ISO conversion for Plex or use KODI?

[y2kindyz]

Hello Everyone,

I finally got my Plex Server working and I was freaking out because only about 30 movies were showing up.  After looking into it a bit further, I found that the movies that were showing were in a folder that I had converted to MP4 files and then after a bit more research I found that Plex does not do ISO files.  When I ripped all my DVD's I ripped them to ISO and I was using KODI to view them.

 

Question:  Is it worth the trouble to convert 1700+ movies to something that Plex can read?

If it is worth while, what is the best way to convert the files?  Is there a program that can be qued up to convert multiple files and just let it run?

Or is it better to continue using KODI?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Oscar

[Frank1940]

I converted about 600 DVD .iso's to .MKV using HandBrake.  (I also transcoded them to 23.976 frames per second which added to the time required!)  It took more than a week running 24-7 using two WIN10 computers.  (Transcoding time was about 50% of playing time for what that is worth...)  Plus there was a lot of operator overhead to setup each file for conversion and than then to delete the .iso after I was sure that all had went well.  

 

Depending on your Unraid setup, you may use up a lot of the write 'resources' if your cache drive is an SSD based one. 

 

P.S.---  BTW, the conversion from DVD's 59.XXX 3/2 field pulldown to 23.976 can result in much smooth playback IF the DVD was properly encoded to begin with.  It depends on whether HandBrake can detect the 3/2 field sequence in the .VOB files.   You might want to experiment a bit with this.  As a piece of information, I have some Mini WIN10 computers running KODI and I have the video card set to 23.976 fps.  Standard TV's and home theater projectors are designed to produce flicker free pictures using this frame rate.  Computer monitors may not do so well...

Edited June 29, 2022 by Frank1940

[y2kindyz]

Thank you Frank.  I need to look into those settings.  Does Handbrake add to the name of the file it creates?  Most of my DVD were SD with a few HD titles.  

 

How many movies can you que into HandBrake at a time?

 

 

[Frank1940]

5 minutes ago, y2kindyz said:

Does Handbrake add to the name of the file it creates?  Most of my DVD were SD with a few HD titles.  

 

The way I had it set up, it did not.  This was an advantage as the support files (.nfo, etc.) did not need any changes.

7 minutes ago, y2kindyz said:

How many movies can you que into HandBrake at a time?

I had about 20-25 queued up at a time.  It would take about a day to transcode that many so I didn't see any reason to go beyond that number.  Mine were all DVD's and not a mixture of HD's and Standard DVD's.  If you are going to be doing HD, you would want a different 'preset' for HD than you would use for DVD.   (At least that is my opinion as I tried to get set things up so that I got as close to the frame rate and scanning resolution of the source material.  Any scaling, I want the playback device to do as I know that the scaling of these devices can only improve in the future but if I do it in the conversion, I am locked to what the current technology can deliver.)   With BluRay iso's, you can often just copy out the video file and change the file name and extension and use that for playback. 

[y2kindyz]

Thanks.  Were you reading from and writing to server?  I am reading from one share and writing to another. I tried with WinXDvd ripper, but it only does 1 movie at at time.

 

I plan on keeping both DVD file and MKV.  My array has 28TB and I have about 11TB in Movies. SO I have room

[Frank1940]

One more thing.  KODI can be setup to use a common database.  Here is a link to WIKI instructions on how to do that:

 

   https://kodi.wiki/view/MySQL

 

You can also find some videos on YouTube on setting things up.  I sync five different KODI media players (both PC and media room setups) to a common database.  When I add a new movie to the database from one PC, it is available to the other four players instantly!

 

2 minutes ago, y2kindyz said:

Were you reading from and writing to server?

I was reading from the server but HandBrake was writing the files to the local hard drive.  After a queue was finished, I would copy the files back to the server cache. (These writes were at 100+ MB/s!)  Then I would go in and delete the ISO.   (I did not use 'move' after I had an MKV file go 'MIA'.  Not sure what happened-- probably cockpit error caused by deleting both the ISO and MKV file!  After I was finished with the file cleanup and had double-checked that every thing was done correctly, I would delete the files from the PC.)  The Unraid Mover would than put them on the array.

 

One thing to remember is that if you want to use the cache drive, you will be limited as to the number of files you can transfer before it is full.  And doing simultaneous read/write operations directly to the array will result a real performance hit!

 

8 minutes ago, y2kindyz said:

I plan on keeping both DVD file and MKV.  My array has 28TB and I have about 11TB in Movies. SO I have room

The problem, I found with KODI was that both the DVD ISO and the MKV file would appear the KODI play list.  This may not be an issue with what I think you are doing (having one share for ISO's and a second share for MKV files).   However, I can see where it will be a bit of a hassle going forward as you will have to keep synced two different sets of files.  And one of them will probably be used very seldom at some point down the line...

[Kevek79]

There is one more solution that might save you some time.

If you use a tool like MakeMKV you can extract the video and audio streams from a DVD or BD into a mkv container with little to no transcoding (Which of course is much faster than transcoding with handbreak).

Those MKV files are perfectly readable by plex and should have the exact quality of the base material (MPEG for DVD / h.264 for BD).

With those files in your library, plex server and client can handle the question of transcoding, if necessary for the player.

And as there should be no quality loss in between ISO or the MKV created as described above you should not need your ISO files afterwards.

 

 

 

[y2kindyz]

Thanks Kevek79  I will look into that.  Thanks  Does MakeMKV make  copy and retain the same file size with different audio streams?  So once done I could delete the ISO files