One big reason behind wanting to do this media center project was to reduce clutter. Having nearly five hundred DVDs take up a bit of space. Since I was going to be encoding all my DVD movies and TV shows and storing them digitally; what was I going to do with all the original DVD disks? I wanted to keep them. I knew that much. I just needed to come up with a better way to store them. I finally settled on a high capacity DVD Album.
DVD ORGANIZATION.
Thanks to some help from a friend I was pointed to Meritline.com. An online store where I could purchase a cheap 520 Capacity DVD Album. The DVD Album looked sturdy, so I ordered two of them. A lot of the DVDs I owned where spechal additions that contained two disks. I also know that my original count was off as to how many DVDs I owned because of the TV shows I had collected. I figured two of the 520 capacity DVD albums could hold 1040 DVDs. I not only would have enough from for my existing DVDs, but I would have plenty of room for growth in the future.
The DVD albums shipped and arrived in Juneau in less than a week. Once they got here I proceeded to take the pile of DVDs I had already encoded and start inserting them into the DVD album. When I was done I had freed up a lot of space that the DVDs where taking up and I did not hesitate to throw out the DVD cases they where in. I bought these DVDs for the movies on them and not for the cases they came in.
I have yet to quite fill up one whole album with DVDs. I am close though. I still have plenty of movies and TV shows to encode. When The first case is full I plan to store it under my bed.
DIGITAL FILE ORGANIZATION
As I encode movies on my Mac Mini I transfer them over to my Qnap Nas. I set up an alphabetical file structor inside two main categories (‘Movies’ and ‘TV Shows’) to save my encoded movies in.
Sometimes a movie that is encoded with Handbrake needs to be renamed. For whatever reason the file name is often wrong. It is important to make sure you name the encoded movie correctly because it will cut down on time you might have to spend on finding the correct movie meta data for which ever media center software you end up using.
(I will be talking more about media center software in a future post)
I would say that since I started this project I have encoded a little less than half the movies I own. This is a long process, but I can already see how it is going to pay off when I am done.
After I filled up my Mac Mini’s hard drive with my encoded videos from my DVD collection there was not much more I could do till I ordered the Qnap NAS. This would be the most expensive peace of my Media Center setup.
Qnap NAS
After reading about NAS solutions online and talking about it with friends who have experience with such devices I proceded to order a four bay Qnap NAS TS 459 Pro+ Turbo NAS with five, 2 Terabyte Western Digital Caviar Black hard drives. The spare hard drive is incase one of the other harddrives fail.
I ordered both the Qnap NAS and the Western Digital hardrives from Newegg. I have had good experiences ordering products from them in the past and this was no different.
Both the hardrives and the Qnap arrived well packaged on a Friday. It was Martin Luther King weekend and I had all three days to work on this project.
From unboxing everything to final setup only took me an hour. Which was great! I think it speaks volumes on how easy setting up a Qnap NAS. It also left me with a three day weekend to enjoy.
Following the easy to read directions for the Qnap, I took out four of my five harddrives totaling 8 Terabytes worth of storage and inserted them into the Qnap Unit. I plugged in my APC Battery backup and plugged the Qnap and the Apple Airport into it, then plugged an ethernet cable from the Qnap to the Airport and turned it all on. By default the Qnap wanted to set up it’s self as a RAID 5. The unit supports other RAID options, but I chose to go with it’s suggested default of RAID 5. It took the Qnap maybe twenty minutes to partiton the harddrives and set its self up as a Raid 5 server.
RAID 5 IN A NUT SHELL
RAID 5 means is that event hough I loaded up 8 Terabytes of harddrive storage, I would have 6 Terabytes of usable storage. If I have understood what I have read the data I store on the Qnap is more or less available on two of the harddrives at any one time. The point of this is that one harddrive of the four can fail and I wont necessarily lose any data. Should that happen I would just follow the easy to read directions it came with regarding how to replace the failed hard drive. The Qnap system will rebuild it’s self and all will be right in the world again.
YOU STILL NEED TO DO BACKUPS
Let me stress to anyone who does a project like this or owns a computer in general, please back up your data. I still do backups. Things I keep on the Qnap that I can’t afford to lose, things like photos, home videos, and documents I still back up off of the Qnap on to another hard drive monthly.
With the Qnap up and running I first went into the settings and enabled Time Machine backups. Again, this was a simple process that only took a couple of minutes. Before long every computer in my house (that would be 5) where backing up wirelessly to the Qnap Nas.
Next I went into the settings enabled APC Protection. Should my house lose power for longer then to minutes the Qnap Nas which would be running off the APC battery at this point would shut down after 2 minutes if the power is not restored.
