын

I was thinking the same thing. Kind of, anyway. I messed with tdarr a little, but couldn't get it figured out without spending more time on it than I wanted to. I just use an unmanic container (again, couldn't get it working the way that I wanted it to) and I have a couple of bash scripts that I wrote, to encode files that I drop into an imports folder, and then process them with the hevc nvenc encoder, using a GTX1650 GPU in the NAS. Average speed is about 18 to 20x (compared to about 2x for CPU encoding, although, the Intel QSV encoder was around 10x, so would still be a good option if you didn't have a dedicated GPU to lean on) I know that I should just spend a little more time in tdarr, however, MOST of my old collection from pre Netflix days has now been imported, and transcoded, and more importantly, all renamed to have a consistent naming convention (I can't believe how little I used to care about filenames, and folder structures lmao, one of the reasons it's always fun to explore old HDD's)

@raulgalets

6 ай бұрын

ffmpeg is so much faster than handbrake for me. it doesn matter which preset I use or how custom I make it, a simple ffmpeg libx265 is at least twice as fast with the same CRF

I use a rehoused 790 motherboard in a full height ATX case. I'm using it to run Automation software for a Radio Station. The Rehousing was to support a full height video card, and to add more storage bays. Dell was still using a standard ATX Power Supply in this design. So i replaced it with a larger one.

Watching your videos gave me the confidence I needed to finally go Unraid on my server desktop. Just waiting for all my files to land on the NAS and then gotta set up Plex and we’re home 🤗 also for the last week have been trying different configs. Huge thank you man 🎉

@haydenc2742

Жыл бұрын

Unraid is a pretty decent home server/NAS system...I bought pro becuase I have 10+ drives at 6TB setup...

Thank you for mentioning Jeff Geerling! He's one of my favorite content creators. He's also local to where I live. Dude goes to the same Microcenter as me lol. He has some amazing Raspberry pi and Kubernetes videos, plus he literally wrote the book on Ansible.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Jeff’s the best! He’s like half the reason I got into this space

@Yuriel1981

Жыл бұрын

@@HardwareHaven you AND Jeff are the reasons I have my home Lab. So thank you brotha!

10 years isn’t really that old for a computer anymore. Anything from 10 years ago is a reasonable up-to-date and modern computer as far as I’m concerned. Even some computers from 15 years ago with the faster variants of C2D and C2Q aren’t too shabby for basic tasks. Good to see a computer like this put to good use rather than be wasted. I’m actually surprised by the performance issues you had.

@sportzbomb120

Жыл бұрын

Could you elaborate on what you mean by “Basic tasks”?

@thewarhogclan171

Жыл бұрын

@@sportzbomb120 emails, basic word processing, light shopping or video watching, etc

@ProjectBlackweather

Жыл бұрын

Doncha know if it can't do 4k@900000000000000000000000000000000FPS it's a piece of shit that should be trashed? (SARCASM)

@wildbill23c

Жыл бұрын

For many people a Thinkpad T420, or even a T410 can still handle their daily needs...although heavy compared to a brand new laptop...those old laptops and desktops will still do the job that many people actually use their computers for. Its when you get into heavy CPU/RAM usage needs like editing video, photos, ripping movies, etc. is when you really need the new hardware to support the new processes that some people are trying to do...although the old machine will handle it, it'll take way too long to get any meaningful use out of it for certain tasks. Most daily computing needs can be done on older machines for sure. I have a Thinkstation S20 for my desktop PC...still does all my daily computing needs....and the 10,000RPM 1TB hard drive can more easily keep up with tasks that many of today's drives can't due to their lower speeds...thinking of doing an SSD swap at some point though.

@ScottGrammer

Жыл бұрын

@Alexander Ratisbona A friend of mine has a PC I built for him out of stuff I had lying around, including a Core 2 Quad Q9650, slightly overclocked. He uses it to run DAW software to record his music and it works great for him. The machine is left on 24 hours a day, and it's been three years since I built it.

I've being using an old AMD PC @2010 for home movie storage, plug into router and it shows on five samrt TVs in our home, works really well and its tucked away out of sight.

I’ve installed hundreds of those small form factor SFF PCs for clients over the years. I’ve also repurposed several and different types of servers. Solid hardware!

