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Budget (including currency): £300-£400, but priority is low ongoing costs, rather than low initial cost Country: UK (England) Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: See below I'm looking to replace my janky 2 raspberry pi setup with a custom built machine, on a budget, reusing some parts from an old desktop. Below I've broken down what software I'm planning to run on this machine, what hardware I already have and what I'm planning to get, and some general further information. Software I've been going back and forth about whether to just have a single Linux OS with all my services running natively, or to virtualise, and I've finally come down on virtualising due to all the benefits that come with it. The various services I want to run on this machine are: Plex NAS (for storing Plex media and CCTV camera footage (from cameras like https://amzn.to/3jcnlv7 and a raspberry pi zero with a camera module) DVD ripping and compressing/encoding automatically whenever a DVD is put into the drive, ejecting on completion for hands-off ripping VPN (so I can access my network from elsewhere, securely) I'm also considering running: Pi-hole Docker containers of various small apps I'm working on for friends to try out, some of which use small Postgres databases Hardware My old parts that I already have are: EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB SC GAMING ACX 2.0 Video Card Corsair Builder 600 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply Some internal SATA DVD drive from about 7 years ago that still works fine I'm currently thinking of getting: AMD Ryzen 3 3300X 3.8 GHz Quad-Core Processor or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor Gigabyte B450 I AORUS PRO WIFI Mini ITX AM4 Motherboard Crucial 8 GB (1 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL22 Memory Fractal Design Core 500 Mini ITX Desktop Case The saved parts list can be found at https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/jcreek/saved/msgH23 with the 3300x selected to keep the cost just under £300. General My plan is to use the 1050ti for hardware encoding Plex streams, and just use the CPU to encode the MKV files ripped from the DVDs, but this may be the wrong way round, especially given there will never be more than 2 or 3 concurrent streams being watched from Plex by my family, and I have a lot of DVDs to get through. The 3300x is probably sufficient for my needs, unless I run heavier apps I'm working on on this machine. It's cheaper than the 3600, but also seemingly impossible to buy, so the 3600 may well be the better option, especially as it has on-board graphics. This could then leave the GPU to be purely utilised by the dvd ripping and encoding system, meaning it doesn't have power draw unless that's running (if I've understood correctly). This machine will need to be power efficient to keep costs down, quiet and small so it can live in my bedroom out of the way. Am I going down the right path? Does any of this sound insane? Have I miraculously come up with a reasonable plan, both for the hardware and software? Any recommendations or comments you folks have would be great to hear!

I built my PC with a 1 TB Intel 660p as a boot disc, which because of it being primarily a pure gaming/entertainment PC has not been an issue. However, I'm facing two issues: 1) I'm already halfway through the storage I already have; I don't have too many games installed, but I'd like to not have to uninstall things aggressively as I have "usable" internet at best. 2) I'm wanting to use it to make backups of DVDs/Blurays for personal use (especially 4k discs); while I have external media drives, I'd probably prefer to have an internal disc as the raws are large and I will need to transcode first reasonably speaking, which I imagine will suffer if I'm going over USB3. I presently have one open M.2 port that can fit an NVME drive (I believe? It uses PCIe and not SATA) and 4 open SATA ports; I'm unsure whether it would be better to get a second games SSD and a hard drive or just get a larger SSD.

Hey guys, I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I really need some help... I'm working on making a film, however I've been stopped dead in my tracks. The film I'm making is about the SCP foundation, and there aren't many high quality models on websites like sketch fab that I can use. Particularly, I need a model of a Mobile Task Force Unit. After searching all over the web and having no luck, I decided to try and rip some custom models from games like Garry's Mod and Arma 3. I quickly realized that I suck at ripping game models because I cannot align the textures with the solider when I use Arma 3, and I cannot find the textures corresponding to a certain mesh when I use Gary's Mod. I used the following programs: Blender - the place where I will animate everything Ninja-ripper - a program I used to rip model files from arma 3 Noesis - a program to quickly view 3d meshes without having to import them all Gimp - the program i use to identify textures Gmad Extractor - the program i used to extract files from Gary's Mod Addons Crowbar - the program i used to convert files from Gmad Extractor into something usable by blender. I've given up on ninjaripper and Arma 3 due to the fact that the textures won't align with the meshes, so I'm working with the Gary's Mod files for now. Gary's mod would be easy to work with if it wasn't for the fact that the models I'm ripping have a ton of different parts. If anyone thinks they might know how to either get the Gary's mod files or better yet, the arma 3 files working, please let me know. I've searched everywhere and I really don't know what to do at this point. Here's a link to the addon page for Gary's Mod if anyone can figure it out: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1687982696download.jfif If someone does know how to rip model files, these are the two MTF soldiers I'm going for. Thank you so much for reading this far. I am deeply sorry that this may not be in the right place but I really need some help. If you need any more information please contact me. download (1).jfif

Can someone link me to an article on how to rip blu-rays? I have a reader in my PC, but just don't know how to do it.

