Lozin

I'm 8 months into ripping my collection to Plex and feel like I've barely made any progress. I've ripped 330 movies and 70 different TV shows so far which is very time consuming. I have come to realize that I could cancel all streaming(which I mostly have) and get rid of satellite tomorrow and just use OTA with a Tivo and my collection and probably never run out of stuff to watch. I'm sure most of you could say the same.

Watershipdownisgood

Ummmmmm hmmmmmmm
Remaining Blu Ray titles to watch from my collection that isn’t a rewatch anime shows included
The Big Lebowski
The Siege
Blind Fury
Mask 1986 Eric Stoltz film
Black Society Trilogy
One Ranger
Eureka Seven
Legend of Black Heaven
Mr. Peabody and Sherman
Rise of the Guardians
Split Second
Grandmothers House
the little things
Lyle Lyle Crocodile
God Mars
Cats Eye seasons 1 and 2
Kurokami the Animation
Shivers
Little Monsters
Suzume
Kanamemo
Lovely Complex
Lost Highway
The Straight Story
Across the Spiderverse
Spartacus
Panther
Diabolically Yours
The Milky Way
Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud
The Shootist
Eat Man and Eat Man 98
The Vision of Escaflowne
Nura Rise of the Yokai Clan
Only Yesterday
Getter Robo Armageddon
Hyouka
Lady Georgie
Ultimate Otaku Teacher
Southern Comfort
Midnite Spares
Day of the Panther and Strike of the Panther
There’s five or six others mostly sequels but this is what’s left I got to say not very long to get through everything.

TripleHBK

I started a Plex Server in 2010. It took me 3 years of steady ripping and converting to go through my entire collection of discs. Since then the process has gotten significantly quicker thanks to the improvement in technology and but it's still a chore/task that I have to do every week or two as I've continued to buy new films. Most of my collection is reflected here on site, but this site doesn't include the handful of digital only films I own, nor does it accurately reflect the hundreds of tv shows I own either. All in all I have around 300 complete tv series to go with the nearly 4000 movies.

2024 is actually the year of a major plex server upgrade. In January I picked up a new JBOD case and 2 20TB HDD's. For the last 13 years I've utilized 8TB external HDD's and a USB 3.1 Hub through an ancient desktop to run the server. (Current Server is 32TB with additional HDD's for redundant storage and some project storage as well). I'm now in the process of building a new server running off of all new hardware. When all is said and done later this year I should be sitting pretty with a 100TB server running through a Beelink Mini PC setup which will allow for more transcoded streams than I'd ever had need for.

Many, many years ago I made it a personal goal to obtain a massive library of films from all known genre's with the sole intent of always having something to discover/watch as I grew old.

To this day I still shop deals and continue to pick up not only titles I want to watch now... but lots/titles I think I might want to watch in the future but have no interest in now. All of that goes into having what I consider a well rounded collection and has made for a wonderful sense of discovery every time I wander into my movie room. Just last night I found comedy titles housed in my collection I had forgotten acquiring. It's the closest thing to going into an honest to god video rental store that I can think of.

Like you, if I were to cancel cable I'd have enough content to last me for years, but it's all part of the fun of this hobby. My daughter is 10 and is just discovering so many of my own favorites for the first time. I buy for her, I buy for my wife, and of course, will continue to buy for me for as long as this hobby allows.

I've come to terms with the fact that I'll likely never watch everything I own, but I'm going to have a great time trying...

Lozin

I should have started my Plex server years ago but never did I finally have enough content that I'm starting to share with a few close friends and family members, 10 people so far and I'll probably keep it around 15 max, I've heard over on Reddit about people getting banned for sharing with two many others. Some of them are sharing with 90-100 people so they say. I always bump new title purchases movies or TV shows to the front of my rip list. I've also been packaging the ripped stuff carefully away in storage and have been saving some good shelf space doing that. My whole collection sits around 330 different TV shows and just over 2000 movies. I'm not ripping my 4K collection yet but want a server powerful enough to handle say 5 4K streams going at once. Some of my friends are having problems on their end with buffering but they are either using cheap Android boxes or the TV itself.

meremortal

This is one of the reasons I've really slowed down with collecting. I've been kind of stuck in a rut trying to get around to years of previous impulse purchases and it can decrease the fun of movie watching when it feels like a chore just to get through them. It's something that I unfortunately think about too much and in turn I pretty much put off watching tv shows and old favorites just to get around to back catalog. Definitely kind of miss the care-free spontaneity of just watching stuff on stream without the curation/library aspect of so much physical media and the clutter it can bring, or going into a watch with the mindset of 'just watch this so it can be gone from the collection and at least get one viewing.' The problem is I'm often too forgiving and just end up keeping them anyway.