I did something similar with a 4th gen Dell Optiplex mid tower. It's stock on the outside, but heavily modded on the inside. I drilled out the HDD cage to make room for a 1080ti hybrid, did the ATX PSU mod, and threw in a Magic Reform 4980hq that has the 128mb l4 eDRAM cache. It can be tweaked to near 4790k speeds while consuming about a third of the power Storage is mounted in an adapter that I slung under the 5.25 bays. There's not a ton of room left, but it works. Emulates pretty much anything I throw at it, plays 4k movies fine. It's great little PC for when company is over

Dude that BIOS splash screen intro is so creative.

In Unraid it's generally better to make separate shares for Movies and TV Shows. While this isn't a big deal if you're only running a single array drive, it can cause issues if you add more drives to your array. One of the main advantages of Unraid is that you can basically add another drive whenever you want to or whenever you need more capacity in your array. Having your Movies and TV Shows on different shares allows you to change the split level of each share individually. For movies you should set Split Level to only split the top level directory, that way all the contents of each movie's folder stay on the same drive. For TV Shows you want to set it to split the top two levels of the directory, that allows you to keep each season on the same drive, but allows different seasons of a TV Show to be written to different drives. TV Shows can take a significant amount of array space and if you have it set to only split the top level directory, Unraid will try to put the entire TV Show on a single drive, even if it is out of space, per your split level settings for that share. Keeping the whole season on a single drive avoids long load times when watching multiple episodes but also helps avoid trying to write large TV Shows with multiple seasons all to one drive even when that drive is out of space.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

For sure. I just didn’t think it was worth diving into split levels on this video, especially since this system is about to get stripped down anyway. Great explanation of it though, and I hope other people come across this! Wish I could pin it 👍🏻

@zito88

Жыл бұрын

@@HardwareHaven For sure, that makes sense. Love the video though, seeing another nerd like myself figuring things out as we go! I'm mostly self taught when it comes to tech, but have learned a lot setting up 3 servers now that I have running in my homelab. I've made a bunch of mistakes over the years and just want to help other people avoid the pitfalls and frustrations from the mistakes I've made! I have two separate Unraid servers running and one that runs Proxmox, tons to learn with both OS's. Keep up the content!

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Nice! Love the attitude and sounds like an awesome setup!

@tanmaypanadi1414

Жыл бұрын

Thank you for sharing 🙂

Bro, I'm attempting to do exactly what you're doing thankfully you've posted this video just in time because I ordered that exact blue ray drive.

I just started making a home server. My first big project like this. It’s extremely daunting. However, stuff like this fill me with that excitement that makes me want to do more. Plus, you’re almost convincing me to buy unraid lol. Love your stuff and looking forward to more in the future.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

You can do it! There's tons of other stuff on youtube to help you out. I started out a few years ago with literally zero knowledge of any of it haha

I have the same PC. Mine came with a bracket that holds a 3.5" Drive on the top, and a 2.5" on the underside (Dell 0R494D J132D). I put a i7 2600, 16GB Crucial DDR3-1600, 480GB Kingston SSD, and the same LG BD-ROM/DVD-RW drive. I also added in a Low Profile Radeon R7 450 4GB GDDR5.

💥 new stuff to watch, man i loved it. Earlier i had a laptop which had 2 hhd and omv in a usb drive it worked as a good Nas for 2 years. But a few weeks ago i got my hands on a dead pc from one of my relatives, the only problem is the motherboard which is dead but no worries i am working on it, watching this guide now has motivated me to start working on this project and the life to this old pc. That my story, i will watch your next upload So see you next time probably under 15 sec

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Nice! Best of luck

Been thinking about doing something like this, but was debating about setting up a cheap old computer for just this or putting it on a server with more power. This helped me make up my mind, Thankyou!

It’s 5AM and I’m just going to bed because I followed this guide earlier yesterday to flash my Blu-ray drive and started ripping 4K movies 😂😂 Huge thank you

Since you're files are going across multiple devices and being transcoded, fileflows or tdarr could be good solutions for you. Both support hardware encoding and work with workers that you can install on your home pcs to help. The server distributes the tasks to all workers. The final renaming and importing could be made easier with sonarr and radarr that are normally used for torrenting but have watch folders and manual imports. They get the series info from IMDb and help to keep track what you've ripped in which quality and what is missing in your collection.

