Starting Over (and that's not a movie title!)

[socker_dad]

Well, I suffered the ultimate disaster: I knocked my dedicated external HDD off the desk by the television (while it was running) and lost my entire ripped library of over 1,000 titles. 😫

But, I have time to recover and see if I can do this better. See, I was experiencing hit-or-miss success with my rips. Sometimes everything was perfect, other times, the rips were suffering from pixelated blacks/dark sections of movie frames, or complete synchronization failure between audio and video.

So let's go back to the basics.

The tv is a Phillips/Roku LED that is limited (officially) to their Roku Media Player, accepting H.264/AVC (.MKV, .MP4, .MOV) video and AAC/MP3/FLAC/PCM/DTS/ALAC/Vorbis audio.

DVD drive is built-in to the Windows desktop, Intel I5, 64k with lots of RAM and a 1 tb HDD.

Software is free MakeMKV and paid-subscription VideoBytes BD/DVD Ripper. I've been using the highest quality MKV ripping options for both Blu-ray and DVD rips on VideoBytes, never figured out how to reprogram MakeMKV settings.

I'm toying with keeping the software and buying a new WD Easystore 6 tb HDD drive. I trust the brand and the smaller footprint should help me keep from knocking it off the shelf so easily.

(more in the reply)

[socker_dad]

I really would like to consider using a mass storage device that had the ability to stream the movie through an HDMI cable.

I brought this up because I noticed that some of the movies that played poorly on the TV were perfect on the PC. Yes, I tried using the Phillips as a 3rd monitor output and played, using VLC, directly to the tv remotely. Nope, still sucked.

So my library is in your hands, the hands of experts, I hope! What do you folks recommend?

[dellsam34]

The Zidoo company has a variety of media players that can take internal HDDs, check them out, Not the average Chinese Android boxes though, expect to pay a higher price for the quality.

[socker_dad]

Thanks! I'll check out Zidoo today!

What about ripping software? Is VideoBytes good enough?

[cholla]

I play most video via USB to my inexpensive Panasonic BD player.
It does have a HDD size limit of 4TB.
It does have HDMI out.
Of course it plays discs.
My HDD for this is in an external enclosure.
This may not be the setup you want.

Now for software:
I have not used VideoBytes so I can not give an opinion on it.
I have the old slysoft AnyDVD HD & use id with CloneDVD for DVD rips.
slysoft AnyDVD HD cad rip some blurays also but fails on newer ones.

I also use DVDFab for DVD rips.I do not have theri BD ripper.
I also use DVDFab Passkey.I have both the DVD & BD.
It can rip either full size.
It can be used with other software to remove encryption.
There is also limited free version that starts as a trial for the full version.
The main limit on it is there is a wait time for newer DVDs or BDs.
It also does not rip UHD(I have used it on one that ripped).
For DVD both decrypters can be used with DVDShrink.
I like DVDShrink for DVDs but some people do not.
It doe not have to compress(shrink) a DVD & does full size fine.

There is another software that has a free version. XReveal .
XReveal does take some setting up . So read their website instructions for setup.

MakeMKV has worked for me.
I prefer the "Backup" feature for ripping.
I have used it to create MKVs also.

[dellsam34]

I have recently backed up my entire HD-DVD and Blu-ray library using nothing but MakeMKV as full disc folders into a Seagate 18TB, I do not use this HDD for playback or NAS, just storage, so it gets powered up only during backup or transfer files to avoid wear, therefore failure. I have other drives for playback and capturing, I'm moving towards SSD for this type of activities and use platter HDDs for storage only.