 This is the SF Productions Podcast Network. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mark. You can check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife to Read Comics on your favorite podcast catcher, or on our website, sfpodcastnetwork.com. On a recent episode, we talked about what, and more importantly how, we watch TV today. We also mentioned our personal streaming service, aka Plex. This is an application that can accept your own media, home movies, music, photos, as well as TV shows and movies you have collected. Plex also has on-demand media of its own, a lot of which you can find elsewhere, plus the ability to watch live TV and DVR shows, as well as an arcade that runs classic video games. I'm going to concentrate on collecting TV shows and movies, but before I do, I have to note that this video gets into a few details that, depending on your location, may not be on the up and up from a legal standpoint. I do this for my own personal use, and I feel as though I've spent more than enough money over the years on media, going back to 8-track, that I'm comfortable with it. If you're not, then move on to another video. Also, while this is not a hugely complex process, media collection is time consuming. I've been working on the process since last August, with at least a month or two left to go. It's mostly waiting for things to finish, and can be a great pandemic project. If you're impatient, this is not for you. Finally, you may be asking, why do this when there's so much content already available on various streaming services? The point here is that you own the content based on media you've already purchased or created yourself. It can't be taken away from you. And on a normal streaming service, may be here today, gone tomorrow, as contracts end. Do you follow the content to another service, then pay for it again? What about content involving an actor or director that has been cancelled by social media, forcing services to remove it? Then there's content that is not available anywhere online. One example? There's no single service that has all of law and order. I guess Dick Wolf hasn't seen a big enough check yet. There's various seasons on various services, but not all of it. We purchased the complete series collection of the Mothership, all 20 seasons of it, and dropped it into Plex for Mindy to watch. I did the same for my MS-T3K collection, also available only in chunks throughout the streaming world. With that out of the way, Plex has two main components, a server designed to always run on whatever device you use. This can be a PC, a Mac, or a specialty storage device running its own computer. If you know what that last part means, I don't need to explain it. If not, don't worry, as you won't go that route. You'll want to choose a PC or Mac that, A, you leave on all the time, B, you don't use very much for other things. It doesn't need to be the latest and greatest. I'm running it on a Mac Mini from several years ago, with a few upgrades over time. There's also a client you use to access the content. There's a long list of compatible devices for the client. We use it mostly via Roku's around the house, but we have players on our computers, tablets, and phones. You'll also want a lot of storage. More about that in a moment. Go to PlexTV to get the software, and sign up for a free account. I say free because, if all you want to do is view videos in your own home via the web, it is free. If you want the ability to watch them on other devices without paying for a Plex player for that device, or watch them outside your home, there is an ongoing cost. Currently, 4.99 a month, or 39.99 a year, or 119.99 lifetime. Check out the site for more details I invested in the lifetime plan. Anyway, now follow the steps to install the server software. It's a fairly standard install process. Once you've done that, install the client on whatever device you want to use it on. Again, there is a cost involved with each device unless you are using the pay version of Plex, aka the Plex Pass. Once you run the Plex client and attach it to your server, it will walk you through this. There's nothing in your media library except for the stuff Plex provides. If this is all you're interested in, you're good to go. Happy viewing! But I'm going to assume you're watching this to add your own media. If it's already in a digital form and a file accessible to you, you can use one of the existing libraries or create your own by pointing the library to the folder your file is in. Please note that if your media came from iTunes or other digital lockers, it most likely has copy protection on it and you can't use it with Plex, unless you want to do some poking around on Google to resolve this. So if most of your video content was purchased on iTunes, you can probably skip this. This method is mostly for old home movies and personal videos you've already converted to digital. If your media is in the form of DVDs or Blu-rays, this is where patience and a lot of storage comes in. There are many solutions to convert physical media to digital files, but here's what I use. Handbrake is a free open-source video transcoder which scans the media in question, gives you a list of tracks to choose from, and then converts it to various formats. You can download it and give it a try. I would highly recommend using or even buying a separate computer for the conversion process as it takes a long time and basically ties up the machine for much else. Assuming you're converting a professional disc, you'll almost certainly get an error that the disc is copy protected. This is because Handbrake on its own can't convert copy protected video. A few moments on Google will help resolve this, enough said. Once the disc is scanned, you can take a look at the list of tracks available. You'll likely find one or more very large files which is the movie or the TV show. Generally, the latter will come in sets of episodes. There will also be relatively smaller files, featurettes, trailers, ads, etc. You can choose to include these or not. My rule of thumb is to convert anything over two minutes in length and skip