Servers and Handbrake

[Skidmark Saint]

I am working on getting all 500+ of my Blurays and DVDs ripped and trans-code for my Plex server. I currently have been using an old Desktop with a AMD 4350 and 4TB of storage. I was able to acquire a couple of servers extremely cheap and want to sue them for the server and to trans-code the files with handbrake. The servers are in the basement and i really don't want to run up and down stairs to swap DVDs. Is there a way to set up the Servers to look for a new file on the desktop then use one of the servers to encode the file and deposit on the other? The servers are listed below. I am open to use any OS or virtualization but unsure where to start. TIA

 

Dell PowerEdge R610 Virtualization Server 2.26GHz 12-Core 24GB 146GB PERC6i 6X-146GB HDD

Dell PowerEdge C2100 FS12-TY 2x 2.13GHzE 550 12GB-RAM 12x-2TB HDD

[Electronics Wizardy]

What os are you using? You can script ffmpeg(the cli version of handbrake, kinda) to run if it sees a file in a folder.

[Skidmark Saint]

I have not decided yet. I can use Linux or windows

[Jarsky]

You could create a CIFS (SMB) share on your Ripping computer, and then set it up as a "watch" folder, by configuring a timed job to sync it with the folder on your encoding server. 

 

If you use linux you can accomplish this with cron & rsync

If you use windows you can use task scheduler & robocopy

 

essentially you just run the timer job e.g every 10 minutes, and look for files that are new/different. 

[Jisagi]

To add to @Electronics Wizardy's comment: ffmpeg runs on basically any os. You can find windows binaries here and linux (debian, ubuntu, ..) binaries here. Anything Handbrake or any other GUI tool can do, can be done with ffmpeg. It doesn't matter if you encode on windows, linux and they should also have BSD packages.