I have an Optiplex 990DT, also with a second gen i5. The local Microsoft TPR that sold it to me gave it Dell's stock/standard ATI AMD Radeon HD 6360. For arcade-emulation gaming and Final Fantasy XI Online, it's absolutely perfect. Dell Optiplex and Precision are the only desktops that I trust. In the passed, I've had ASUS and a few HP's. They were not as good as Dell. I have found that Optiplex and Precision have consistently come from the factory with the DVD drive set on territory 0. This is fantastic for people like me who hae have extensive library of territory 2 anime DVD's.

3:10 if you look closely, you'll see that the blue drive bracket in the top right of the picture, holds a 3.5" as well as a 2.5" drive so you don't need to buy a bracket if you're just using an SSD and a spinning SATA drive. The first SATA port on the motherboard supports 6GB/s SATA 3 for an SSD, but the second and third SATA ports only do 3GB/s, so don't expect miracles. For a real increase in speed, a PCIe adapter with an MVME stick would probably help (I think the motherboard can do PCI mode 3 but not mode 4). You probably also want a USB3 adapter but since there are no 5.25" style Molex connectors on the power supply, that will take some improvisation.

I have an OptiPlex 3040 micro. I tried to use it for UHD Blu-rays, but I ran into the same speed issue you found. If you want hardware decode for 10-bit H265, you need at least Kaby Lake (7th gen). I have 6th gen Skylake, and the dell bios won’t allow me to upgrade, even though it’s the same socket. But otherwise, it’s very small, quiet, and pretty efficient.

@lucasrem

3 ай бұрын

let the Nvidia driver do it !

This is exactly what I used an old optiplex I had laying around for too. Ripping and reencoding my media this box does a decent job at

I also talked myself out of a cache pool on my server. I've found that it can stream multiple 4K videos at once without bogging down the drives or the basic gigabit ethernet I'm using, and my ARC hits are already pretty high. On a basic home media server, it's pretty overkill. Though the adapter card would allow you to have more disk space in the small form factor.

Because of the Optiplex 790 being stuck on Sandy Bridge, I used the Optiplex 7010 as my starting point for my build. Unfortunately I grabbed the SFF and not the DT form factor, with the disappointing laptop optical drive. Now that time has moved on, Haswell and newer generation desktops are getting cheap. I'll use this as inspiration to play around with unRAID though. Thanks for the awesome content!

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, the lack of full 5.25” bay is a huge bummer… wish there were more newer prebuilts with one

@AthenaNova1

Жыл бұрын

I have an HP Envy desktop with a laptop DVD burner. It's so annoying how they designed the case to only support a slim drive!

@JamieStuff

Жыл бұрын

There are slim UHD-capable drives available, as well as USB external ones.

One way to improve here is another method of offloading to various nodes on your network with tdarr. It can monitor your central library folder and replace files when new additions are detected.

Thanks, I think I will try this. I have a lot of not so old used pc’s I need to find something to do with and this seems like a worthwhile project. Thanks.

@HardwareHaven

10 ай бұрын

Good luck!

I use a Chuwi Larkbox Pro Mini PC as my media center. Running on Windows 11. Hooked up to my library on an external hard drive. Considering transferring to an ssd for faster loading time. Perfect tiny setup if you ask me. I could use a "bigger" mini pc but I really wanted something ultra small and simple.

I'm doing something very similar to this but my older office PC of choice is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M93P small form factor PC with the Intel Core i5-4590 (Quad core) It has served me well and has a total of 8 USB ports on it for expandability 6 of which are super speed. This was $100. I think it is a good 1st setup for me to get started and begin learning.

My Optiplex(es) are working hard in my home for my media library. I'm using an Optiplex Micro for ripping the discs, an Optiplex SFF with an i7 for transcoding for mobile (manual process unfortunately) and my Unraid Server with Plex to manage and stream the media. Might explore more automated and or all-in-one solutions in the future 😁 Nice video, I'm a huge fan and enjoy every episode of you tinkering with old pc stuff (software and hardware). Keep up the good work mate!

@Dfain94F

Жыл бұрын

Unmanic on unraid is what I use to automate my transcoding

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Wow! Lots going on haha, I love it. And thanks!

