… solely for ripping blu-rays. It has to be as cheap as possible in other respects.

I know fancy graphics cards can be used, but what’s that Intel jobby that lets you use dedicated hardware in the CPU? Is it as good? Cos that could be more cost effective than a spanking GFX card.

I think you need the sandy bridge range for the on board graphix functionality. Prior to that you had to go with a second card.

The encoders which use graphics cards are generally (much) worse quality for the same outputted file size. Handbrake + a cheap many-core AMD cpu is working well for me.

What I do is rip using MakeMKV (backs up the data from the disc losslessly into MKV format). This takes about 15-20 mins and the files can be used directly in XBMC, MPC-HC, VLC, WMP or similar (but they take up around 20-25 GB).
Or to save space they can be re-encoded with Handbrake. With completely default settings (aside from audio which I change to ‘passthru DTS’) the files come out at between 4-6GB and the quality is very passable.

By the way, you can batch up multiple encodes with Handbrake, then it will automatically sleep or shutdown the PC afterwards. Doesn’t matter if it takes a night to rip 3 titles then, plus you can make use of cheap leccy.

Except for having to get up three times to change the disc.. three blu-ray drives might be pushing it a bit 🙂

The one time I tried this on my laptop, I seem to remember the encoder let you choose between intel, cuda or softare. The two hardware options were similar in terms of time but I didn’t ocmpare quality and I was only ripping DVDs to PSP format.

This would be ripping blu rays to some format good enough to watch on a big telly.

molgrips – Member

Except for having to get up three times to change the disc.. three blu-ray drives might be pushing it a bit

No no no. 😀 You rip three or four with MakeMKV, then cue them up for encoding over night. The makemkv bit takes only about 15-20 mins.

retro83 how much storage do you have if you are keeping 30-40gig movies?

i’m fast filling my 2TB NAS.

soma_rich – Member

retro83 how much storage do you have if you are keeping 30-40gig movies?

i’m fast filling my 2TB NAS.

8TB in raw storage, in reality only 6TB is usable due to RAID overhead.

I’ve got one of those HP Microservers (N40L I think). Really lovely bit of kit, highly recommend it. Think it cost £150 ish with the cashback deal.

Edit: It’s not all for movies, wifey’s mac backs up using Time Machine to it, it also stores all our photos, music etc.

edit 2: link to the cashback deal
http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421

Nice work retro83.

At 4-6Gb per movie, is there any noticeable degradation between that and the original blu ray?

@retro83: I guess all you need on top of that is the OS – and MS Home Server should do the trick. No need for the full £400+ lic? And a switch?

molgrips – Member

Nice work retro83.

At 4-6Gb per movie, is there any noticeable degradation between that and the original blu ray?

To be honest, not that I can tell. If you have better eyes/telly than I do, you can whack the quality up to 19 (lower numbers = bigger file) or use the high-profile encoder preset (use more CPU time).

spacemonkey – Member

@retro83: I guess all you need on top of that is the OS – and MS Home Server should do the trick. No need for the full £400+ lic? And a switch?

I think Home Server would work well, but I’m using Ubuntu 12.04.

As for the switch, I use a gigabit TP Link jobby from amazon – think it was £10-£15. The server will stream 100mbytes/s over the network no problem at all.

The only bummer is the price of disks now. 😡

My telly’s not that big and we sit a fair way from it.. I could live with 5GB/movie. I’ve probably got 30-40 movies to put on, so that’s not even half a TB.

For hardware you might want to think about an AMD APU, which is sort of what you described with intel.