I was considering the idea of making a pc that had many disk drive to rip large amounts of dvd/cds at once. It would be super convenient for digitizing a large movie and music collection. This raised some questions.
- what hardware would i need. Would i need a strong processor and lots of ram or would i only need lots of sata ports.
- automation could it be automated to rip disks when inserted, eject when done, and categorize the media.
- blue ray, would it be worth it. i heard there were problems because sony hasn't opened up blue ray.
- would having it mass burn disks be worth it. The only use is see these days is blue ray because of the capacity.(back up?)
- other uses. you probably would want to get more use out of it that converting disk. What other roles could this computer perform.
I wasn't exactly sure where to put this.
IMO Blu-Ray ripping is worth it as long as you have enough disk space.
I tend to keep my rips at full quality, which means 20-30 GB per movie and 8-10GB per episode of a series. Do the maths to determine for yourself whether or not it's worth the price of the HDD space.
I built a 20TB NAS (actually 32 TB with RAIDZ2 redundancy) for storing my collection.
No idea on how to rip multiple drives at the same time, I tend to rip them into single movie files (one for the main movie, sometimes several more for the extras etc) so that I don't need to deal with menus, non-skippable 30-minute copyright warnings, trailers etc.
For that kind of ripping I use MakeMKV, but to my knowledge you can't run multiple instances of that simultaneously.
Lots of Blu-Rays come with all kinds of language and subtitle options you'll never use, so I deal with that kind of stuff on a per-movie basis anyway.
As for the hardware side, unless you plan to invest big in large-capacity drives, you'll probably want a raid controller for your drives and use the motherboard's SATA ports for DVD/Blu-Ray readers.
There's a sweetspot for buying drives, and right now that's around the 3-4TB per drive mark. Sure, you can buy 8TB drives, but if you need 4 of those you may be cheaper off with eight 4TB drives and a dedicated raid card. (depending on prices in your region, of course)
I imagine there would be a open source way to automate this on linux but it probably wouldn't support blu-ray.
I see the software is free till the betas over and blu-ray will cost after. Are the blu-ray features worth buying?
Also how long dose each rip take(blu-ray) and how much cpu and ram usage is there?
MakeMKV has been in beta since the dawn of time really, I've been using their beta for around 2 years now. They keep giving a new activation key whenever the previous one expires.
Sometimes they're a couple days late though, but in that case you can just turn your Time & Date settings back to somewhere before the key expired.
Is it worth buying? It depends on how often you use it and how much you value it. Everything has always worked perfectly fine for me, but I do wonder if the 60 EUR asking price isn't a bit much. Still, if the beta ever ends I'd probably buy it.
Ripping a complete Blu-ray takes me about an hour, but I'm using an external BR-reader over USB 2.0 . It may be faster with an internal reader, but I don't have any free 5.25" bays.
As for CPU and RAM usage, I just ripped a movie to test it, and on my PC it went from 0% CPU and 3.00GB RAM to anything between 1 and 20% and RAM stabilizing around the 3.75GB mark
The CPU is just a 4 year old i5-2500, by the way
Looks like i could really use anything that's not out of date. Wonder if i could get away with a i3 or even a celeron/atom.
I have been ripping with my netbook in the past (Atom N270 1.6GHz single-core without hyperthreading, 1.5GB of RAM) and didn't really notice any issues.
Of course I must add again that I'm ripping over USB 2.0 . If you can get more speed out of a Blu-ray reader on a SATA connection, the CPU load may increase.
A bit of quick and dirty maths :
I'm taking an hour to rip a 90 minute movie with another 90 minutes of other stuff (behind the scenes, bloopers, interviews, trailers etc). That puts my external reader at x3 speed.
An x12 reader can theoretically be 4x as fast as what my USB reader is doing, so if there's CPU load caused by the ripping process, it should be around 4x higher.
Mind you, that's still not a lot because it's mostly below 5% now anyway.
Sorry for the late reply, by the way. I completely overlooked my notifications here.
Something like that seems like is probably just limited by the speed of your storage, so if you had an SSD as a stop gap before moving things onto hard drives you should be alright with even something like a cheap AM1 build.
Now if i convert the file type\encode will that require more power/ram.
Might run into some issues there, though you could just get like an 8320e which is around 130 and do the job pretty well on the cheap.