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  1. Member
    Join Date
    May 2004
    Location
    New Zealand
    Search Comp PM
    After much prevaricating, and seemingly endless disk ripping and encoding, I have finally reached the next state of organising my media collection, and am trying to figure out my best approach.

    I am soliciting thoughts and comments on options.

    What I have
    1. An reasonably sizable movie and TV collection, amassed by several years of capping off my cable box, ripping my (extensive) DVD collection, and digitising the VHS films I don’t have in another format. Around 3,000 films and around 3,500 TV episodes - most of which are .MP4, with some of the older caps being .AVI, mostly SD but some newer caps are HD. All sitting on my NAS in \files and \TV\Series\Season\ directory structures.
    2. A NAS with quite a bit of spare space, which also has Plex and a uPnP server etc installed by the manufacturer.
    3. A small living room PC (NUC footprint, N3150 Braswell CPU, 2GB Ram, SSD, 750GB HD), connected to a Hauppauge HD PVR2, connected (via an HDCP stripper) to my cable box. This does HD caps, and can also do SD. It will shortly have NextPVR and a USB tuner installed, for live TV streaming and recording. It also runs Kodi and has a remote control, and is networked.
    4. A living room DVD recorder (Panasonic XW390), which has a DLNA server, networked and also connected to my cable box. This does SD caps, and can also record OTA material.
    5. A bedroom media player (Minix X8-H), which is networked and runs Kodi.
    6. A spare room media player (WD TV Live, seldom used), which is networked.
    7. Ethernet over powerline tying it all together. Has been in for years, stable and reliable with good (circa 85 megabit) throughput.
    8. A relatively powerful (recent i7) PC in the study, also networked with a blu-ray drive and plenty of storage, for work and video processing etc.
    9. Kodi on my tablet, which I can use for watching stored media and streamed live TV, over WiFi, elsewhere in the house – as I cook in the kitchen etc.

    This all works well. However, I want to reorganise my media collection, scrape metadata, and back-it all up etc. I accept that it’s too difficult to use metadata on the WD Live in the spare room, so I’m prepared to flag this.

    First, I need to organise my media collection

    I a planning to put everything into a sensible file structure. For movies this will be sitting in alphabetical subdirectories, with each movie in its own sub-directory, as follows:
    \NAS\Films\A\Movie Name (date)\Movie Name (date).MP4

    For TV series this will be structured with cascading sub-directories, with all the episodes for the same season in the same directory, as follows:
    \NAS\Series Name\Season XX\Series Name Sxx Exx.MP4 [...]

    Then I want to scrape the metadata

    I want to store this locally within the folders, as far as possible, rather than in a proprietary database, and include it in the backup.

    My current plan is to use Ember Media Manager (or similar) to scrape the metadata (.nfo, fan art, posters, trailers etc) using the XBMC conventions. This will be stored in the appropriate subdirectory for the movie or TV series.

    Then I need to back it up

    My plan is that encoded films, once properly named, will be batch burned to 25GB HTL blu-ray disks, which will be indexed and stored off site as insurance. Probably taking around 350-400 disks, in 4-5 wallets for the whole collection, by the time I’m done. I’m happy to just do 10-15 disks a week until it’s done. Hopefully I will never touch the disks again, and the NAS is RAID5 so is at least tolerant to a disk failure, but the backups will be there if I need them.

    The files with metadata etc that have been backed up will be transferred to the NAS, from which I will access the media and metadata etc over my network. Only within the house, I foresee no need for external access.

    Growing the collection

    The media collection is growing by 8-12 films per week, and 5-8 TV episodes a week, mainly through capping. These will pile up on my main PC with metadata being scraped etc. Once enough have piled up, they will be backed up to optical disk (as per above) and then transferred to the NAS. I will probably do this every 4-6 weeks.

    Access to the collection
    This is where I am starting to come unglued. I have already decided that Kodi will be my frontend (with vanilla uPnP for the WD in the spare room), and that I want to use the metadata stored on the NAS rather than re-scrape for each media player. Given this, I can’t figure out whether I am better to:
    1. Just share the NAS directories with Kodi as SMB or NFS shares, and configure Kodi to use the metadata in the NAS share rather than scraping it anew.
    2. Use Plex Media Server on the NAS, with PlexBMC to connect it to Kodi.
    3. Do something else.

