Demise of Video Station
For those of you who don’t know (why are you reading this post…), Synology’s Video Station package provides a graphical front end to any video content you store on your Synology NAS. This post primarily came about because Synology, with its latest update to DSM (DiskStation Manager v7.2.2 onwards), dropped support of the Video Station package.
NAS Upgrade
The second driver for this post was that my previous Synology NAS, a DS213+, was limited to upgrading only as far as DSM 6.2.4; Synology announced EoL for this version would be October 1, 2024. This forced me to upgrade my NAS Q2 2024 to a DS423+. Thus, with an increase from 2 to 4 bays, and the purchase of larger capacity drives (the MTTF of the decades old drives in the DS213+ was foreseeable!), I now had a great deal more storage available.
‘Plexed
So what to do if, like me, you used Video Station but wanted to ensure you can continue to be up-to-date with the DSM – you might as well because it is inevitable that Synology will drop support for v7.2.1 at some point in the future.
There are a number of packages out there that can be installed on DSM which will give you equivalent functionality to Video Station. I decided to opt for Plex. In part, because it is readily available on all the LG televisions we have at home, and also on Android devices.
Best practice configuration of your video library under Plex is discussed later.
Up to the Job
The last piece of the “lets rip my whole video collection” puzzle was the purchase of a high spec gaming PC earlier this year which, once the disc has been decrypted to a file, reduced the whole ripping process from some 8+ hours per disc on an aging laptop to … no more than 15minutes. Which is just insane and a testament to the march of technology!
With these jigsaw pieces in place, I now had everything to hand to create the big picture, namely ripping my entire video collection and have it available to play, on any device, anywhere.
To do so, three more pieces were required:
- A Blu-ray player
- MakeMKV
- Handbrake
Blu-ray Player
A list of Blu-ray players that are ideally suited to the task of ripping, and which can also be leveraged to rip 4K UHD discs, is listed in the MakeMKV forums.
Pioneer seem to be the most highly regarded brand. Alas, I have a decades old Samsung Blu-ray with a micro USB v1 connector. I’m sure a newer drive would be quicker, but I’m not sure I can justify the cost of a new one given that I don’t believe it would be night & day quicker. In addition, since I currently only have a HD Blu-ray collection, there is no driver to upgrade due to 4K requirements.
Obviously, things would change if I decide to go down the 4K UHD route which, given my ownership of OLED UHD televisions, is likely… But, for the time being I’ll stick with what I’ve got.
MakeMKV
MakeMKV reads the contents of discs, decrypts them, and then writes the various titles out to your storage device.
It’s a fairly easy tool to use, but a great deal of tedious grunt work can be removed from the ripping process by editing your preferences to ensure that only English tracks (audio and subtitles) are selected.
If you don’t do so, you will have to laboriously deselect the French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese etc tracks either in MakeMKV or later in Handbrake. Human error in this manual process will inevitably creep in and the processing of this extra data just gobbles up more CPU cycles, storage and, when streamed, your available bandwidth. You know it makes sense…
Handbrake
Handbrake is a tool that digests the MKV file output of MakeMKV and converts it into whatever type of file your heart desires. Most of the time this will use some form of compression algorithm to greatly reduce the size of the resulting file.
In my case, I wish to retain the visual and audio integrity of the media; otherwise I might as well use an online streaming service to watch them.
Audio Selection Behaviour
When creating my own preset, for the audio Selection Behaviour, use of Passthru retains the high quality of soundtracks; with anything else being encoded in AAC stereo.
Subtitles
Note that the Selection Behavior for Subtitles is configured to only select English, but since we weeded out only the English versions when ripping the disc with MakeMKV, you may think specifying it again is somewhat superfluous.
However, if a foreign language is spoken at some point in the film, HandBrake can perform a scan of the source title to try and detect if portions of the title are in a foreign language. If it detects this, it will add the appropriate (English) subtitle track automatically.
Video Encoding
Finally, the Video Encoder used is the H264 format. The newer H265 standard would result in a reduced file size, but it’s not as widely supported, hence the use of H264 for the time being.
The Quality slider is set at a value recommended for 1080p Blu-ray. Since this is a logarithmic scale, the higher the quality setting, the significantly bigger the file. The consensus is that, from this value (23) onwards, it’s a case of diminishing returns. Obviously, this would require tweaking for lower quality DVDs and higher quality UHD discs.
Lastly, since my PC has an NVidia graphics card, I configure the Video Preferences to use the associated driver to encode the files. Doing this greatly reduces the time taken to encode the files.
Once the discs are ripped and the resulting files are ready to be moved over to the NAS, the configuration of the media library have to be considered.
Plex Configuration
Due to the simplicity of installation of any package on DSM, there’s not a lot to say about Plex installation and configuration, but here are a handful:
- When initially opening Plex from DSM to configure it, the URL might be incorrect. Read this Synology Community forum post for details.
- To ensure the correct collection of online data by Plex, ensure that the file for the title is spelt correctly and includes the year of release in brackets i.e.
Alien (1979).mkv - If there are multiple editions of a title, retain the year of the original release for both editions, and ensure the title name is suffixed with edition metadata, as per the example below:
/Alien (1979)
Alien (1979) {edition-Theatrical Version}.mkv
Alien (1979) {edition-Director's Cut}.mkv
Additional Info - Follow the Plex recommended method of organising your video collection by using a directory structure. See the Alien example below. After that, ensure that “Special Features” tracks are renamed to some meaningful title and then copy them into the appropriate directory.
/Movies
/Alien (1979) {edition-Theatrical Version}
/Behind The Scenes
/Deleted Scenes
/Featurettes
/Interviews
/Other
/Scenes
/Shorts
/Trailers
Alien (1979) {edition-Theatrical Version}.mkv
/Alien (1979) {edition-Director's Cut}1
Alien (1979) {edition-Director's Cut}.mkvThis approach saves the hassle of having to rename a title and suffixing it with identifying metadata i.e.
Alien Deleted Scenes.mkv
to
Alien Deleted Scenes-deleted.mkv
A tedious task no matter how large or small your video collection! It’s a great deal easier to ensure a sensibly named file is moved into the appropriate directory.
- Note that different editions of a title should be stored in their own uniquely identified directory ↩︎