Streaming 4K Blu-rays With a DECADE-OLD PC

Today I'm turning this

decade

old Dell Optiplex into an all-in-one home media server. It will definitely be fun, but is it a good idea? Before we begin, I want to take a minute to thank the sponsor of Today's Video Nord Pass Nordpass is a super easy-to-use password manager that works on all your devices and sets the standard for security with its advanced encryption and zero-knowledge architecture. , but even with many of these safety features, I know many of you might be tempted. to avoid the benefits of a password manager because well, I guess it seems a little scary to keep all your passwords in one place, zero-knowledge architecture makes it almost impossible for your passwords to be leaked due to a data breach, but I want to show you a really quick and easy tip to make your passwords even more secure, all you have to do is let Nordpass take care of generating the saving and autofilling of your passwords, but when you first create a password for a account, add a small phrase or sequence of numbers to the end of the password and use this exact same passphrase for all your passwords, this way Nordpass does all the heavy lifting but you don't see that passphrase you put at the end, which It means even if someone managed to access your entire vault. in plain text the password still wouldn't work because they don't have that little secret plugin.

Using this little trick in conjunction with Nordpass, you can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with knowing your passwords are safe and right now you can get a special offer on two years of nordpass plus one month free by visiting nordpass.com Hardware Haven or using the code Hardware Haven at checkout. You can also get a three-month free trial for a business account using Code Hardware Haven Business Things. Improve your online security and sign up for Nordpass today. In a previous video, I took a look at this Dell Optiplex 790 and concluded that for an older PC it's pretty solid for desktop use and even some light gaming, but due to the higher power consumption of the I5's second generation, it really wouldn't be a good choice as a home server, so today I'm going to turn this into a home server.

Okay, that doesn't make sense, but for some reason I really liked it. form factor of this machine, especially when placed horizontally, looks like something that could easily fit somewhere accessible but a bit discreet and it also has a full size optical drive and it turns out I'm getting a little more interested in extracting data ultra high-definition Blu-

rays

and that led me to start thinking about how cool a system like this could be if you set it up so you can rip Blu-

rays

, transcode and store them, and then stream them to your devices, all from it. obviously with this specific machine power consumption was going to be a big problem, but for other even more efficient PCS like this there is another obvious problem and that is that this case only has space for a three and a half inch hard drive and while my movie in the program collection it's not incredibly valuable since I have the hard copies as backup.

I don't want to have to copy them all over again if a single drive fails, so after a bit of Googling I stumbled upon this three and a half inch to double. Two and a half inch adapter from Corsair for only seven dollars and that's when I decided to get a little silly and go Hardware Haven style on this project. I came up with a plan to use unraid, which I think is great for things like home servers. It has great community apps for Jellyfin, which is what we'll use to stream our media, as well as apps for creating MKVs and a handbrake that will be used to rip and encode Blu-rays without Raid.

It also conveniently boots from a USB drive, meaning you could install these two two-and-a-half-inch two-terabyte hard drives for storage now. I was planning on just using a couple of random two and a half inch drives that I've accumulated, but I actually have some plans in the future for these, the I5 2400 clearly. is not a good candidate for video transcoding, as I learned earlier in the last video, so I decided to keep the Nvidia Quadro k1200 in the system since it has the ability to run a single unbeaten stream and supports h.264 up to 4K. The system had extra PCI lanes available, so I was tempted to put in a dual NVME adapter to allow for a pool, but I wasn't planning on copying too many files to the server, so it probably wasn't worth it.

Optiplex already had a DVD drive that would be totally fine for DVDs, but I wanted to be able to rip not only Blu-rays but also Ultra HD Blu-rays, which are a little more complicated. Fortunately, there is an amazing guide on the make mkb forums that did things fairly. simple, I took this LG wh-16 and S40 which was listed in the guide as a drive that could be upgraded to work with Libra Drive. Update Libra Drive Don't worry if you're not familiar with any of this, it's not too familiar. complicated due to some of the DRM complications of Blu-ray, especially 4K or Ultra HD Blu-rays, you typically can't read the raw data directly from the disc, but that's where Libra Drive comes into play.

I'm not going to explain how. works here because there is a great forum post that I will link in the description below along with a guide I mentioned above to make Libra Drive compatible with many drives, the firmware needs to be updated to a specific version, luckily this process is quite simple and safe at this point, but I'll talk about that later. I want to make it clear that I am not an expert on any of this. I have my own media collection at home that I've been using. for a couple of years, but I've only really used DVDs up to this point, so this is all a bit new, so don't necessarily treat this video as a final tutorial, but rather as inspiration and perhaps entertainment.

There are plenty of other great videos you should definitely check out, including this one from Jeff Geerling. The system was already clean and mostly put together as of the last video, so all I really needed to do was change the optics. drive and then installing the hard drive caddy to fit the two and a half inch drives in was easy but I had to make a bit of a mess to get all the cables to fit because of how close together the drives were, I finally got it done. However, everything fell into place and it was time to install Unraid.