    Ideally I want to be able to find films & TV shows easily, browse metadata (posters, descriptions, ratings, actors etc) as I flick through them, and also sort the collection by type (comedy, action, thriller etc) if I am in the mood for a good comedy etc.

    I don’t care about parental controls or restrictions – no children are likely have access to the system for the foreseeable future.

    Initial questions
    1. Is Ember Media manager the best media manager choice for this type of scraping?
    2. Am I better off to connect Kodi to the NAS using SMB/NFS, and use Kodi to access the local metadata, or to use Plex to serve the content up to Kodi?
    3. Subject to (2) above, if not Plex is there something equivalent that I should consider instead?
    4. Does anyone have any experience with forcing Plex to use locally stored metadata scraped with the likes of Ember Media Manager (or a better equivalent alternative as per (1) above), and is this a sensible approach?
    5. Does anyone have any experience with PlexBMC, and is it a good way to integrate Plex and a Plex metadata collection on a NAS with Kodi?
    6. If not PlexBMC, is there something else I should consider instead – I have read references to Plexkodiconnect
    7. Is there a painless way to get a WDTV Live to use Plex metadata and/or locally stored scraped metadata in some form?

    Any other thoughts on how to best organise and access my collection greatly appreciated.

    The only thing that isn't on the table is hardware selection, as I have pretty much already purchased it all.
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  2. Member Krispy Kritter's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    St Louis, MO USA
    Search Comp PM
    I never finished setting up my HTPC and media server, but I seem to recall that Kodi will use metadata if it's present, or you can scrape it as needed (or with addon tools). I seem to recall it was pretty flexible. So if you already have the data in a format Kodi recognizes, no further action would be needed.

    I don't have enough knowledge to comment on your setup questions. Very likely all of your thoughts noted above will work, as I've seen people configure things all different ways with the same end result. It's usually just a matter of which way suits all of your hardware needs.

    As for your backups, with HDD prices what they are, it's hard to justify the time (both burning and worse case, restoral time) and expense of burned media over simply copying to another HDD.
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  3. Member
    Join Date
    Jun 2011
    Location
    United States
    Search Comp PM
    I use Plex since it has a server and clients available for nearly every platform.
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  4. Member
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    West Texas
    Search PM
    Don't use soft sided wallets for storing Blu-ray discs. They seem to be susceptible to damage in them. Several threads over at MyCE attest to this, with most having some sort of impression left in the data side of the discs from the wallets.

    Use thin, individual cases if you need to save space. Or the multiple disc Amaray cases.

    An external HDD would make more sense.
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  5. Member
    Join Date
    May 2004
    Location
    New Zealand
    Search Comp PM
    Originally Posted by Arnold_Layne View Post
    I use Plex since it has a server and clients available for nearly every platform.
    Have you managed to make it play nice with Kodi as a front end, or do you use plex clients throughout?
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  6. Member
    Join Date
    Jul 2016
    Location
    Canada
    Search Comp PM
    I have about 1000 movies and 100 TV shows , mostly I ripped from my bluray disc into MKV 264 format and stored in my hard drives (8 X 4TB). I put them all in my old Desk top PC (NAS). I used a 120 GB SSD as my Win 7 OS drive and 16GB RAM. I shared all my media using windows sharing and use WDTV plus to play them all anywhere in my house.

    - tried using a third party software like plex/PS3 - very slow when streaming high bitrate bluray content. Using windows is the best way to share your movies . .easy and faster . .
    - used Ethernet over powerline, only good up to DVD bitrate movies, stutters when high bitrate bluray content is streamed. Found that via internet cable is the best way to stream full bluray.
    -I made my own meta data by editing the .xml file using notepad and storing them with the movie . .. still in the process of completing my collection
    -Ditched all my other media format file once I get the bluray equivalent . .still got about a few movies in DVD format ..
    - For Back up . . Don't burn them on Bluray/DVD disc.. just buy a cheap hard drive to store them, it is cheaper, and less time consuming . . .
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