@FynnR

Жыл бұрын

@@Dfain94F thanks for the hint! That in combination with DiskRipper and your only doing would be to periodically insert a new BluRay disk into the drive. Maybe paired with notifications to know when the current disk is ripped and queued for transcoding and life would be easy! Sadly I currently need to adjust the metadata on most of my movies since they're all in German. Wouldn't be fun if it was fully automatic 😉

For the heck of it, you could swap the motherboard and processor in that Dell out to something a little more modern, like a Ryzen 5 3600 with a B450 or B550 board. The only issue you’ll have is getting the pinout for the power button, power LED, and HDD LED (I remember that being the only proprietary thing in that computer). The only thing you might need is a low-profile cooler, but I think a stock cooler like the wraith would fit.

I have the exact same optiplex also running a 2nd gen i5 which I converted to a home jellyfin and file/torrent server. I too, love the look of the optiplex lol. There is an additional slot for a 2.5 inch drive at the bottom part of the stock HDD holder(light blue plastic part). I was able to mount a 2.5" Sata SSD as boot drive and 2 units of 2.5" 1TB HDD on a 3.5 to 2.5 converter mount as well as a 3.5" 3TB low power HDD in a 5.75" HDD hot swap caddy. Total of 3x mechanical drive and 1x SSD. So far the PSU is able to keep running without any sudden shut down.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Nice! Yeah I totally missed the 2.5” mount on the caddy haha

You have inspired me to not be as scared about the flashing of the bluray drive. I have been putting off that part for...a bit. Since my current unraid tower is a full size desktop, I can just slap that drive in and call it a day once I format it.

My old high school still uses those computers

OptiPlex's are pretty solid. I have two of them in my house, one is a i5 2500, maxed out ram/SSD/GT630 2gb (triple monitors), is on 24/7 and hasn't skipped a beat in the last 6yrs or so. It's mainly used for office work for my GF. I plan to do something like this video to repurpose it when I find something newer for her. Best part it was nearly free. I live in a tech sector, when the companies upgrade it just rains OptiPlex's and like office PC's...I got a Z640 workstation and 4 OptiPlex's in different conditions for $50, sold the Z640 for $120 during the pandemic when everyone wanted a gaming PC.

I was able to set up Tdarr that automatically transcodes. You can set it up for FFMPEG or Handbrake. It will watch a folder and you can make it automatically transcode based on watched folders or whenever you tell it to do a new scan.

I owned an identical model about a year ago - beefed it up to 16 gigs ram and used it as a spare Hyper-V machine for odds and sodds until I sold it off to some who needed a better machine after a laptop breakdown. I'm at the same thought pattern as you with the limited processing fabrication. 2nd gen is quite old and struggles to keep with modern day computing demands.

I've taken a few years off of tech to pursue other hobbies, but having limited budget for hobbies lately videos like yours have had me very intrigued to start spending time on PCs again. I should be picking up an optiplex 3060 SFF (i7-8700, 16GB RAM) for $100 this evening. Pretty stoked! I still need to find a another for a router/firewall box. I wish the USFF/Micro had a PCI-E slot for a NIC.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Woah nice deal!! Enjoy it

@TheeAbstractHero

Жыл бұрын

​@@HardwareHaven Pro-tip- It's become an outdated marketplace these days but I find all the best deals on Craigslist. Project cars, Used furniture, old commercial PCs apparently too! Thanks for the videos!

Fantastic idea! Definitely got my gears turning as I also want backups of my DVD and blu-ray movie collection.

I’ve been running a HP SFF for 7 years as my Plex server with a an external HDD. Still going strong

Sooooo... it's 2023 and the streaming options have fragmented so much that we're looking at building media servers as an option again 😅

Does Handbrake convert the original HDR video to a lower bitrate and also keep the HDR? That's interesting, I use ffmpeg from cmd and use hardware acceleration and the best I can do is tonemap it. Also in jellyfin I believe, tonemapping is not available for CPU, only hardware transcode can, which is why in 10:43 the lionsgate logo looks weird. I'm wondering if you can utilize the minisforum ryzen PC as a jellyfin or as a handbrake transcoder (via network share, though the share speed is not that fast), however I don't know the hardware transcoding capability and quality of Ryzen APU. Overall great video showcasing the potential of these hardware and tools.

Appreciate your hard work, thanks.

I've been ripping Blu-rays since 2015 & 4k Blu-rays since 2020 I convert them to mp4 with handbrake making sure that all audio tracks are added despite cutting the file size down to roughly 10% of the original file size (which is useful for copying to my tablet for long car journeys) I've used over 6tb this also because I rip & convert all the special features which I'm surprised how few people who rip disc do. I don't have it set up as a server since for my simulation would be pointless. I copy the files to a USB drive and then play them on my LG B9 OLED TV which play even h.265 files without issues even raw if needed. I know my set up is uncommon but works for me and it's a good way to have a backup are out of print discs.