the rest. Now you'll come to a screen with a lot of options. I'm going to suggest you ignore most of it and just choose Fast 1080p30 as a format. That's good enough for most people and is the default. Or you can spend days going over message board threads arguing the most exact perfect settings if you like. Before you click start to kick off the conversion, let's talk storage. While you can use the internal drive in your Plex server for this, you may find yourself quickly running out of room. For example, a half hour TV show episode from a DVD can clock in at 100-200 megs, an hour show at 400-600 megs, and a film from 600 megs to 1 gig or more. You may want to invest in an external USB drive and connect it to your Plex server. You can buy a 4TB drive for around $100 online, which will provide room for a decent sized media collection, I run an 8TB drive. Anyway, start the handbrake process. Depending on how many files are involved, their complexity, and the power of the PC running it, this can take from one hour up to several. Just let it run and do something else. Once it finishes the queue, it's time to move the resulting files to your Plex server. You can always use your home network, but I use flash drives which are ridiculously cheap, and just sneakernet them over to the other machine. This is the only part of the process where you can save time. Wait, before you move the files into Plex, you need to massage them a bit, both to provide metadata, info about the content, and optimize the file for what is essentially streaming. I use a product called Subbler on my Mac. I can't speak to Windows users on this, again, give Google a try. Before you start Subbler, go ahead and open each file. You can and should confirm that the main media file is in fact complete and what you wanted. In some cases, studios will fill up a disk with multiple copies of the same file or incomplete versions of the product. This is done to make what we're doing today harder. I found it's easier to just convert it all and throw out what you don't need. Go ahead and rename the files, which will most likely look like name of movie slash show dash one, two, three, or just title one, two, three. Subbler uses the file name to autocorrect metadata, so this is the time to rename the file. For movies, just call it the name of the movie. Just name the movie, extras, whatever they are, trailer, making of, etc. If there's an actual title at the beginning, use that. For TV shows, call it the name of the show, followed by S-X-X-E-X-X, which is the season number followed by the episode number, as in S-O-1-E-O-1. How am I supposed to know that? Google the TV show name and episodes and you'll almost certainly find a Wikipedia entry on it. This is tedious, but it makes things a lot easier later. There's also the TVDB.com, which is the same source Subbler uses. In one case, I was working on some loveboat episodes and found I had to include the ID number assigned by the TVDB in the file name for it to work, no idea why. Be sure to delete any duplicate files or incomplete files, just whatever you don't want. Done all that? Now, open Subbler and select the files, which will open them up as separate windows. Click the magnifying glass on the top right, which should bring up a bunch of metadata if you've named the file correctly. For those movie extras with no official name, you can skip this step. Click through and choose a poster, if available. Now, save the file, then click the optimized option. This will take a few minutes depending on the length of the file. This will make it run smoother on Plex. I had to go through and re-run a lot of stuff when I didn't do it. Ok, now you can either send the files over to the Plex server via the network or your flash drive. For movies, I import them into iTunes first, which creates a folder name for the movie. Then move the folder with the movie into the Plex location for movies. You can then delete the iTunes copy. If you have movie extras, create a folder called Featurettes alongside the movie file and then put the extras inside that. Run Scan Library on your Plex movie library and it should pop up in the list. For TV shows, I use iTunes as the final resting place, then just point Plex to that. So import your TV show files to iTunes and they should show up in separate season folders. If you have TV show extras, what I do is change them to season 99 or similar in iTunes, which allows them to appear in Plex. I suggest that you delete the transitory files as you go as they will collect quickly and fill up your hard drives and flash drives. If you have Blu-rays and wish to convert them, get ready with a lot more patience and a lot more storage. We start with a new step prior to Handbrake, which does not accept Blu-rays. You need to do a separate conversion first. I use a product called Make MKV, which does what it says, converts Blu-ray files to .mkv files compatible with Handbrake. They are also compatible with Plex itself, but unless you either have a tiny Blu-ray library or a ton of storage, it's not practical. Blu-ray films can easily run to 30 gigs or more in MKV format. Download Make MKV. It's free to try and $50 to buy. Load up the disk. You may need to purchase an external Blu-ray drive since most machines don't include that. I bought one for $80 online. Click on the drive icon in the window and let it run. This can take a few hours. Once it completes, run Handbrake, choosing the folder itself where the MKVs were deposited. Make MKV will put them in a folder with the Blu-ray title. Change the format setting to HQ1080P30Surround. This process takes much longer. I have seen some take two days to complete, but assume five to six hours at minimum. From there, follow the same steps to make it to Plex. Does this seem like a lot of work? Well, it is, but most of it involves waiting for things to finish, which gives you time to wait out COVID, write up podcast notes for shows like this, or check out our audio podcast, How I Got My Wife to Read Comics on your favorite podcast catcher, or on our website sfpodcastnetwork.com. From the Pop Culture Bunker, I'm Mark, thanks for watching.