Methods of using Plex?

[mattdmg]

So I just installed Plex because I am becoming increasingly interested in using it for movies on my TV. I tested it with a video I had on my computer and it worked wonderfully.

 

Since I am new to this what are some methods of attaining movies files so I can watch them on my TV. 

 

I’ve seen people say something about ripping Blu Ray disks (whether they rented or ready owned them). If this is a good method what Blu Ray drive should I get for my desktop that isn’t too expansive? 

 

Im also curious about any other ways if there is an easier way or something.

[WereCat]

MakeMKV for ripping BR. 

Then I use StaxRIP to encode the MKV with h265 NVENC to lower bitrates to get smaller files with barely any visual quality loss. (requires Pascal GPU). 

h265 with CPU encode will give you much better quality but it will take much, much, much longer to encode. 

[Fullmental]

Like @WereCat, I use MakeMKV to rip Blurays. I have three bluray drives (one is portable), and I've had success with the Pioneer brand. I'm not a fan of the LG drive I have, it's significantly louder at the same speeds:

 

 

The MakeMKV program is technically in beta and is offered with a free beta key right now, but I just went ahead and paid for the full license, it's been that useful to me. 

 

I use Handbrake to encode my videos using H.264, as it provides a balance between filesize, quality, and encoding time. I find H.265 takes way too long with CPU and NVENC doesn't compress enough (plus I can't use my plex server for that since it doesn't have a dedicated GPU, and I'm not leaving my main rig on for file compression jobs all the time).

[AWayne]

On 8/2/2018 at 10:56 AM, Fullmental said:

Like @WereCat, I use MakeMKV to rip Blurays. I have three bluray drives (one is portable), and I've had success with the Pioneer brand. I'm not a fan of the LG drive I have, it's significantly louder at the same speeds:

 

 

The MakeMKV program is technically in beta and is offered with a free beta key right now, but I just went ahead and paid for the full license, it's been that useful to me. 

 

I use Handbrake to encode my videos using H.264, as it provides a balance between filesize, quality, and encoding time. I find H.265 takes way too long with CPU and NVENC doesn't compress enough (plus I can't use my plex server for that since it doesn't have a dedicated GPU, and I'm not leaving my main rig on for file compression jobs all the time).

Hi I'm thinking of starting a plex server and stumbled upon this thread! I don't have blueray discs at the moment, but it seems like MakeMKV takes DVD's as well. I was just wondering if the process is as easy as 

1. Use MakeMKV to change a DVD or Blueray disc to an MKV file.

2. Use Handbrake to compress that file into H.264 or H.265 (You recommend H.264 I see)

3. Upload the newly compressed MKV file to plex

 

Also I found a way to rip a DVD right in Handbrake to an MP4 or MKV file format. Would that probably not be as high of quality as MakeMKV?

 

I hope you can help me out with your plex knowledge! Thanks

[2FA]

1 hour ago, AWayne said:

Hi I'm thinking of starting a plex server and stumbled upon this thread! I don't have blueray discs at the moment, but it seems like MakeMKV takes DVD's as well. I was just wondering if the process is as easy as 

1. Use MakeMKV to change a DVD or Blueray disc to an MKV file.

2. Use Handbrake to compress that file into H.264 or H.265 (You recommend H.264 I see)

3. Upload the newly compressed MKV file to plex

 

Also I found a way to rip a DVD right in Handbrake to an MP4 or MKV file format. Would that probably not be as high of quality as MakeMKV?

 

I hope you can help me out with your plex knowledge! Thanks

I haven't used Handbrake recently to rip discs but last I tried, it couldn't get rid of the encryption on the disc and is hence why you need a different program for the ripping.

[AWayne]

10 minutes ago, 2FA said:

I haven't used Handbrake recently to rip discs but last I tried, it couldn't get rid of the encryption on the disc and is hence why you need a different program for the ripping.

Yea I was running into that as well, but there is a work around. I followed this for the fix: Handbrake DVD Rip. I was wondering if this is same quality as MakeMKV?