Been running MakeMKV / HB on various Win 7 / 10 combos from a couple old Phenom 2’s to a 16 Xeon to a recent i5. Also running with Linux Mint on a Core2Quad and a Ryzen 5 setups. Mint seems to run a little better because of no bloat ware for Windows. My (2) i5’s running Win10 on a small form factor like yours. Once I threw in some low profile graphic cards and SSD drives-they took off like a rocket!

Woohoo! Wasn't expecting the follow-up video so soon!

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

I’ve been an editing fiend recently haha

Something that would be interesting to see is if it would work as a good server if under clocked/volted while just acting as a server and going to default clocks when ripping drives. With how common these machines have become in the past few years its an easy entry but power consumption can be the real cost driver over time.

Love the form factor. It appears to have a TFX mounting pattern, but I could be wrong.

Cool setup. I would just add as a tip, if your streaming device or smart TV has support for H.265 playback already built-in (most do these days), I'd disable hardware transcoding on the Optiplex and just stream everything with direct play. You'll eliminate the stuttering and you can keep your video files as H.265, which is much more efficient storage-wise and will save you a TON of space over time.

i've been running Emby on my media PC that runs Windows 10 with about 45TB or so for my movies/tv shows. I have a GTX 1060 6GB that does the transcoding.That's all it does. My main computer does the Handbrake legwork. Its a first Gen Ryzen 7 1700x with 32GB/RAM. I use a virtual machine to download my media and use Handbrake to convert some movies and ALL of my tv shows to save space on the drives. I used to convert movies but since you can download the x265 version of everything nowadays, i just download those and convert only what i need to. I will say this also... if you're converting a 1080p to a 720p (for most tv shows), there's NO noticable video loss in the file. Just throwin that out there...

I use a 4590T in my unraid server - obviously not a powerhouse but it does have QuickSync which, even for the vast majority of content today, it can transcode faster than real time in Plex (and presumably other media servers that support hardware transcoding). The whole system peaks at about 50w so it's not really an issue to run 24/7...I also run a flightradar node, a DVB-DVR, some web services, a self-hosted password manager and a few other Docker containers...pretty sick for something that doesn't use much more power than my ISP issued router.

Love your videos! You actually try out really cool ideas, love it!

This is almost identical to my server project. I took my old first PC, which I quite like the form factor, and managed to set up a headless ubuntu server capable of ripping DVDs (BluRay lectors are incredibly expensive) and host them in Jellyfin. I am currently looking for a gpu to do the heavy transcode lifting as the CPU is just an Intel Core Duo which if I reckon correctly is incapable to do hardware acceleration. Thanks for the content, Hardware Haven, really enjoyable!

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, you’ll definitely need something else for transcoding. Luckily there are lots of cheap GPUs on the market, at least compared to recent times haha

@scyyloo2085

Жыл бұрын

@@HardwareHaven indeed, it was crazy not so long ago!

@98LuckyLuk

Жыл бұрын

Nvidia Tesla P4 is quite cheap, draws little power and has double the transvoding power of the 1080. It costs around 100 dollar.

Its amazing I am using an old AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition as my Plex Media server and let it run headless in my attic Amazing to have found a good use for this old beats ! This PC I pulled out of the Trash in 2017 from a Recycling center and the only problem was that the power supply was broken.

Nice build, i have the same Optiplex. i like your nice calm style, even when things dont turn out. The newer Cpus Intel/AMD can easily handle all of that work even without a graphics card. I know, EXPENSIVE!! These new cpu's are really crazy powerful.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Surprisingly there seem to be some fairly affordable option in more of the mobile cpu space. I just like messing around with the older stuff haha

with handbrake, try encoding to " H.264 (Nvidia NVEnc) " it should use some of the GPU power and cut down on render times

@StephenDeTomasi

Жыл бұрын

Makes the files massive though. I'd rather CPU encode

@cocosloan3748

Жыл бұрын

@@StephenDeTomasi Not true. Encoding is encoding - same settings on GPU and CPU should give you same file size. Its just faster using GPU .

Finally this is exactly what I needed!

This is basically my main setup including the case

Yay new Hardware Haven video

NAS+Apple TV 4k+Infuse Pro can’t be beat for simplicity and reliability.

