Best service to buy movies with

[AMD Lover]

I'm thinking about slowly putting together a home server. If i do this whats the best service to buy TV shows and movies on. I've used iTunes to buy a few and i don't think theyll play on a server running FreeNAS and Plex. Correct me if im wrong

[dalekphalm]

I'm thinking about slowly putting together a home server. If i do this whats the best service to buy TV shows and movies on. I've used iTunes to buy a few and i don't think theyll play on a server running FreeNAS and Plex. Correct me if im wrong

Best method? Don't.

 

Buy Blu-Ray and then rip them to your server. That way you'll get:

1. Far superior quality - you're in complete control over how much, or how little compression you use.

2. No DRM - plays on any OS or hardware that can handle the particular quality

3. Physical backup - Always good to have just in case.

 

Otherwise, I guess you could go iTunes or Amazon. But given the cost difference between that and just buying a blu-ray (especially on the awesome sales Amazon often has), you're really just better off ripping them yourself.

[AMD Lover]

Best method? Don't.

 

Buy Blu-Ray and then rip them to your server. That way you'll get:

1. Far superior quality - you're in complete control over how much, or how little compression you use.

2. No DRM - plays on any OS or hardware that can handle the particular quality

3. Physical backup - Always good to have just in case.

 

Otherwise, I guess you could go iTunes or Amazon. But given the cost difference between that and just buying a blu-ray (especially on the awesome sales Amazon often has), you're really just better off ripping them yourself.

Can you just rip with a standard program or how do you do that?

[dalekphalm]

Can you just rip with a standard program or how do you do that?

Let me introduce you to MakeMKV:

http://www.makemkv.com/

 

You'll need a Blu-Ray drive in one of your computers of course, but that's all you'll need.

 

It extracts the movie from the Blu-Ray disc into an MKV file, but doesn't transcode it (no compression), so you get the EXACT SAME quality as the movie from the disc had. You can also choose which subtitles and audio tracks to include (for example, take out the foreign language tracks or the commentary, or whatever you prefer). You could also rip all the special features into individual movie files if you wanted to, but I don't bother personally.

 

Now, once you have that, you'll have an awesome high quality blu-ray rip. However, not everyone has tons of HDD space. These movie files can be anywhere from 8GB to 20GB in file size, depending on movie length and original quality.

 

If you want to shrink the movies down, then you would use something like Handbrake:

http://handbrake.fr/

 

With that in mind, HDD's are pretty damn cheap these days. You can get a 3TB HDD for just over $100 (or sometimes under), and 4TB drives are dropping in price too. So to make it easy, I would probably just rip them with MakeMKV first, and if you find yourself running low on space and can't afford more drives, then you can consider compressing them with Handbrake (or your preferred transcoder).