Raspberry Pi for 1 app networking Blu-ray drive?

Operating Systems & Open Source Open Source & Web-Based
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I’ve been buying a lot of discs that I rip to my NAS, so I can watch them on Plex.

tl;dr I want to load an app in a web browser over the network.

Problems

  1. I have too many Raspberry Pi 4s sitting around collecting dust.
  2. I don’t want to connect a bunch of Blu-ray drives to my Windows PC because they slow it way down.
  3. I don’t want to have to turn on my main Windows PC to rip discs.

I came up with a fun solution to these problems.

Solutions

Inspiration

Back in the day, I had this Linksys box with a parallel port and ethernet jack. It allowed me to put a local-only printer on the network. This saved a ton of money because those network add-on cards were so expensive and not available on all models.

One drive per Raspberry Pi

To remove those drives from being plugged into my PC, I can use a Raspberry Pi: one per drive.

I have two ideas on how to do this:

  1. Share the drive’s mount over SMB → still need my PC to rip, but I don’t have to connect the drives to my USB ports, and I can use any PC.
  2. Share only the MakeMKV or ExactAudioCopy app over the network accessible via a regular web browser → I think you can do this with Xpra? I’ve done it before in a Docker container on TrueNAS, but my goal is to have these drives available next to my desk, so I can easily swap out discs.

Which method should I use? Or is there a better one altogether? Ideally, I’d have minimal maintenance needed on the Raspberry Pi since I’ll have 3 for now.

More Problems (no solution needed here)

With either method, I need to maintain an OS on the Raspberry Pi that isn’t easily maintained. I’m going to make a separate thread where I ask about a solution for that.

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If you set up MakeMKV and ExactAudioCopy “headless” you could have the drive you rip the discs to and the BD reader to the Pi and just swap in and out disks when the program spits them out.

But a Raspberry Pi is gonna take so long to rip that you might aswell use your desktop. For CDs is totally fine. You could get a simple CD/DVD reader for the Pi and make copies in parallel between it and your PC.

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I’ve been using GitHub - jlesage/docker-makemkv: Docker container for MakeMKV for ever now, works great, browser based VNC included. Maybe there is something like that available for EAC.
Never tried it with a Pi though, but ripping directly to a SMB or NFS share should be possible.

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Yeah, running Docker on a Pi is gonna be tricky. I could install TrueNAS, but it needs a separate drive for apps, so it wouldn’t work for this purpose.

Maybe something like TalosOS is better? Is there a Docker-OS?

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Actually, if it works, TrueNAS is a great OS for running apps, it’s just that the selection is limited compared to TrueCharts (whatever it’s called now which is on TalosOS now), and apps are secondary.

The 2 drives issue can be solved with one of those super small USB flash drives that fits right into the port. A bit of a waste though.

The question is if a Pi can run containers and get the full Ethernet and drive speeds. Blu-rays rip at up to 30MB/s.

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I run Debian arm64 on my Pis, Docker is available there, runs without issue. A Pi 4 should handle reading at max drive speed and put that onto your NAS via SMB or NFS, no problem.

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This may work for you and clear up your nas but would be some extra work. You can get 4 sata drive hats for some of your PIs and connect GPUs to the PIs that you have your Blu-ray drives attached to for hardware accelerated transcoding riping and streaming. I’ll attach a video on connecting GPUs to PIs. Leave at least one PI to control a cluster

For trafficking, networking, streaming, and backups. You can connect the PIs in a switch and have the PIs wifi on. Use proxmox to cluster your PIs (you can off load work this way) and you can setup all traffic in the cluster between nodes to go through the switch. This would include settings up CHEP and deploying jellyfin(has better and free hardware transcoding then plex), and your RIPing software, and sending that traffic in the subneted network. The one PI I said to leave to the side will need to be setup as an access point and load balancer to the subneted cluster through all the wifis in the cluster. You could also get ethernet splitters and second switch.

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People are building and hosting World of Warcraft servers with cmake inside dockers on Rpi 4/5 now. It might be worth investigating. Keep us posted, I’ve been on a bit of an ARM kick lately with tinkering!

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I don’t transcode my rips, so no big deal there.

I got it working even with the Docker containers! Thanks for the suggestion @meilon!

Audio discs

I ended up using abcde for CD rips; although, having to SSH in is not a slick as a web interface.

I spent hours trying to get Exact Audio Copy to work through WINE on the Raspberry Pi, and it works aside from the fact that the it can’t see any of my drives even though they’re being passed through via WINE.

One issue with abcde, aside from the fact that it doesn’t support AccurateRip, is that any album with a single audio file won’t rip. It was fixed on GitHub but never released. The software’s been latent for 5 years since that fix.

Video discs

I did get the Docker container working, but I couldn’t rip 4K discs. I tried everything including having the Raspberry Pi directly connect to my Phone, but it simply wasn’t able to get the decryption keys.

I ended up just using TigerVNC. The Raspberry Pi Connect app is installed, but it only works with SSH. Something’s broken about it, and there’s a huge thread of complaints. People are rightly saying it’s dead.

So instead of the fancy web interface, TigerVNC is the only way I’ve found to do it.

Ripping Speed

In terms of ripping speed, I had 1 Raspberry Pis per drive before and didn’t notice any issues.

When I was doing ripping some CDs I recently bought, I got all 3 drives running on one Raspberry Pi. Had to power two drives externally and plug two drives into the USB 3.0 ports to get it working.

Not sure the speed because abcde doesn’t tell me, but I’ll know when I run MakeMKV next time.

Original Goal

My original goal was to remove these drives from my desktop. That task is accomplished!

But then the interface to rip still sucks. I have to remote in with TigerVNC or PuTTY. It’s not as slick as running MakeMKV in a web browser; that’s for sure.

So while I’ve accomplished my goal, the final product isn’t great either.

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