HD Goofnut

It took me about three years as well to get my entire collection on PLEX, but it's been well worth it. It generally requires about 10 minutes of maintenance each week unless there's something extensive like a TV season to put on there. There are plenty of discs that I bought that never came with digital copies so having PLEX for that has been wonderful and a big time saver over the years. My family can literally watch anything I have in less than a minute with just a few clicks thanks to the new TCL I got for $228 in November. It seems like a large chore when you first get going, but once you get caught up to new purchases it's much better.

Member-222782

How Long Would Your Collection Last You?

Until my dying breath?

Aside from "bronzing" or, God forbid, an incident involving fire, my collection isn't going anywhere and I have no interest in ripping it or backing it up onto servers. I feel people who do this aren't really fans of physical media.

cakefactory

People who back up their discs aren't a fan of physical media? Considering how prone tons of discs are to bronzing or other kinds of environmental damage it seems like trusting your discs to work forever is foolish. I've had a few fail already (mostly crappy old ones from labels like Mill Creek, but some Criterion, too). If you have a bunch of rare or OOP discs, you don't back them up, and your disc fails, you're completely SOL unless you want to go to ebay and hope there's a scalper that will charge you out the nose for it.

For those who are running plex servers - what's your hard drive setup? I'm sort of interested in doing this for exactly the reasons I stated above. But, working in IT, I'm all too familiar with how common cataclysmic hard drive failures are. Do you guys have RAID arrays or what? What kind of storage space are you using if you have hundreds/thousands of blu-rays backed up?

ReedSolomon

As you know, there are a bunch of options, but I prefer simple.

Server has (currently) three disks. I have two backup sets of three disks each, with each disk in a set backing up a corresponding server disk.

No fancy raid, no ZFS, just two backup sets, one stored off site (at the office). Goal was to make backup trivial (rsync) and to be able to setup a new server by just installing the backup set.

I wrote a little python script to use "par2" to generate parity info for all the files and store it in a separate directory tree on each drive. Bit rot happens, this allows me to fix it, but again... I didn't want raid or anything like it. Just a file system that's readable instantly from anywhere.

Every week or so, I take one set to work (it's in a pelican case) bring the old one home and update. Easy.

As for the directory structure, again... lots of solutions, but I run linux and I've used "mergerfs" to make all of the various disks / directories look like this to my HTPC software:

Then, no matter what other disks I add in the future, or how I move stuff around, the HTPC front end sees stable paths.

ReedSolomon

How long will my collection last...

I've had it for two years now, so I know I watch 1-2 movies a week. Let's ignore tv series for the moment (which I also watch) because there are WAY more hours of tv shows than movies.

I currently have 1142 movies showing on my htpc. At 2 movies a week, that's 1142 / (2 * 52) == 10.98, or right at 11 YEARS worth of movies.

For tv shows, I don't have a quick way to add up the total -time- I have, but let's just say I watched one tv show a day:

That's 12227 different episodes. One a day, 365 a year, or 12227 / 365 = 33.5 years.

If I overlap the movies and the tv shows (maybe I have my own Saturday Night at the Movies), then I'm good, right now 11 years with movie night and then another 22 years with tvshows only. Maybe I'll rewatch some of the movies.

JupiterMission

Interesting to see so many people do the digital backup and Plex thing. I only digitally back up my most treasured, older discs (The Simpsons season 1-8 DVDs, Eerie Indiana series, The Norm Show) that I'd be the most upset to lose. Otherwise I figure the disc will do. I still have a ton of 20+ year old DVDs and 30+ year old CDs that play with zero issue.

As far as how long it would take to get through all of my discs... I bet that if I stopped buying new stuff and stopped streaming entirely, I could be entertained for a full decade without repeating a disc. And if I just went with stuff that was new to me (blind buys), I'd possibly be good for as many as four years depending on my pace. My goal for the last decade has been to build up my own personal "video store," so that has justified a lot of blind buying, whether that's smart or not.

I don't have as much time to watch movies as I used to since I have two young kids, but I have about 1700 films between 4k, Blu, and DVD (not to mention a hundred or so VHS tapes). If I watched three movies a week, it looks like that would last me just under 11 years. Kind of crazy to think about. Reassuring yet... stressful. :P

ReedSolomon

I literally could not do this without the media. Huge fan.

I feel people who consider moving bits from polycarbonate to metal an indication someone is less interested in the advantages of physical media to be misinformed. Bits are bits. Front end doesn't know the difference.

ReedSolomon

Same thought. My server isn't a huge "to be watched" pile. It's my library. A library isn't nearly as useful if it only has things I've already read.

I don't stress about the "backlog" any more than I stress about all the books in the town's library I haven't read. They're there if I want them. And videos in my library aren't going to be taken away because someone's licensing agreement expired. I find a great deal of comfort in walking down the virtual halls of my library.

tuffy

Looks like the stuff I've ripped is sitting at... 5,953 hours. So just sitting around watching it all for 8 hours per day like a TV station would take a little over 2 years before I'd have to start rewatching things. Of course, I don't have that kind of free time now, but perhaps after I've retired or something.

