My recent pet project has been setting up a NAS, or home server, for myself and family. It started when we realised Netflix is €23.99 a month (nearly €300 per year) now, and we don’t use it because much of what we want to watch isn’t on it - or on any streaming services here! What started as a self-sufficient streaming replacement became much bigger as we realised it could do more; phone backups, work archives, music streaming, and just about anything else.
Getting Started
I may not have seriously considered this project if I didn’t have a Pi 5 lying around. I say “lying around”, but it was really part of a disused Commodore 64 project. More on that in another article, perhaps! Anyway, it had not been used in a few years and wasn’t practical, so I decided it may be a great donor for a server. I did my research to make sure it was possible - it required some extra accessories and planning - but once I was satisfied, I took out the C64 and removed the Pi from it. The end of one DIY project and the beginning of another!
So, what did I have and what would I need? And would the Pi accomplish what I want? All excellent questions. The Pi 5 is a perfectly competent, low-power server for basic use, serving content to a few users from a hard drive. The catch that I had to be okay with up-front was no transcoding; I had to pick a format and quality level and stick with it. This meant that legacy devices wouldn’t be compatible - which isn’t a big deal - but also that a good internet connection was going to be demanded if I wanted to stream video outside the house. After all, these backups were going to be 25-30GB Blu-ray quality movies, and with no way to downsize them in real time it would require a hefty connection. I decided that if this was required down the line I would scale up to it, but this would serve home use fine; if I needed to watch something elsewhere later I could download them in advance or transcode the Blu-rays to the more efficient h265 to save bandwidth at source. So not a huge problem.
Building
All I had was a Pi 5 with a microSD and a 256GB SATA SSD. What would I need? A real NAS would need more storage, and ideally not over a USB, so I bought a Radxa Penta SATA HAT, which is basically an adapter for hard drives for the top of the Pi. It needed its own power supply on top of that. What a pain - Radxa only sold their official power supply from AliExpress, which had long and expensive shipping, so I bought two 12V 5A DC adapters and one of them did fit. Still, pains are par for the course with DIY. Then, storage! Since this would back up the whole family, including important stuff, we wanted plenty of storage and some level of failsafe. We went with two hard drives, both 6TB, set up with RAID 1. This basically means that only 6TB is usable; but if either dies, nothing is lost. Amazing!
Back Up
Then came the rabbit hole of media backups. I wanted to get the ball rolling with the legitimate discs we had around the house. I had an Apple SuperDrive for CDs and DVDs; CDs went smoothly with XLD. I really enjoyed making backups of all of my music, opening their cases and perusing their feel and notes. DVDs are where the problems began to spring. MakeMKV found it difficult to extract some of my DVDs; sometimes the movie would appear twice, or an episode would fail to extract, and so on. It got worse with Blu-ray!
I was hoping to use my PS3 to dump Blu-ray ISOs and decrypt them on PC, but unfortunately it didn’t prove to be any good at this. So I sucked it up and bought a Verbatim 43333 for $120, which was the best reader around and could read 4K discs. I plugged it in, read a few long forum posts and took the plunge on flashing what I hoped was the firmware - which went smoothly and easy using a GUI, in the end - and yet it still wasn’t working. Odd. Oh - it just didn’t like being plugged into the front USB ports, and worked at the back. Whatever. It was alive! This was enough for most of my Blu-rays, but some were still more obstinate. “The Rock” (1996) failed to dump because of what looked like an encrusted spot on the disc’s edge, perhaps some sort of rot.
The worst one, John Wick 3, had something called playlist obfuscation. It would throw hundreds of different titles at you when you tried to dump the disc, and all but one of them were fake and out of order - one was the real movie. Apparently the way you find the solution is to use a program like AnyDVD to play the movie and make note of the real playlist, but AnyDVD was taken down two years ago, and VLC found playing the disc difficult too. It required an extension called libaacs, which I had to find a precompiled version of; then it rejected it for not having the keys. I found those and added them. Finally, it recognised the disc! But not my Java install, which was required for the menus, so I installed Java again. After all of that… it opened, and played only a black screen. No wonder people just pirate movies at home!
Fortunately this movie had been “solved” - Lionsgate use this obfuscation and a forum thread posted all the solutions for each region, and I eventually found the UK solution matched my copy. I could finally choose the right title and dump the movie. The 4K one didn’t work and at that point I didn’t care, I was going to just take 1080p.