Just to watch shows I wanted, I was subscribed to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and
HBO MAX.
Throw in all the other streaming services and you're lookin' at more than a hundred
bucks a month, and for what?
Another dumb original series that destroys the legacy of a franchise I used to love?
Or how about this: This guy bought two seasons of a TV show called Final Space, and Amazon
just deleted 'em!
He can't even watch videos he bought, all because of a dumb licensing agreement between
Amazon and Warner Brothers.
You can't tell someone they're 'Buying' something if it's actually a rental!
It's too much!
And I am done with it.
Today I unsubscribed from my last subscription, Disney+.
But my kids!
What do I do about my kids?
They love Disney.
Disney princesses.
Pixar.
Disney shows.
All this Disney!
I have to do something to prevent mutiny.
[Red Shirt Jeff] Arrr, mutiny!
Time to sail the seven seas!
No!
If I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do it right.
I'm cutting the cord—well, figuratively speaking—but I'm still gonna legally own
all the movies my family watches.
And I'm gonna still get HD and 4K content, but with NO ADS, ever.
And I'll be able to watch whenever and wherever I want.
How?
[Red Shirt Jeff] Piracy!
NO, cut it out, Red Shirt Jeff!
I'm gonna rip it!
In this video, I'll show you how I legally built up a library of almost every good TV
show and movie my family and I ever watched.
It starts with this: this is a Pioneer UHD Blu Ray drive that I plug into my computer.
I use it to rip, or copy, all my movies and TV series.
Then all that content ends up on here: a new 6-bay NAS that ASUSTOR sent me to try out.
And hey, they're sponsoring this video, so I'll give a quick rundown on why I like it.
The Lockerstor 6 Gen 2 is a 6-bay Network Attached Storage server, and it's perfect
for your home or office.
It's quad core Intel CPU will chew through your media library, it has 2.5 Gig Ethernet
built-in for fast network transfers, and it has a PCI Express expansion slot for even
more flexibility, with a four-drive M.2 NVMe adapter.
Now, I'm guessing if you buy one it won't have all these factory warnings about Red
Shirt Jeff not being allowed to operate on it.
I went over and showed Red Shirt Jeff, and of course the first thing he did was ignore
all the warnings and replaced the M.2 expansion card with this 10 Gig adapter!
I'm actually glad he did that, because now I can copy files to and from the thing way
faster.
But if you want a really nice six-bay NAS, go check it out with the link in the description.
But back to the problem at hand.
This year, everyone's jacking up their prices.
And they're forcing you to watch ads on the cheaper tiers!
[Darth Vader] I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further.
Heck, I didn't think we'd ever see Apple consider ads, but now even they are, at least if this
crazy ad exec gets his way!
[Obi Wan Kenobi] You were the chosen one!
It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them!
All this time, the content selection on every service has eroded to nothing.
Only originals and old campy 80s movies...
there's barely anything worth watching anymore.
As Disney, Paramount, and all the other studios go back to locking away all their classic
movies, there's only one thing we can do to fight back: cancel our subscriptions and go
back to physical media.
Heck, most services upcharge if you want 4K.
And they're not even giving you good quality 4K.
What if I told you you can buy 4K UHD Blu-Rays and get even better quality than any streaming
service at any price?
Well, you can.
And here's how.
You're gonna need three things to get started: a computer, a Blu Ray drive, and a place to
save all your movies and shows.
Almost any modern computer works.
I'm using my Mac laptop, but the ripping process runs on anything—Windows, Mac, or even Linux.
Then you need an optical drive.
Almost any drive'll rip a DVD...
But they don't all work for 4K UHD Blu Rays.
And it would stink if I can't rip Top Gun Maverick in 4K, once my preorder arrives!
You could hack firmware on a cheap drive, but I spent a few more bucks to get this,
the Pioneer BDR-XD07UHD.
I like two things about it: first, if I plug it directly into my Mac, I don't need another
power plug.
And second, it rips 4K Blu Rays without any hacks.
I used to use this old Plextor drive, but it doesn't work with 4K at all.
But a drive like this would work fine for normal Blu-Ray discs.
The last thing you need is a place to put the movies.
DVDs are usually a few gigabytes per movie, but Blu Rays can be 30 or even up to 60 gigs
per movie for 4K content.
So you're gonna need at least a giant hard drive.
Right now you could get a 10 terabyte drive like this WD Essential drive for about $200.
I use a NAS, or Network Attached Storage, so I can expand my storage and access it anywhere.
You can just plug the NAS into one of the extra ports on your router to share your media
with your whole house.
There are two great things about using a NAS.