It is a big enough library that decided to tag the episodes/movies that I've never seen before, those that could use a rewatch, and ones that I've watched and want to keep around. Then constant feature-creep expanded my little tagging program into a huge scheduler to keep track of all the stuff I'm planning to watch and stick it into a huge spreadsheet-style table on demand, so that'll keep me busy for the foreseeable future.

TripleHBK

My Plex server isn't designed to provide the best possible viewing experience. I still vastly prefer to use my BD / UHD discs when watching movies, however the convenience that a server provides is second to none, particularly for music and tv content. Having all my films, tv shows, music, home movies, family photos, etc within grasp of any internet connected tv in my home has been amazing. There isn't a day that goes by that I, my wife, or my daughter don't access content. During the holiday's or occasions where I work between rooms (say living room and kitchen) jumping from screen to screen is a snap and in many cases I'm able to sync up content between rooms as well so that I can enjoy watching what is playing in another room without the hassle of disrupting someone else's viewing experience to move a disc.

My brother in law runs a raid array but I myself have always opted to go the 1:1 backup route. Up until this January I've used Western Digital 8TB external drives. These run $149 - $199 and are an easy cost effective way to get a lot of storage up and running with a relatively low cost.

When I first started out I ran everything off a single 3Tb drive. Eventually that drive became a "project" drive that still is in use to this day for other storage needs and the server moved to a single 8TB drive. When that single 8TB Drive wasn't enough, a second 8TB drive was incorporated and I separated my films from my tv series. That lasted for years and years. It wasn't until 2022 or so that I again had the need to expand and picked up 2 additional 8TB drives so that both the TV and movie directories could again be split. In this case... animation on one drive, live action tv on the other. For movies I split Horror & exploitation from all other film genres... for my collection, that resulted in a pretty even split for the HDD's.

Everything that was ripped/downloaded was/is also then backed up to separate offline 8TB external drives that are only powered up when I need to back up content to them. These backup drives serve as an extra layer of protection in the event that the main drives fail, but as time has gone on and I've acquired other drives, I also have a bit of redundancy built in, in that my older drives also house copies of much of my content.

Separate from the redundant HDD's however, I also regularly burn downloaded content to BD-R. If I own it on a disc then I pretty much assume I will always have that. Add in the primary server, it's backup copy HDD, and in some cases maybe even a 3rd back up and those rips are safe. The BD-r's serve as a replacement option for that digital content without disc.

Of the 9 or so multi TB HDD's I've owned over the years, I've only ever had 1 go bad on me. It's still functional and is currently a last resort back up, but the platters have corruption issues and so writing to the discs are problematic at best. Content can still generally speaking be read ok however as only a small section went bad before it was boxed up.

With that all said, as I noted in my original post, I'm in the process of making a switch... My current server is now 2 20TB WD Red HDD's (with plans for 5 total) housed in this Sabrent 5 HDD enclosure...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Y4F5SCK...lig_dp_it&th=1

That enclosure is then connected to a Beelink mini pc such as this...

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SYR619R...v_ov_lig_dp_it

So that I have both the storage space and performance for another decade, but also the flexibility to use the PC itself for other purposes as needed. Going the NAS route has definite advantages and is what my brother in law choose, but I like the additional uses a mini pc offers and so it's what I've stuck with. Best of all those Sabrent enclosures can be daisy chained and so if in time I need another 100TB of storage, I can easily add on without reworking the entire server.

With this new setup the older primary 8TB server drives have now become redundant backup drives for content housed on the 20TB drives that are kept offline until a day would come that I would need to recover anything lost... but fingers crossed that day never comes.

At the end of the day running a plex server has been a awesome addition to my home and has made consuming content so much better... but it's also been a fun project that has let me tinker with media I enjoy and in itself provided hours of entertainment as I try to get things set up just as I like it.

Lozin

For me personally I have kind of "rediscovered my collection" I had physical media in every room of the house except the kitchen and bathrooms. My basement H/T full of physical media, the basement spare bedrooms full closets and some on the floor beside, upstairs livingroom full(albeit neatly organized) both spare bedrooms upstairs closets full, our bedroom? You guessed it not full like the other rooms but still had some in the room. I even had to resort to putting up shelves in the laundry room just to store overflow TV shows and larger box sets. I started ripping stuff last summer that I forgot I had and we have rediscovered how great some of the old tv shows I have are and I'm packing up the discs carefully and boxing them up and putting them in the storage room. My wife got our living room back so far and one of the spare rooms. I'm surprised she put up with this for so long, but watching stuff from my own collection that I haven't seen or forgotten I had for the past 15 years on any tv or phone in the house has been great. I love the Plex user interface and the Plex pass is well worth it. Also sharing my library with my retired dad has been great, no more loaning out discs and wondering if they are going to get scratched or damaged somehow and he loves the old shows and has all the time in the world to watch them.