DVDs on TV in 2021

Recently I decided that I'd like to try converting some of our DVD collection to media files that we can store on one drive and play directly from our TV. I think I found a method that will work. It wasn't too difficult, although I honestly thought it would be even easier.

We finally got a widescreen, flat panel smart TV maybe three years ago. A friend got it from the company that he was working for when they went out of business and liquidated their assets. Before that we had a large 4:3 CRT that, honestly, I preferred in a lot of ways.

But the new TV has a USB port where you can plug in a hard drive, and it can play media files (videos, pictures, music).

We have a DVD collection of almost 300 titles. Most of them were purchased ten or twenty years ago, it seems like. We also have a few streaming services, so we hardly ever make an effort to dig through the DVDs to remember what we even have, let alone pull anything out to watch.

Despite that, I think there are several things that we might watch if they were easier to access. The biggest group in this category is TV shows that my spouse can watch (and re-watch) in the background while knitting. We also have a handful of movies that I haven't seen for years and would enjoy watching again.

So, when I remembered that our TV could probably play video files off a USB drive, I started investigating to see whether we could make a media library from our DVDs.

Making Videos

The TV supports about a dozen video container formats, and even more video codecs. At first I wasn't sure how I was going to decide between them all. But we also want the option of turning subtitles on (and off), and the TV only supports internal subtitles on AVI, MKV and MP4. So that helped.

The top recommendation for DVD ripping software, across all of the internet as far as I could tell, is Handbrake. In order to extract DVD data, Handbrake requires libdvdcss to be installed separately.

I had some false starts trying to generate MP4 files. Depending which options you select, Handbrake will change the file extension from MP4 (which our TV recognizes) to M4V (which it doesn't). My internet research suggests that these are similar enough that you can just rename M4V to MP4 and it will probably work fine. Since our TV doesn't recognize M4V, though, I assume it won't support any of the features that differentiate it from MP4 anyway, so no point using them in the first place.

Subtitles

My next obstacle was getting closed captions to work. It seems like Handbrake supports a lot of subtitle formats, and our TV supports a handful of subtitle formats, so it seemed like it would be easy to find one that worked. Unfortunately, Handbrake doesn't provide any way to choose how subtitles are stored in the file. If I added the closed captioning track from the DVD, then it encoded it as tx3g captions in the MP4 file and (mysteriously) as an unidentified (to VLC) data stream in the MKV file. Neither of these worked on our TV.

Of course, Handbrake can also burn in the subtitles on the screen, but I do want them to be optional, so that wasn't very appealing.

I spent some time exploring other software, to see if I could, like, rip the subtitles out of the disc, then convert them to a different format, then add them back in with Handbrake or MakeMkv, but that wasn't giving me great results and was a big headache.

Luckily, I tried a different disc, which had "subtitles" instead of "closed captions". It seems that DVD subtitles are pre-rendered as graphics, while closed captions are a text stream. The result is that Handbrake encodes subtitles in VobSub format instead of tx3g. Our TV supports VobSub in MKV files only, so that's what we will use!

I could have explored external subtitle files, which the TV also supports, but I'd prefer to have a single file, so it didn't seem worth the trouble once I found a configuration that worked.

Quality Choices

Our expectations for video and sound quality are very modest. We don't have a fancy sound system. We would probably still own a CRT if our new TV hadn't fallen in our laps. We aren't going to be picky about video quality.

My understanding is that DVDs are essentially 480p (although I think there are reasons this isn't strictly true, but I think it's "nearly true"). So there is no reason to encode them at a higher resolution than that.

For reasons I don't understand, Handbrake encodes the file to a strange resolution that is shorter than 480 pixels tall, even though the source video is 480 pixels. I can't tell if this is related to anamorphic projections or what. I couldn't find any satisfying explanation on the internet.

I tested the "Fast 480p30" and "HQ 480p30" presets in Handbrake and couldn't really tell the difference. I probably could have tried the "Very Fast 480p30" also, but I didn't bother.

In the end I saved a new preset based on "Fast 480p30". I disabled chapter markers (they were appearing as an extra subtitle track, and our TV wasn't using them for navigation anyway). I added automatic inclusion of English subtitles as an optional subtitle track. I kept the default behavior to detect and burn-in forced subtitles (such as for brief foreign-language dialogue in a mostly English-language film).

Storing Videos

Now I've learned that I can make videos that the TV will play, but what will I put them on? Our TV suports the FAT, exFAT and NTFS file systems. I went with exFAT for compatibility.

I also learned that it prefers the drive to use the master boot record (MBR) partitioning system. It will recognize drives that use GUID partition tables, but it shows a second, empty copy of the device in the browser for some reason.

During testing, I have just been dropping files on a 16 GB thumb drive. This works fine, but I have no interest in moving files on and off of it all the time. Convenience is my goal. So how much space do we need?

As part of this project, I took an inventory of all our DVDs to see how much storage we could expect to need. I counted about 1,000 hours of feature content (not including special features, which we generally don't care about).

Using my custom preset described above, my test files ended up at about 0.5 GB per hour of content.

At that rate, we could fit our entire collection into about half a terabyte. In reality, my guess is that we would only ever care about maybe half of the media we have. I guess probably more than that, since most of the discs we would want to watch are TV shows, which account for more total time than the large number of films that we're less interested in.

Based on those numbers, I think I would lean toward a full 1 terabyte drive for storing our videos. I don't really expect to use that much, but if the price difference is small, then I'd rather have more than we need than not enough. Maybe we'll decide to use a higher quality encoding. Maybe we'll decide to put our music collections on there, too.

So do we spring for a solid state drive (SSD) or get a cheaper hard disk drive (HDD)? The price difference is significant: $105 or more for 1 TB SSD compared to only about $50 for 1 TB HDD.

I couldn't find much convincing data about drive durability. It seems like SDDs may have an advantage in this use case, where I'm writing data and then leaving it on there (not erasing and re-writing a lot).

I have a small concern about power draw (which I understand is typically lower on SSDs). The TV manual recommends using externally powered devices. But it also indicates that the USB port supplies 5V, 1A, which seems extremely normal. Maybe the external power advice is intended for if you're playing videos off your digital video camera or something.

Finally, there is the question of how much noise a HDD would make. Would it be enough to be annoying? I feel like it wouldn't be noticeable from across the room, but others in the household think it could be annoying.

I think my conclusion is that I'll start watching the weekly ads and see if any good deals on a 1 TB SSD show up. We have some time before I fill up my thumb drive.

Conclusion

In the end, I'm glad that I found a solution that seems to work. It's all done in a single app, Handbrake, with a single saved preset that I can use for every rip.

It did feel a little like a close call, though. Like, in the end, there was exactly one configuration that met all the requirements of myself, our TV, and the software ecosystem. If anything had been slightly different, the process would have become elaborately complicated if I could do it at all.

But it worked out, so I'm satisfied.

emptyhallway

2021-01-21