Finally I setup a shares and users accounts on the Qnap NAS. This allows me to store the encoded movies I had on the Mac Mini on the Qnap. After transferring over the movies I was able to start encoding more of them again.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE QNAP NAS
At the time of this post I have had the Qnap Nas for a little over three weeks now with no real complaints. I was able to set the whole thing up in under an hour and it’s been very easy to use. I do recommend the Qnap, but also know I have no bases for compression. This is the first NAS I have ever setup.
The Qnap is capable of doing much more then it currently is. I really want to explore the tons of options it has. I do need to compete this first task before I start playing with it more. I have to finish encoding my DVDs first, then I will go back and see what other Qnap options I might like to play with.
I have discovered that the Qnap and iPhoto 11 do not get along well togetherl. This is because of the format of the hardrives in the Qnap. iPhoto 11 requires HFS+ formatted hardrives to run correctly. Qnap does not support that format (yet). My workaround for this has been to use a separate external hardrive for iPhoto 11 which I also backup. I could keep all the photos and iPhoto 11 on my main computer’s harddrive, but I have so many photos that the space it requires is very large for me. At this point it just makes sense to keep it on a separate external drive.
In my next post I am going to be talking a little bit about file and media organization.
I recently found this post on author Neil Gaiman’s thoughts on Internet Piracy. I feel that a lot of artists have expressed this same sentiment. Unless your Metallica, I think you will enjoy this.
You’re not losing sales by getting stuff out there. When I do a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people ask “What about the sales you are losing by having stuff floating out there?” I started asking the audience to raise their hands for one question — Do you have a favorite author? And they say yes and I say good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book put up your hand. Then anybody who discovered their favorite author by walking into a book story and buying a book. And it’s probably about 5-10%, if that, of the people who discovered their favorite author who is the person they buy everything of and they buy the hardbacks. And they treasure the fact they’ve got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it. That’s how they found their favorite author. And that’s really all this is; it’s people lending books.
Encouraged by the results of my previous post I went forth and ordered a Mac Mini (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM, 320GB Harddrive) along with the Apple remote, wireless keyboard and wireless Magic Trackpad to see how play back looks on my T.V. I figured having a computer hooked up to my TV there would be times when I might want to use it like a computer. Surfing the web from the couch or having a place where guests can check their e-mail just seemed like the smart thing to do.
The Mac Mini I ordered was a custom build. Chances are this will be overkill for 90% of you. I would say from my experience of doing a project like this you can get away with the base model of the Mac Mini and be just fine.
When the mac mini came I found setup to be quite easy. I Took the computer out of it’s box and placed it on the stand under my T.V. Hooked up the power cord, HDMI cable and pressed the power button on the back of the computer. On it’s first boot-up I was asked if I had a wireless keyboard and mouse/trackpad and to turn them on. A few more clicks through the initial setup and I was good to go. My Mac mini was running fine and everything looked great on my TV. I did have to go into the system preferences and make minor adjustments to the display settings for my TV, but that was it.
First thing was first. I had some software to download.
After downloading and installing the VLC and Handbrake programs I put in the first DVD I wanted to encode. Ironman 2. Like the test movies I did earlier in the month I put the Ironman 2 DVD in my mac mini, launched Handbrake and pointed it to the DVD so it could do it’s initial scan of the movie data.
The first time I did this with another DVD on my laptop the process just took about a minute. On my Mac Mini with Ironman 2 it took almost 2 hours to complete. Something was not right here. When the scan was completed I reviewed the handbrake encoding settings. It was in this process I noticed something was wrong. No audio tracks were listed. If I told handbrake to encode this it would encode the movie without the audio. I went to Google for help and started searching around to see if other people had this problem. Sure enough they did. Ironman 2 has new/different copy protection on it preventing me from encoding the movie I owned.
Remember that what I am doing is perfectly legal. This is my media I bought and paid for. I am just putting it all on a drive so I can access it more easily.
Thanks to some forum posts over at the Handbrake site I was able to use a program called ‘Mac The Knife‘ and copy the DVD to my hard drive and then encode it with handbrake. (At the time of this post I have been considering switching from ‘Mac The Knife’ to ‘Ripit‘ A $25.00 peace of software that appears capable of ripping more copy protected DVDs then the free ‘Mac The Knife’.) The end result was an encoding of the movie for my mac mini. Since then I have come across a few other disk with copy protection like this. Mostly TV Shows.
ENCODING SETTINGS
Screenshot of Handbrake
After watching the Ironman 2 movie and comparing it to the DVD I kept seeing what is call artifacts on the screen. The default Handbrake compression I was using was not the cleanest and it was driving me a little crazy. I headed on over to the Handbrake forums and did some reading. It turns out you can make slight adjustments to the settings and see a huge difference in video quality. It is now to the point that I can’t tell the difference between the DVD and the encoded video. Which is what I was hopping for.