My dad got me the album Demon Days by Gorillaz and I was wondering, if I rip the audio from the cd will the cd be blank? I want to keep the audio on the cd encase I want to put it into the cd player in my car while on the road.

Hi everyone, I own a bunch of Blu-ray films and I am wanting to rip them onto my desktop PC and create a Plex media server. I had a quick look on Amazon for Blu-ray drivers and the cheapest I found were about £50. Does anyone know of any fairly budget Blu-ray drives which are good at ripping Blu-ray discs fairly quickly? I would quite like to spend £30 rather than £50 if possible. Thanks in advance, Matthew

Hey guys, I have a bunch of DVD's and Bluray's which I've collected over the years because I really enjoy having physical media of the films I enjoy but recently I've created a NAS and I'm wanting to start digitising my movie collection. I tried using Handbrake to begin with because it's something I used many years ago for a college project, but it hasn't worked for some films due to licencing restriction, so I've moved on to using VLC to 'Convert/save' which has worked but it has definitely compressed the films visually and audibly. For example Skyfall on DVD is approximately 8GB but the VLC version is just over 1GB and it hasn't kept the 5.1 Dolby Digital audio. What I'm really wanting is a piece of software which will rip DVD's and Bluray's and keep them as close to the original as possible, is that possible with VLC or do I need to use another program? I appreciate there will be some compassion but I don't want it to be noticeable downgrade. I hope that all makes sense. Thanks in advance, Matt

My GF was running a Ryzen 2600 for a year until she upgraded to a 3600 and sold her old one to a friend. To celebrate her new CPU I wanted to gift her an AIO for christmas, well it wasn't in stock so here we are a couple of days later! I wanted to fit her whole white/black/grey build theme so I chose the Corsair H100i Platinum and replaced (in my opinion) pretty bad Fryzen air cooler she wanted when we initially configured her PC. Now the fuckups begin. Not checking to see if she still has the original CPU backplate that came with the motherboard. Not letting the PC run for some time before trying to remove the cooler. As soon as the AIO arrived I went ahead and tried to uninstall the aircooler. Removing the screws was easy enough, but the cooler still would not come off easily. Most of the build I've done were Intel based, so I did what I do to an intel platform when the cooler won't come off, I just try it with more force. BAD IDEA!!! I forgot that the AM4 socket does not have a system like the intel based ones with the socket holding the CPU in place with 2 metal cutouts. So the only thing that could happen happened; with a lound bang the CPU got ripped out of its socket together with the cooler. So my mind goes to panick mode! How did this happen? Why am I so dumb? Why does my GF have to sit on the couch next to me while I fuck up so bad? So now I just look at the CPU still sticking to the cooler in horror looking for bent pins. My GF just asked me wtf that sound was. I just told her that I yoinker the cooler out with the CPU still attached. She does not have any experience with hardware so she just asked if that is bad As I explained that I might have damaged her CPU she did not even get that mad at me, which I am really grateful for since that might have made me panick even more than I already did. After I checked the CPU and the socket for damage and did not find anything, I tried to put the CPU back into its socket as gently as I could. It slid right in, so I turned the PC on and hoped for a signal. A few seconds later the message: New CPU installed! appeared and something close to a ton of weight fell of my heart. Now that I knew I haven't killed my GFs CPU or Motherboard I went and unboxed the AIO. When I realized that the AIO is going to need the stock backplate I just though: Great, now I have to go look where she put the boxes of her mainboard and hope we put it in there. After about 3 hours of searching my and her house for it we gave up. Now I not only almost killed her CPU and mainboard, but I also could not finish installing the AIO. Defeated I ordered a replacement backplate from Amazon and we waited 2 days for it to arrive. It now being Saturday the backplate arrived and I could finally finish the installation of the AIO. At least that went well without a problem! The temps fell 10C during video rendering and the noise also went down after tweaking the dan curves. So after the most defeating days I've ever had concerning building PCs, I was finally finished and my GF was happy with her PC tl;dr I ripped my GFs Ryzen 3600 straight out of the motherboards socket and we also had to wait 2 days for a replacement backplate to arrive. I just had to share this story with you guys in this sub, since some of you might take something out of it. That being let the PC run a couple of minutes and heat up the thermal paste so you can actually remove the cooler without the CPU still attached and to keep track of where you put your fucking backplates! If anyone is interested, here is a before and after of her PC and the pcpartpicker: https://imgur.com/a/QKke19A https://de.pcpartpicker.com/user/Noah0302/saved/#view=wGWQqs