Was successfully able to shoehorn a GTX1060 into a SFF I7 dell 5050 by using a sata to 6-pin power adaptor. The 1060 supports H265, and has no issues rendering 4k. Used NVidia x060 GPUs can be found really cheap, and work extremely well for this. As for handbrake, your much better off leveraging a GPU than relying on a CPU for that task.

Someone probably said this somewhere below but jsyk that's not a dual NVME adaptor - I have have same exact card - it has one NVME drive that goes through PCIe as normal and one SATA drive which is POWERED by PCIE but then connects to the mobo with that SATA port on the back so that the M.2 SATA drive is then connected via an old school SATA port....hence the different keying and the NVME mentioned on one side and NGFF (next gen form factor for SATA) on the other

I use the Dell 9020 for a pfsense box. Works very nice with 2 x 30GB Intel SSDs in raid. PS, sata SSDs fit firmly between the PSU and the case lip nicely.

I just used DVD decrypter for my bluerays. Worked fine.

I have an Optiplex 7010 with an I7 3770 and GTX 1050 ti. No problems streaming 4k video. A 2nd gen I5 just doesn't have enough power to run a server if you have multiple streams going.

Tdarr may be worth looking into for automated encoding. It may also be able to leverage the nvenc encoder. More importantly, because you have multiple systems, you can leverage several nodes simultaneously. Automatic Ripping Machine as others have mentioned is also pretty much the epitome of automated work flow, save for support for gpu encoding.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Yeah I definitely plan to look into that more when I get the time. Thanks!

This is interesting, b/c I just grabbed a 2012 Dell XPS (Microsoft Signature PC) as a test bed for what I want to do next on my home network. I decided to go with TrueNAS Core, which does mean the video card is tied to the host (Proxmox may have been the better option, but still evaluating). For my Jellyfin/Plex side, I fired up an Ubuntu Server VM and CIFS mounted my Synology Videos Share (which is also shared via the Synology App). I am running Jellyfin and Plex in the same VM until one proves to just be better for my uses. My ripping is done with very old laptops (a 2006 HP and 2008 Dell, both now running a lightweight Linux) which rips the disk and saves to a special share on the Synology, and then Handbrake on a Windows machine, connected via gigabit ethernet, which does the final effort.

Nice idea, I never knew about the possibility to do something with CDs and DVDs, but this is a very nice project, imagine a notebook for that, it would fit perfectly ROAD TO 100K! 🥳🥳🥳

Im in a similar situation with a hp 800 g2 6500 sff that I got. I love the form factor and it sits nicely in my living room. Problem with it, is that its all proprietary hp components, so upgrading is a pain in the ass at best and impossible at worst.

I have a custom built ryzen PC for my ripping server with 3 blu ray drives :P love you video great explanation for beginners

I would try and find a top-of-the-line core i7 of that generation that would definitely help with things some and probably maybe even give you much better transcoding encoding speed for the videos because I remember trying to encode a 60-plus GB 4K file movie and take it down to a much more reasonable size on a 2600 k core i7 before I upgraded to a 2700x and I remember it saying it would take around six hours and that's quite a long time but lot less than that 16 hours you showed

I haven't ripped a DVD in over 10 years. It's interesting to see a lot of the same tools are being used but is seems like the process has gotten much more complicated.

@nachowifi2181

10 ай бұрын

Right!! And not to mention over 60GB for an uncompressed UHD. Assuming you have a back up server, thats 120GB for 1 movie. Insane

production quality is wild (especially for the amount of videos you upload and the size of you channel)!

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Wild in a good way..? Haha

@ahwx

Жыл бұрын

@@HardwareHaven yeah! definitely!

@ahwx

Жыл бұрын

@@HardwareHaven i meant to say that it's very good, but englishn't...

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Haha just making sure. Well thanks! I try as best as I can haha

By using the jellyfin "native" client rathen than the web client, there's no need to transcode most of the time. Range of codecs supported by browsers is smaller than the app.