Unraid has an update tool, but I've had problems with it in the past, so I decided to use the manual method, which is still very easy. First, you need to format the drive. in FAT32 and I only had a 64 gigabyte drive on hand, but I just made a smaller partition and then formatted it as FAT32 and labeled it non-raid, which is important after downloading the installation folder from the Android website, I copied everything and ran the boot build script. Once that was done, I popped the drive into Optiplex, booted it, and then navigated to the IP address it gave me to start setting up unread.

Thanks after adding one of the hard drives to the array and then assigning the other as a parody I installed the community. apps plugin to get access to the plugins and apps that I would add if it seems like I'm going through all of this too quickly and you want to know more about unraid, maybe just watch this video that I made here most of the initial. The settings are the same in both videos. Once I had access to the community apps, I installed the NVIDIA drivers plugin which is required to use invinc for transcoding before installing Jellyfin.

I needed a file share to store all my media, so I created a public share called media. and then accessed that share to create separate folders for movies and shows. I copied a few things into these just so I could try out jellyfin, after that I found the jellyfin app from linuxerver.io and started installing it here. I needed to mount some of the media folders I created and then also added the Dash Runtime equals Nvidia argument under additional parameters to give Jellyfin access to the Nvidia GPU once installed. I was able to head to port 8096 to configure and test Jellyfen after making sure everything was fine. working fine, including hardware transcoding, it was time to move on to ripping some Blu-rays to do this.

I installed the make MKV app and here I also mounted volumes to give access to a new folder on the media share and I also needed to provision the device. Fortunately, you can activate Make MKV without those IDs and check the logs which will basically tell you what you missed, so I copied these two IDs here, clicked edit on the Make MKV container and then added two new device configurations using Copy the IDS and then hit Apply to restart the container once it finished spinning. I went to port 7806 to access the MKV UI, where I saw the optical drive appear as expected to test it.

I entered a standard Blu-ray. and it read the disk just fine, so after reading the files I found the eight files that correlated to the Eight Episodes on that disk and started saving them to my shared folder. I only really saved one for the sake of time, but it was fine once that was done, I copied the dot MKV file into my TV shows folder, labeled it correctly, and then rescanned my jellyfin library and, you know, It worked great because the file was using the h.264 codec, the quadro k1200 was able to handle the transcoding very well below. although I installed a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray and as expected MKV was unable to read the disc, this is because, as I mentioned above, this drive needs to be flashed with a different firmware to work with the Libra drive, while I probably could have found a way to do it without Raid, I decided to just put my Windows SSD back into the system and do it there.

All I had to do was download the update tool from the guide I mentioned and then download the correct binary firmware for my unit once I had those I could use the software to flash the new firmware. I loaded Make MKV on Windows just to make sure everything was fine and as you can see it now supports Libra Drive. Now in the Make MKV web UI, I was able to open the disk, select the file to take out the knives and start extracting it. This takes a while, but after about an hour I was able to drag the MKV into my movies folder and view it on my desktop; however this file uses the hevc or h.265 codec which is not supported by the quadro k1200, this meant we had to rely on software transcoding which caused some unfortunate buffering as the I5 2400 was doing my best to try to keep up, plus the file size is quite large and although I want my movies to look good, maybe I don't want them to take up so much space, so this is where the handbrake comes in.

Handbrake can be used to re-encode videos with different codec compression settings and all sorts of other things. Installing it was almost the same as doing. MKV, but there is no device to configure or anything, just a volume to assign. I decided to make one adjustment which was to configure the CPU fixation. I set the container to cores one through three, which would hopefully leave core 0 available for Other processes on the server's handbrake are quite CPU intensive and my goal was to not get stuck creating MKV or Jellyfin while the handbrake was on. running with it configured.

I imported the knives from MKV and then set a preset to maintain the existing frame rate and resolution. but using the h.264 codec with a CRF of 20. Hopefully this should preserve some of the quality but make the file significantly smaller with all my settings changed. I began the coding process which gave me an ETA of only 16 and a half hours. Yes, the handbrake is very CPU intensive, so while I could have left this running for the next day, I really needed to finish this video, so I decided to cheat and just use my Mini's Forum um 690 to do the heavy lifting with the 16 thread ryzen. 9 6800 HX removed it in a couple of hours and copied the finished file to the server.

This new file was significantly smaller but, more importantly, could be transcoded with the k-1200, meaning there will be no more studio issues, so while it's nice to be able to transcode MKV files directly, it's also useful to have a handbrake to transcode them to a different codec or file size when needed, you can set up a watch folder and the handbrake will automatically encode any files that get there with a certain preset which could help speed up your workflow if you decide to re-encode many of your files, obviously this system is not the best with the double whammy ofhigh power consumption and simultaneous lack of CPU power, but I found it a lot.

It was fun setting up this project and I feel like I learned a lot in the process. I think I'm going to move my new Blu-ray drive to my main Nas and set up and create MKVs there and probably just let the um 690 run handbrake and handle all the encoding. Hopefully you enjoyed this and maybe even learned from it. If you do something similar to this, please let me know about your setup in the comments or if you think there are ways I could have done this. Better let me know too, don't forget to go to the description where you can get an exclusive offer on nordpass plus one month free using Code Hardware Haven or you can get three months free on a business account with Hardware Haven business code, that's all for this one , so as always, thank you so much for watching, stay curious and I can't wait to see you in the next one, thank you.