I'm digging a deeper and deeper hole for myself with this f-ing HiFi hobby. It's a tinkerer's fever dream. Now, I'm looking at how I store my music and podcasts. Until now, I thought I was satisfied with using iTunes as my audio ripping, storing, and playing platform. Then, I switched over to VLC for all my AV needs... that was good. Then I discovered Foobar2000 and EAC. Dammit. So, first (of many) questions: My CD collection from the 90s was ripped to AAC or ALAC (and even some MP3s snuck in there to boot). I'm taking out CDs from my public library, and making PERSONAL copies for myself. a. I can rip audio CDs using either Foobar2000, iTunes, or EAC. Is there a significant difference between Foobar & EAC? I find Foobar2000 easier to use. EAC has all kinds of mysterious settings (that I don't understand). b. I dug into VLC, and it appears that it can also rip CDs. True/false/sort-of? c....TBA. Sources: A 2010 article from How To Geek. A 2015 article about ripping audio CDs. A 2016 article that attempts to differentiate the audio codecs available.

What is the best program to rip dvds (that is free). Currently I am using VLC but it is kind of slow. Any Suggestions?

I'm a big fan of the PS2' Prince of Persia since It came out. Today as a PC player I decided to try to reproduce the game on Unreal Engine 4 with some updated graphics. The problem is that I'm not a really good 3D modeller but I could try to update the models from within the game. Obviuously this is just for fun The problem that I don't any idea of how can I get those models and textures since the only thing I knew that it could work was 3D DX Ripper but it gives me some distorted and backfliped models. Anyone knows how to do it? Thanks

Hello, I am quite new to Plex, only earlier this week I dove into using it myself, and so far I am loving it. I have been a fan of Spotify for having such a vast range of music that is so easily accessible, and now being able to steam my music to my speakers or TV using Google's Chromecast products has just got me using the service more and more, but I have always been a little dissappointed that no matter what you can't get Lossless qualitfy on Spotify. So now I have found what Plex can do for me, taking my fairly massive stash of CD's and turning them into FLAC files on my computer which I can access from anyway means that I can now live in a world of quality and convenience. The only thing now for me is how can I replicate this satisfaction with my favourite Blu-ray films? I have gone online and found that a handy program called Handbreak can rip my movies off of DVD's and Blu-ray's just like my CD collection, but I don't really know what I need to do to insure that I get as close to Lossless as I can? Also something else is even after ripping Blu-ray's to their Lossless files on my desktop, can I even steam that good a quality using Plex to other devices in my house or will the quality be compressed anyway? So what I would really like to know is what is the highest quality I can steam video at on Plex? And then what is the next quality level up from that which I can rip my Blu-ray films onto my desktop at so that I don't take up too much space but also get the best quality streaming I can out of Plex? Another thought of mine is I use Windows and Android but others who I have shared my Plex library with are on iOS and Mac OS X so its desirable that the codecs for these files can be read on those platforms as well unless the compression is only a little bit worse for iOS and Mac OS X because I can live with that. I really hope that makes sense. It's late where I am and I am tired. Thanks in advance, Matt.

I am trying to rip part of my dvd collection to a 4TB drive in my HTPC. I have tried a few programs and They are ripping them with huge borders around them in the video. Does anyone know why this is happening or what other programs I could use?

I hate to post about something so simple, but I'm looking for a good DVD ripping program. I tried to search on Google, but all it does is link me to cnet and shit like that.

Source: http://torrentfreak.com/uk-dvd-cd-ripping-will-legalized-summer-140328/ Way to go UK, put and end in all this nonsense.