[Fullmental]

2 hours ago, AWayne said:

Hi I'm thinking of starting a plex server and stumbled upon this thread! I don't have blueray discs at the moment, but it seems like MakeMKV takes DVD's as well. I was just wondering if the process is as easy as 

1. Use MakeMKV to change a DVD or Blueray disc to an MKV file.

2. Use Handbrake to compress that file into H.264 or H.265 (You recommend H.264 I see)

3. Upload the newly compressed MKV file to plex

 

Also I found a way to rip a DVD right in Handbrake to an MP4 or MKV file format. Would that probably not be as high of quality as MakeMKV?

 

I hope you can help me out with your plex knowledge! Thanks

Hi there, I can help you out here. I'd love to answer these questions, in fact I've been considering making a video on this so I have a lot of the information ready to go: 

 

MakeMKV does take DVDs and Handbrake does have a disc rip feature, but Handbrake does not handle disc encryption so it's very unreliable.

 

The process is *sometimes* as simple as the 3 steps you laid out here, but of course nothing is ever really so simple when you start digging a little deeper. Let me go over a few of the not-so-simple parts here:

 

1. You will need to be careful selecting the main title or titles in blurays. For movies, there may be multiple versions of the main title, with subtle differences between each. You see this most often with releases that have different visual edits depending on what language the audio is selected as when you play the disc in a conventional bluray player. Generally, I've found the "first" main title in a list is the English one.

 

For TV shows, it can be more complicated. There are often individual episode titles and a "main feature" title (plus all the smaller segments here and there, extras and trailers and whatnot). The main feature is typically the largest title in file size and length, but it can be hard to understand the full disc layout. The trick here is that, if you were to select the individual titles instead of the main feature, the episode titles may be out of order when listed separately. This isn't always the case, but when it is that can throw you for a loop. This means that title 01 may not be the first episode played on the disc if run through sequentially on a player.

 

There are two ways to handle this. The first is to just rip the main feature only, and split it up by chapter groups in handbrake later. You'd need to open the file and find the chapter end points, then use those to select each chapter range and export as a separate handbrake encode. I've found this is difficult and sometimes impossible to batch automatically, because there can be differences in the number of chapters from disc to disc and even episode to episode. If you're ripping a lot of content, you can literally spend hours doing this. Not fun!

 

The second is to look at the segment maps in the main title, and try and locate the associated titles for each segment map. This can be hard and there may be some overlap, but if you do it enough you'll get the hang of it. In this example, I'm ripping a copy of Avatar: The Last Airbender Book Three, Disc 3. You can see at first glance it's kind of hard to follow what are episodes and what aren't:

 

 

Looking at the segment map on the selected "main feature" title though, we see it contains segments 1093, 1062, 1086, and 1095. Now, one or more of these may just be intro/outro titles with some sort of studio credit, so this is where it gets kind of tricky. 

 

Generally, you see the episode segments listed immediately before or immediately after the main feature on the disc hierarchy. In this case, it actually looks like both have occurred. We can compare these to see what the difference is:

 

Looking at the first title, we see the duration is 24:33, and there's a single segment, 1062. The second title has a duration of 24:34 and a segment map of 1093 and 1062. So this means that these two are nearly identical, except for a single segment, 1093, which is approximately 1 second long. We can safely ignore the title with this extra second in the beginning, and disregard segment 1093 as a whole, and I would deselect that title during the rip.

 

Now let's look at the 13 chapter, 23.4GB titles:

 

 

So we see the same segment 1095, which may be some sort of control segment for the bluray player (I'm not 100% sure), but we also see another difference, a segment 1086 in the second title. Knowing segment 1095 is 1 second long, we can see the 1086 segment must be 7 seconds long. This is long enough that it may be some sort of short intro or a studio logo, but it's kind of odd that this is only on the 4 part finale. When ripping this disc, I would take the extra time to include both versions of this title, that way I could visually compare and make sure that segment isn't something important. Once the rip is done, you can just open up the file and watch the first few seconds to see which one you want to keep.

 

Regardless of the outcome here though, we can see that two sets of titles make up the entirety of the main feature, with segments 1062 and 1095 having the bulk of the episode content. Once you figured out what segment 1086 was, you'd have everything you needed to have the discs copied in sequential order. Furthermore, we can see that the episodes are listed sequentially in this disc, with 1062 being the first episode, and 1095 being the second (which is the 4-part series finale).

