I got in the mood to do something really geeky a few days ago. It started with a couple of podcasts: Adam Christianson's MacCast 2014/01/16 featuring Ara Derdarian and iMore's Vector 22 featuring Don Melton. MacCast gave an overview of putting together a Mac-centric home theater and Vector was an in-depth look at transcoding video. I'm only about a tenth of the way through ripping and transcoding my movies and TV shows, but it's turned into a fun project and I thought I would outline it here.
I have attempted similar projects several times in the past and was never able to pick up steam. The tools were often finicky and the results erratic. After digging in again, I have found some great improvements on the way these systems work, and have made great progress in setting up my home theater system.
The first step was to figure out the central hub of my home theater. I happened to have an old Macbook laying around with a broken screen: perfect. On the software end, I had heard good things about Plex Media Server. It is easy to use and has some great features including the ability to stream over DLNA (more on that later) automatic metadata tagging, and streaming online. The install process is easy and guides the user step by step through setting up the server. Plex is also available for Windows and Linux.
Now that I had my server up and running I had to get media on it. I started out way over my head: Don Melton's solution involves code, the use of the Terminal, and a couple of command-line interface apps (if none of those words scare you, that system is available in the show notes linked above). For my needs, the regular versions of MakeMKV and Handbrake are more than sufficient.
MakeMKV rips DVDs and BluRays and is much simpler than other software I had used in the past. Once MakeMKV scans the disc the user selects which items they want ripped and clicks "go". That is theoretically all I need to do; Plex can read MKV files and can actually transcode on the fly when streaming to other devices. Unfortunately I have limited hard drive space and lots of movies at the moment. This is where transcoding steps in.
Handbrake will take the MKV files I create and transcode them into MPEG4 format, compressing the video file, burning the subtitles into the movie (I like subtitles, shut up), and converting the 5.1 audio into stereo (all I ever use). These are the settings I use but each is customizable and the software includes various presets that will suit most user's needs.
After ripping and transcoding I end up with a single video file for each movie that gets transferred to my Mac running Plex. Now we are ready to play the movies. Plex offers a lot of options: including playing the movie on the computer running Plex, a Roku app, iOS apps, a workaround that allows the use of the Apple TV's Trailers or iMovie Theater apps, and my current favorite: DLNA.
DLNA is a wireless protocol that allows one to stream from one DLNA-enabled device to another on the same network. In the case of my home theater system: my Xbox 360. With the two devices on my home network I can tap the center button of my Xbox controller and access the Plex Server through the Media tab under "Video Player". The Xbox has access to all of the available metadata and can sort my movie collection by director, year, genre, and various other categories.
A couple of quick notes: I have not yet tried ripping my BluRay discs. I do not currently own an external BluRay drive to use with my Mac Mini. They are available on Amazon and that will be my next movie related purchase. I have also not gone through this process with the TV shows that I own on DVD. Plex is set up to handle TV shows, but I do not know how well that works on the server side or streaming through DLNA. I will be writing updates to this post as I figure out these particular challenges.
The process of ripping, burning, and transcoding has come a long way since I first started playing with it seven or eight years ago. It has become a simple (if lengthy) process and provides great ways of accessing one's personal media both on a home network or streaming over the internet. Feel free to comment if you have any tips from your experience or have questions about my process.
No comments:
Post a Comment