I have finished ripping all of my Blu-rays that did not come with digital copies. Using existing hard drives, I should be able to fit all of the movies and TV shows I have on my 2 TB My Cloud, backing them up on a 2 TB external drive. The only problem is the My Cloud maxes out at about 11 MB/second reading or writing, but hopefully that won’t interfere with playing the movies, though I think it might be the limiting factor.
Plex is a great tool for sharing the movies over my home network, using my desktop/laptop as a media server. I just told it where the movies were on the My Cloud and it created an index, downloaded metadata, movie artwork, etc. to make a really professional looking interface with very limited work on my part (not perfect: in A Few Good Men below it lists Christopher Guest and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as stars while leaving out Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, I guess alphabetical by first name? Didn’t realize until later that for the sample artwork I picked the same movie for this blog entry as the one on Plex). All I had to do was correct some of the mismatched movies, which I could have avoided if I had included the year of the movie in the file name. Unfortunately even though I have Plex apps on the Amazon Fire Sticks connected to both TV’s, I don’t know if I will use it that much since I already have the Blu-rays and DVD’s at home and could watch those. And since I had to compress the movie files to make them more manageable (they are still 5-10 GB each, but smaller than 25-40 GB of the original mkv files on the Blu-ray disk), it is better to watch on disk anyway. So Plex is great, but not that useful ultimately.