 

It looks scary and there's a lot of info to digest here, but just take each disc one at a time and verify your results. If you're unsure, rip both the main feature and the individual titles. It'll take twice as long to rip, but you can then compare the video files directly and check your work. As you do this more and more, you'll find yourself having more confidence in your selections the first time, and you can get away from this otherwise time-consuming process.

 

Moving on to point 2 (sorry point 1 was so long!): 

 

2. Yes, use handbrake to compress the file into a .mkv or .mp4 file. You can use some of the included presets or tweak the settings per disc, it's really up to you how in-depth you want to get to achieve the best compression ratio and quality level possible. I wound up creating several of my own presets depending on feature type (animation, film, tv show), transfer quality (clean, grainy, blocky, etc), and a few other factors liek audio and subtitle selection/quality. I could write (another) essay on this, but I'll save that for another time. Generally speaking film grain or blockiness can affect output file size, so a 90s film on bluray with a lot of film grain will not compress as much as a brand new film with a very clean quality to it, and even a brand new film will not compress as well as an animation - which has a lot less detail to it.

 

 

 

3. Uploading to plex is somewhat tricky just because you need to name all the files properly for Plex to pick them up. It doesn't pick up metadata very well (if there's even any on the discs, I'm not 100% sure). This is probably the most time consuming process, but there are some tools you can use to speed things up. First, get familiar with the documentation Plex has on media naming here. This should give you all the information you need on how to name each individual video. 

 

There are tools you can use to do some of this naming automagically. Basically all you need to do is get the episodes in the proper order by filename. You can do a quick and dirty rename of all files by just naming them with a series name, season number, and episode number like this example below, and then import them into a file renaming program with Plex media library support:

 

 

Then use a tool to rename and structure them in a way that plex can recognize everything. I used a tool called FileBot which used to be free, but it is now $20 and exclusively on the Windows Store. There are probably other programs out there that do essentially the same thing, but I haven't used any others for an extended period of time. What you do is import the files, select the database you want to match to, and verify everything matched correctly (hopefully). You'd have to follow the tutorials based on which tool you use to figure out how that is done.

 

If you have any other questions please feel free to PM me, that way OP doesn't get spammed by unrelated notifications on their topic.

[AWayne]

46 minutes ago, Fullmental said:

Hi there, I can help you out here. I'd love to answer these questions, in fact I've been considering making a video on this so I have a lot of the information ready to go: 

 

MakeMKV does take DVDs and Handbrake does have a disc rip feature, but Handbrake does not handle disc encryption so it's very unreliable.

 

The process is *sometimes* as simple as the 3 steps you laid out here, but of course nothing is ever really so simple when you start digging a little deeper. Let me go over a few of the not-so-simple parts here:

 

1. You will need to be careful selecting the main title or titles in blurays. For movies, there may be multiple versions of the main title, with subtle differences between each. You see this most often with releases that have different visual edits depending on what language the audio is selected as when you play the disc in a conventional bluray player. Generally, I've found the "first" main title in a list is the English one.

 

For TV shows, it can be more complicated. There are often individual episode titles and a "main feature" title (plus all the smaller segments here and there, extras and trailers and whatnot). The main feature is typically the largest title in file size and length, but it can be hard to understand the full disc layout. The trick here is that, if you were to select the individual titles instead of the main feature, the episode titles may be out of order when listed separately. This isn't always the case, but when it is that can throw you for a loop. This means that title 01 may not be the first episode played on the disc if run through sequentially on a player.

 

There are two ways to handle this. The first is to just rip the main feature only, and split it up by chapter groups in handbrake later. You'd need to open the file and find the chapter end points, then use those to select each chapter range and export as a separate handbrake encode. I've found this is difficult and sometimes impossible to batch automatically, because there can be differences in the number of chapters from disc to disc and even episode to episode. If you're ripping a lot of content, you can literally spend hours doing this. Not fun!

 

The second is to look at the segment maps in the main title, and try and locate the associated titles for each segment map. This can be hard and there may be some overlap, but if you do it enough you'll get the hang of it. In this example, I'm ripping a copy of Avatar: The Last Airbender Book Three, Disc 3. You can see at first glance it's kind of hard to follow what are episodes and what aren't:

 

 

Looking at the segment map on the selected "main feature" title though, we see it contains segments 1093, 1062, 1086, and 1095. Now, one or more of these may just be intro/outro titles with some sort of studio credit, so this is where it gets kind of tricky. 