When you launch Handbrake you are presented with a pop out pane on the right side that has a number of preset suggested compressions. If you click on the ‘Apple TV’ preset and then go back over to the main window you are only going to have to adjust two settings. The first on is under the “Output settings”. You want to uncheck the box called “Large File Size”. Next, lower on the same window you’ll see a slider bar. You want to drag that slider to the right till the RF reads 19. That’s it.
If you don’t want to have to go back and adjust those settings each time you put in a DVD to encode, you can click on the “Presets” drop down menu on the finder bar and save this setting as a new preset. As you can see below it is near impossible to see the difference between the DVD and the encoded video.
The Movie: Ironman 2. Quality comparison image. Click to Enlarge.The Movie: Dead or Alive. Quality comparison image. Click to Enlarge.
As I have been writing this post I have been encoding a lot of my DVDs. The encoding settings I have given you above will work for most of your DVDs as well, but not all of them. This is because most DVD are made using the NTSC standard. I do own DVDs that are made using the PAL (Phase Alternating Line) standard. When I try to encode a DVD that was made with the PAL standard the result is a movie that looks like it is shifting alternating lines. When you see it you will know what I mean.
To correct this problem and remove the “alternating lines” look of my encoded movies I once again visited the handbrake forums. The first steps are the same as above. Launch Handbrake and in the pop out pain on the right side that has a number of preset suggested compressions. If you click on the ‘Apple TV’ preset and then go back over to the main window you are only going to have to adjust two settings. The first on is under the “Output settings”. You want to uncheck the box called “Large File Size”. Next, lower on the same window you’ll see a slider bar. You want to drag that slider to the right till the RF reads 19. We are almost done. Click on the “Picture Settings” icon at the top of the program window. Switch over to “Filters” tab and click on the “Decomb” drop down menu and select “Default”. Every PAL movie and TV show I have encoded with this setting has looked great to me. Don’t forget to save this as a preset.
HOW TO ENCODE TV SHOW DVDs
Handbreak is a great program, but you still need to help it along it’s way. This is very evident went you are encoding TV Shows. When you have Handbreak scan a TV DVD like Firefly, handbrake is going to pick one file it thinks is the video file you want to encode. Normally it’s the file with the longest video on it. However a TV show DVD like Firefly can have up to 4 episodes on one DVD. By default Handbrake is going to try and find the one video file that is the longest and only encode that one file. This is not what we want. So how do we fix this?
This is where I use VLC a lot. Start off by Scanning the DVD with Handbrake. Once that task is completed launch VLC and start playing the first episode on the DVD. Once the episode is playing click on the “Playback” drop down menu on the Finder and highlight “Title”. This will show you which Title (or file) is playing. So you should be able to see that episode one of Firefly is using Title 2. You can now pause the show and go back to Handbrake and on the main window flick on the “title” drop down and select “2”. From main window chose what you want to name the encoded episode (something like Firefly 1) and click the icon at the top of the window named “Add to Queue”. Go back and repeat these steps for each episode on the DVD. Once done you can click the “Start” button and Handbrake will encode each episode on the DVD.
CLOSE CAPTION SECTIONS (Subtitles) Updated: 3.10.2012
Sometimes you will be a movie or TV show that has sections where the actors are speaking a whole other language. When you are watching this on a normal DVD player the captions for what the actors are saying will show up automagicly. When you encode the same movie or episode with Handbrake these cations are not automagicly burned in.
To have these captions or subtitles show up in the parts of the show they are supposed to click on the ‘Subtitles’ tab and then select ‘0-English’ underneath the ‘Track’. and burn your DVD as normal.
WHATS NEXT
With my new encoding settings setup I went forth and started to encode my DVD collection. In less than a month I had filled up the harddrive of my Mac Mini and was forced to stop encoding my movies. I had to order the Qnap NAS server before I could continue any more with this project.
In my up coming post “Mac Mini Media Center Project (part 3). I will be discussing the specs of the Qnap NAS server I ordered and how it’s been working out for me so far.
Thanks to some help from a friend I was pointed to Meritline.com. An online store where I could purchase a cheap 520 Capacity DVD Album. The DVD Album looked sturdy, so I ordered two of them. A lot of the DVDs I owned where spechal additions that contained two disks. I also know that my original count was off as to how many DVDs I owned because of the TV shows I had collected. I figured two of the 520 capacity DVD albums could hold 1040 DVDs. I not only would have enough from for my existing DVDs, but I would have plenty of room for growth in the future.
The DVD albums shipped and arrived in Juneau in less than a week. Once they got here I proceeded to take the pile of DVDs I had already encoded and start inserting them into the DVD album. When I was done I had freed up a lot of space that the DVDs where taking up and I did not hesitate to throw out the DVD cases they where in. I bought these DVDs for the movies on them and not for the cases they came in.
As I encode movies on my Mac Mini I transfer them over to my Qnap Nas. I set up an alphabetical file structor inside two main categories (‘Movies’ and ‘TV Shows’) to save my encoded movies in.