First, you can install multiple hard drives, so you can increase your storage and have
more redundancy.
Second, you can run software directly on the NAS to share your media library, like the
program I use, Jellyfin.
When you're starting out, just having an external hard drive might be enough.
But eventually, especially once you become a data hoarder, you'll probably get a NAS.
And maybe more than one.
Don't say I didn't warn you!
Once you have the hardware, how do you get the movie out of one of these?
Well, let's plug the Blu Ray drive into my Mac, and I'll switch over to my screen and
show you exactly how I do it.
The first thing you should do is install a few apps that you'll need: MakeMKV, VLC, and
Handbrake.
MakeMKV is great for ripping movies off discs.
It basically takes the raw video and audio streams and puts them into a file called an
'MKV' file.
MakeMKV is free if you grab the beta key from their forum, but I actually paid for a license
a few years back since the software's so useful to me.
So install that, then also install VLC.
VLC stands for Video Lan Client, but it's basically the best video player ever, since
you can throw practically any kind of video or audio file at it, even ones that make QuickTime
barf!
Finally, you don't technically have to install Handbrake, but I use it to do something called
transcoding.
Handbrake can translate the MKV files MakeMKV rips into something more useful for devices
that might not be able to handle a full, uncompressed 4K stream!
We'll talk about that later.
But now that we have the software downloaded, it's time to rip our first Blu-Ray!
Open up MakeMKV, and if it asks you for a software key, you can either buy one or go
to the forums and grab the current beta key.
They update the key every couple months, so you have to keep downloading a new version
when the old one expires, unless you buy it.
You should see the Blu-Ray drive in MakeMKV, and you can confirm everything's working in
the Info over here on the right.
I'll pop in my WarGames Blu Ray to rip it.
This is one of the movies that inspired me to get into computers.
I mean, how could you not love a movie with this kinda soundtrack?
[killer 80s soundtrack]
I only mean that in half-jest.
I still listen to the original Tron soundtrack, too, you know, the Wendy Carlos one?
[what ever happened to the synth music?]
After a few seconds, MakeMKV will start reading the disc and scanning for protected video
content.
Sometimes this can take a minute or two.
Once that's done, you can click on the Blu-Ray icon, and MakeMKV will finish scanning the
disc for individual 'titles', basically all the tracks on the disc that have video in
them.
This is where things can be a little weird.
When you pop a Blu-Ray in a player on your TV, it has a menu.
And in that menu, you can play the movie.
But there are also other videos on the disc.
Like if there are bonus features, each one of those is a separate video file.
And if there are multiple versions of the movie, like one with director's commentary,
or a separate video for an alternate language, then those can show up too.
So finding out which of these titles is the actual movie can be tricky, sometimes.
What I normally do is rip all the largest files, usually at least a few gigabytes, because
one of them is usually the main movie file.
Or if it's the Lord of the Rings Extended edition, I just rip every file on the disc,
because they load those things up with awesome extended content!
In this case, it's a War Games Blu-Ray, and it's pretty obvious it's one of these two
files, which are both about 30 Gigabytes.
So if you just want the movie, select the biggest files and uncheck everything else.
Then choose a folder to rip the movie into, and click the 'Make MKV' button.
This process takes... eeeh a long time.
So if you have a lotta movies to do, good luck!
No, but really, with my movies and this drive, it's about 20 Megabytes per second, which
means each movie takes 20 or 30 minutes.
If you're ripping a 4K UHD disc, and the read rate is like .1 times, then you might have
either a disc that isn't yet in MakeMKV's database, or your blu-ray drive might not
have the right firmware for ripping 4K content.
So you can either fix that or just wait like a year for the rip to finish.
But after a while, the rip is complete!
And now you have files with names like 'WarGames t03' and 't04' in a folder.
And on my Mac, at least, I can't open these files in QuickTime, but that's why I installed
VLC.
If I right click and choose to 'open with' VLC, then it should open up and start playing.
I always quickly check the ripped files and make sure the one I think is the movie is
actually the movie.
Some movie studios do dumb things like put like 20 versions of the movie, with 19 of
them being all scrambled, thinking they're being all smart.
The do everything they can to prevent you from watching the movies you buy the way you
like to.
If you do run into problems like that, head over to the MakeMKV forums.
There are guides like this one that help you figure out the right title.
Luckily that's not the case on this disc, and this first file is actually the whole
movie.
So I'm gonna rename it.
We're not gonna start organizing things yet, but whenever I name a movie, I always put
the movie's name and the year it was released in parenthesis.
That can be really helpful since there are sometimes multiple movies with the same name,
and this lets media software distinguish which one it is!