 

Generally, you see the episode segments listed immediately before or immediately after the main feature on the disc hierarchy. In this case, it actually looks like both have occurred. We can compare these to see what the difference is:

 

Looking at the first title, we see the duration is 24:33, and there's a single segment, 1062. The second title has a duration of 24:34 and a segment map of 1093 and 1062. So this means that these two are nearly identical, except for a single segment, 1093, which is approximately 1 second long. We can safely ignore the title with this extra second in the beginning, and disregard segment 1093 as a whole, and I would deselect that title during the rip.

 

Now let's look at the 13 chapter, 23.4GB titles:

 

 

So we see the same segment 1095, which may be some sort of control segment for the bluray player (I'm not 100% sure), but we also see another difference, a segment 1086 in the second title. Knowing segment 1095 is 1 second long, we can see the 1086 segment must be 7 seconds long. This is long enough that it may be some sort of short intro or a studio logo, but it's kind of odd that this is only on the 4 part finale. When ripping this disc, I would take the extra time to include both versions of this title, that way I could visually compare and make sure that segment isn't something important. Once the rip is done, you can just open up the file and watch the first few seconds to see which one you want to keep.

 

Regardless of the outcome here though, we can see that two sets of titles make up the entirety of the main feature, with segments 1062 and 1095 having the bulk of the episode content. Once you figured out what segment 1086 was, you'd have everything you needed to have the discs copied in sequential order. Furthermore, we can see that the episodes are listed sequentially in this disc, with 1062 being the first episode, and 1095 being the second (which is the 4-part series finale).

 

It looks scary and there's a lot of info to digest here, but just take each disc one at a time and verify your results. If you're unsure, rip both the main feature and the individual titles. It'll take twice as long to rip, but you can then compare the video files directly and check your work. As you do this more and more, you'll find yourself having more confidence in your selections the first time, and you can get away from this otherwise time-consuming process.

 

Moving on to point 2 (sorry point 1 was so long!): 

 

2. Yes, use handbrake to compress the file into a .mkv or .mp4 file. You can use some of the included presets or tweak the settings per disc, it's really up to you how in-depth you want to get to achieve the best compression ratio and quality level possible. I wound up creating several of my own presets depending on feature type (animation, film, tv show), transfer quality (clean, grainy, blocky, etc), and a few other factors liek audio and subtitle selection/quality. I could write (another) essay on this, but I'll save that for another time. Generally speaking film grain or blockiness can affect output file size, so a 90s film on bluray with a lot of film grain will not compress as much as a brand new film with a very clean quality to it, and even a brand new film will not compress as well as an animation - which has a lot less detail to it.

 

 

 

3. Uploading to plex is somewhat tricky just because you need to name all the files properly for Plex to pick them up. It doesn't pick up metadata very well (if there's even any on the discs, I'm not 100% sure). This is probably the most time consuming process, but there are some tools you can use to speed things up. First, get familiar with the documentation Plex has on media naming here. This should give you all the information you need on how to name each individual video. 

 

There are tools you can use to do some of this naming automagically. Basically all you need to do is get the episodes in the proper order by filename. You can do a quick and dirty rename of all files by just naming them with a series name, season number, and episode number like this example below, and then import them into a file renaming program with Plex media library support:

 

 

Then use a tool to rename and structure them in a way that plex can recognize everything. I used a tool called FileBot which used to be free, but it is now $20 and exclusively on the Windows Store. There are probably other programs out there that do essentially the same thing, but I haven't used any others for an extended period of time. What you do is import the files, select the database you want to match to, and verify everything matched correctly (hopefully). You'd have to follow the tutorials based on which tool you use to figure out how that is done.

 

If you have any other questions please feel free to PM me, that way OP doesn't get spammed by unrelated notifications on their topic.

Hahaha wow! I must say I did not expect such a thorough and in-depth response! This may take me awhile to digest and try out myself and I thank you for your professionalism. I will definitely PM you once I start figuring all this out. Thanks again!