Handbrake does support hardware encoding & decoding so if you upgraded the GPU you could use handbrake on the same computer to do transcoding. I was running plex on a Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-3220 CPU @ 3.30GHz 3.30 GHz 8.00 GB (7.88 GB usable) So a slightly newer CPU than what you mentioned, but I kept running into out of memory & CPU errors when my kids & I were all watching different shows. I decided if I was going to build a new plex server (GPUs were going for triple MSRP at the time) I would make it a relatively high-end system. I put in a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K with 128 GB of RAM. I used RAID 5 for my 4 drives, & boot off an M.2 drive with a DVD & Blu-ray drive in the system. Because the CPU includes a decent GPU it can hardware transcode h.264 & h.265 with no issues.

@haydenc2742

Жыл бұрын

Most of the older processors don't have the encoders needed to encode, later model Intel chips (like 8th or later) do have H265 compression codex built in, otherwise they just chomp their way thru with regular processing..it is possible...but it's ALOT slower than using video card cuda cores :(

I swapped the k200 for a RTX A2000. It's compatible to encode x265/h265 to x264 so, I guess, no problems there I guess. And the Case of the Dell Optiplex is quite nice, so swapping the Mainboard for some low powered AMD Epyc is a valid option here.... I think a M11SDV-8CT-LN4F would fit that. Just put a noctua or something on the Heatsink, because well, the Mainboard is designed for a Server Airflow case.

You can actually fit (2) 4TB HDD = 8TB total in that dual caddy. I got (2) PS4 external HDD's and removed them from the case they are 15mm thick but both installed in the caddy no problem. Also I used a Lenovo M93p SFF system as I was able to upgrade it to an Intel Core i7 3770 3.4Ghz Quad Core CPU to handle the Handbrake stuff.

Great video ! Please let me know how I can view the table you show at 4:09

I got HTPC/NAS in same box. R5 2600x, GeForce GT1030, 28TB total HDD space. Non-compressed 4Ks, Blu Rays. Can play 3Ds too on my projector. 10G NIC for network transfers. Windows 10 Workstation.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Sweet setup!

id recommend a ASMedia ASM2812 Chipset dual NVME splitter that way you can use the full read bandwidth of the NVME and don't have to use one drive as sata from my testing it sacrifices write speed but I'm using an Intel 670P 2tb drives trying to create a 2x5tb NVME storage solution to have faster access time to my bulk storage

I've got a few similar machines at home that make pretty good retro gaming PCs. I've also used them for ripping DVDs as the included optical drives tend to rip quicker than USB drives. However when it comes to converting - even with a gen 2 i7 it can take quite a few hours. Although it's fine to leave it going overnight and they'll be done when you get up. These days I tend to lean towards x265 encodes for my collections because of the smaller file sizes. While the machines are fine for ripping and software encoding DVDs to x265, I'm not too sure whether they'll play them natively. I suppose using something like Kodi or Jellyfin player should work. I also tried encoding a 20GB Bluray and it was going to take about 3 days LOL. Personally for media centres I'd probably go a newer mini PC like those from Lenovo, HP and Dell (even though they don't have room for a DVD drive without the extension). 7 & 8th Gen tend to have x265 encoding.

My current setup is Anime based, so i use Topaz to upscale the content i get from DVD's, then use handbrake to convert it to a smaller filesize without degrading the picture at all. Currently it takes Topaz 3 hours per episode on my 3070 to upscale and about 15mins to convert that file. Honestly some people hate upscaling but if you are like me and are not able to get good blueray's of anime this is the next best thing.

@KaikoClanworth

Жыл бұрын

-Edit sorry Topaz is a upscaling software "Topaz Video Enchance AI"

the Quadro K1200 can't handle h.265 transcoding but the nVidia T400/600/1000 can... one of those might be a good option. Also the P620 can too, I think. And you can use nVenc with HandBrake. Also VCE or QuickSync.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Yes, no idea why I didn’t look for nvenc in handbrake

@cocosloan3748

Жыл бұрын

@@HardwareHaven I was going to say the same like the guy above 👍👍

I'm going to be doing a similar setup on a 790 I picked up about a week or two ago, just waiting to move around some network things so I can hook it up. I was worried that the i5 might not be enough. I've seen a lot about these boards in the 790 accepting Xeons with the latest bios update even though dell doesn't say they are supported. there's a Xeon 1260L with a 45w tdp, and a few others with 80w tdp in that socket generation. they're super cheap so I am going to try it out and see whether the system will run with one. no Igpu but that's fine if you're running headless or are using one for transcoding anyways.

@henrikmanitski1061

Жыл бұрын

I have successfully run a 790 SFF with a Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1270 (no iGPU), 32GB of RAM and a GTX 1650 LP.