So this one I'm gonna call War Games, with 1983 in parenthesis.
At this point, some people are finished and move on to the next movie.
And you can just use the raw MKV files if you wanna rely on something called 'live transcoding'.
But I don't do that, for two reasons.
First, I don't wanna have to have a fast NAS or computer dedicated to live transcoding.
It takes a lot of horsepower to re-encode 4K and HD content to play it back on older
or slower devices.
And while it's nice to have the original data from the disk, these MKV files are HUGE.
Like, for War Games, it's over 30 Gigabytes.
A modest library with 300 movies is gonna eat up 10 terabytes!
Throw in TV seasons too and you can eat up 20-plus terabytes pretty quick!
I transcode the movies right away, and throw away the MKV file.
I can compress a 30 gigabyte movie down to 4 or 5 and still have extremely good quality.
Doing that means I can store five times more movies and TV on the same hard drives.
That's a lot of money saved.
And for me, I transcode everything using Handbrake.
When you open up Handbrake, it asks you for a file.
I'll browse to the War Games MKV, and select it.
You can see a preview of the video, but the most important thing is to choose a preset
that you'll be happy with.
For normal Blu-Rays, I stick with the built-in HQ 1080p30 Surround preset, because it preserves
a stereo and surround sound track, and it uses H.264 encoding.
H.264 is an older codec, but encoding is usually fast and it can be played back on just about
everything.
For 4K videos, I use the same preset, but I bump the Resolution Limit to 2160p under
the Dimensions tab.
But I'm thinking about switching to using a newer H.265 preset once more of my devices
support it natively.
But let's not get too far into the weeds.
You can spend a lotta time tweaking custom presets.
For me, I just want a really good quality copy, and the built-in presets are pretty
good for that.
The last step is to pick an output folder, and Downloads is fine for me, and then click
'Start'.
This is the one part of the process where it can be helpful to have a faster computer.
My Mac Studio is way faster than my slower laptop, and if you have a GPU, you can even
use hardware acceleration.
Handbrake has a whole Performance section that goes over the details.
But no matter what, it still takes a lotta time!
So if you have multiple movies to transcode, like in my case War Games and Mulan 1 and
2—gotta throw a bone to the kids here—I can queue up additional videos.
Just open another source, then set up the preset, and click 'Add To Queue'.
I usually rip a few Blu-Rays at a time, and then queue up all the transcoding so it can
chew through the files for a day or two, even while I'm sleeping.
After Handbrake's done, the MP4 file it exports can be played back on almost anything!
Heck, even my Raspberry Pi could play it now!
At this point, you have a lotta options.
You could just play the movies back on your computer.
No problem!
But if you wanna take things seriously, you need a NAS.
Now, ASUSTOR sent me their 6-bay pro-level NAS, and I'm actually using that as my main
NAS.
But for most people starting out, a smaller 2 or 4 bay NAS like this one might make more
sense.
It only has 2.5 gigabit Ethernet, and the processor on it is a little slower, but it's
perfect for a media library.
And with four drive bays, you can put in two, three, or four hard drives so you have better
redundancy.
You can set up the NAS to have one or two hard drives as a backup, in case one fails.
With a NAS, even if you're storing terabytes of data, being able to swap out a bad hard
drive is really helpful.
I still have a second backup copy of everything—that's what this other NAS is doing in my rack—but
that might be overkill for most people.
It really depends on how important your data is to you.
Check out my 3-2-1 backup plan video if you wanna learn more about how I do my backups.
This NAS is from ASUSTOR, but there are also other good beginner NASes from QNAP, Synology,
and Netgear, and they all cost around $300 bucks—but that's before you buy hard drives.
Hard drives will run you another fifteen bucks per terabyte, and if you want some redundancy,
you have to buy an extra drive just for that.
ASUSTOR sent along six of these 6 terabyte Seagate IronWolf NAS drives.
You don't have to have a really nice quality drive like these, but they do help when you're
running four of 'em alongside each other.
So all-in, a NAS like this with four 6 terabyte hard drives will run you about $700.
If you're daring, you could build your own NAS using something like TrueNAS and an old
PC, and save a little money.
But these NASes are worth the price for most people.
They're quicker to set up, they're super compact, and they're pretty efficient.
All these NASes run custom software, this one uses something called ADM.
And using ADM, it only takes a few seconds to set up media sharing for my entire house.
And I'll show you how in my next video.
For the next video, I'll talk about how I set up Jellyfin on the NAS, and how I'm able
to watch movies on any device or TV in the house.
So subscribe!
Until Hollywood actually cares about your right to own the content you buy, I'm Jeff
Geerling.