I use the same programs. I have an old pc I use for Plex. But what I do is use my my main computer for MakeMKV and Handbrake. I do this because my main computer is my strongest computer. And I usually will do 10-15 movies at a time. I can keep an eye out for strange encodings in certain movies and blurays.

I just went through the same guide to update the firmware on an older portable USB LG BluRay player to work with UltraHD discs and it works fantastically. Only problem now is I'm using OSMC on a really old pair of raspberry PI boxes that can't go beyond 30fps playback, and my rebuilt media server can't possibly handle the transcoding. I may experiment with buying a new Raspberry Pi IV which can do the decoding and and see how that goes...

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

There are some potentially good alternatives for transcoding that are a bit cheaper on the market. At least with the current pi market.i haven’t had a chance to fully test it recently, but the linkstar from seeed studio supposedly supports 4K h264, and there are also some cheap mini PCs with newer Intel mobile chips that should be able to transcode 4K with quick sync

I did a similar thing but used a dell precision t5810 work station i bought on fb marketplace. I put a 10 core 20 thread xeon in it and a cheapo graphics card that didnt require external power. Currently have about 7tb of media live on the server. Its very time consuming with handbrake and i am only running it on win 10. I usually only rip in h.265 to keep file size down, havent had any issues thus far with transcoding. Im using plex instead of jellyfin though.

Ciao,che mi dici della transcodifica di Vlc? Hai mai provato? Grazie per aver condiviso questo tuo progetto 👍

Try an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF. It uses 6th or 7th gen CPUs, DDR4, and has room for TWO 3.5" drives as well as an NVMe SSD. The down side? Slim DVD drive. But an external box for your BD drive will cure that.

FYI, the newer versions of the SFF Optiplex come with an adapter for two 2.5 drives in the 3.5 tray.

@HardwareHaven

Жыл бұрын

Yeah I totally missed that haha

Im still surprised what my old i3 4130 can handle. Ive it set up to run unraid and Jellyfin with its igpu and as long as i dont use 10bit video and stick to h264, it will transcode 4k just fine. So nice to get my old hardware to use. Only gotta help out with my PC to transcode a move once into 264 so it will work with it. Wish the Handbrake container would work, but sadly i had no success since the older versions dont have the QuickSync support on Linux by the looks. but i did test it on a windows machine with handbrake 1.07 or something, and holy smokes it worked really well.

@JamieStuff

Жыл бұрын

Those old 4th gen Intel chips are amazingly capable. Consider grabbing an i7-47xx chip off of Ebay for around $50, and it'll make that computer really sing.

Good work here thanks for sharing

I have my 2010 eMachines 720 laptop on an Ubuntu server with UI installed running jellyfin and a file server with my 2 4TB HDD on a USB dock.

Currently running a Amahi overlay on a Fedora 27 server on a custom water cooled ROG Rampage V Extreme, I7-6800K, 64G ram, 24Tb Raid 6 (4 x 12Tb NAS Drives) with a 2Tb M2 SSD boot. Running a Plex server for media. A bit overkill when you think about it but was having way to many hardware problems with this MB as my daily driver. Runs well as the server.

@hardcorehardware361

Жыл бұрын

Hows the server going without ECC? Any issues transferring large capacity data sets?

@colinsedgwick8938

Жыл бұрын

All good, transferred over 6Tb in one run, no issues found.

@hardcorehardware361

Жыл бұрын

@@colinsedgwick8938 Thank you

For the transcoding capabilities, and fast rip times. I wouldn’t recommend anything less than an i7 4790. Also the graphics card should be a AMD brand for inter compatibility between programs/apps. The WX2100 and Wx3100/WX3200 are great candidates. Also if you have 16 to 32GB ram set up a page file. The SSD will have an increased life span with less read/write cycles and the ram will cut the decompression time in half from less read/write cycles that normally occur on the ssd/HDD.

sweet will try this soon i have an eligable Asus Blu-Ray however it is in an old pc used for retro games running XP/Vista and 7 with an old Xeon W3680 6c/12t and a GTX 960 i wonder how it will run.. i wonder if it is possible to do the heavy lifting on a gpu with nvenc

Great video. The i7-2600 or i7-2700k would have been a decent little upgrade to help speed some of that up. They're fairly cheap now.

I did a very similar setup except I run makemkv and handbrake in an unraid windows VM!….cool video