Cliff wrote:
I was asked in a PM to discuss how I use my WHS to feed support my AppleTVs. My response ended up being kind of lengthy and is probably better off being delivered in the form of a thread rather than a PM.
Let me describe my general environment, the software I use, and how I manage my environment.
First off, I have iTunes managing all my media: movies, TV shows, and music. That means I need to convert this media to a format that iTunes recognizes. Also iTunes acts as both a client, and as a server for AppleTV or other instances of iTunes with which you may want to share your library. So you need to have an instance of iTunes running on your WHS machine for this to work.
I have roughly 450 movies totaling 780GB, 300 television episodes at 270GB and 115 albums at 8.5GB hosted on my EX490. Here is a diagram of my network:
.
Software:
Video transcoding:
HandbrakeRequired video libraries:
VLCMeta tag editor:
MetaXI have iTunes 10 running on the EX490 as well as the 2 OS X workstations. I use Handbrake to transcode video to the h.264 file format required by iTunes. This does not produce a full copy of the DVD, just the movie itself. So if you like scanning through endless trailers and FBI warnings, this method is not for you. Handbrake in turn requires VLC to be installed. I use the 64 bit versions of both programs. I use MetaX to set the meta tag fields in the resulting file and publish the file to a local copy of iTunes. I copy the file to the movie folder on my EX490, log in to the WHS box, and from within iTunes add the file(s) to the library.
The Mac Pro is my primary video transcoding machine. Handbrake is multi-core optimized and will make use of hyperthreading, so my MP is substantially faster at this task than the notebook or the WHS box. In Handbrake I normally specify the AppleTV preset and I increase the constant quality setting to 65.20% on the video pane. Handbrake normally encodes two audio tracks. The second one is a passthru and is the one used by AppleTV. The first track is used when the output device can't process the passthru audio stream. I usually increase the bitrate of the first track to a level similar to that of the passthru track. Subtitles are a bit of a pain and you will need to experiment some to get a feel for those. Normally you only care about 'forced' subtitles as those are the ones displayed when a language other than English is being used in an English language film. Review the Handbrake documentation for a discussion on how to ensure subtitles are captured if present in the source.
Once the video is transcoded I run MetaX to set the values of the various meta tags. If the movie is not found in the tagchimp database then the
Allmovie.com is a nice resource for movie and disc information such as chapter titles and such. iTunes does not let you edit all the tags that are displayed by your AppleTV, so use MetaX for this task. For example:
The iTunes 10 client is the easiest to install on the server. Prior versions required that the install package be modified, but iTunes 10 will successfully install without this surgery. If you want to run iTunes 9, here are instructions:
link. Use the Windows Scheduler to automatically run iTunes when you log in to the server. I initially tried having iTunes run at startup, but I wasn't getting a user interface on the screen when I did it this way. So if I reboot the WHS machine, I have to log in to cause iTunes to run.
I always want iTunes to run as though I was standing in front of the machine and working on it directly. The way to do this is by using the Remote Desktop Connection application with a /console switch. I always use this method to connect and administer the server. I do not use 'Launch Home Server Console' menu item on the HP software. When I am done, I close the application without logging out. This leaves my session active in a disconnected state.
If anyone has suggestions on how to accomplish this better or more efficiently using my current hardware then I am all ears. I am not currently doing any Blue Ray transcoding. And to the person who PMed me, I hope this answers many of your questions.
I am currently doing what you are with the added bonus of blu-ray. Blu-Ray takes a few more steps though, so lets get started.
First to save your self a tun of money, in doing blu-ray
You will need an external drive enclosure, that allows for optical drives and of course the drive. If you buy them separate you can save hundreds if you also want the ability to wright blu-ray disks.
Now for the fun part, the drive depending on the connection used USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 will only allow for Blu-Ray read rates of 4x where as FireWire 800 will allow read rates of up to 8x. As an FYI kind of thing blu-ray drives will not read above 4x for movies its a limitation of the drives firmware to keep the noise down.
In other words a faster drive wont help much over the standard USB connection.
Now for the software..
CoRD.
http://cord.sourceforge.net/ Its a better RDP app for the Mac than the one offered by MS.
MakeMKV
http://www.makemkv.com/download/ This is needed to copy the blu-ray to a container file that HandBreak can encode.
Open the Blu-Ray with MKV its fairly automated, much like copying DVD's from the days of old select the largest file, click makemkv. It should start reading the disk and making the mkv container file. This
HandBreak with the help of VLC can read DVD's but not Blu-Rays. This is where MKV comes into play, MakeMKV will copy the blu-ray to the hard drive, but not in an iTunes format. Using HandBreak click on source, select the file you saved using MKV.
If HandBreak wont read the *.mkv try playing it with VLC, if it doesn't work you may need to do a search on the issue, some blu-rays just wont copy nicely.
After encoding with HandBreak the rest goes as stated above. Though there are a few more steps its always nice to see that HD logo on a video you encoded on your ATV. I currently have 141 Movies done using this process.
This process can also be used for normal DVD's and can be a lot faster than having HandBreak read the disk and encode at the same time.
Please use caution when doing Blu-Rays, they will take a LOT of disk space up to 50GB, once compressed with Handbreak they average between 2GB and 4 GB. You should have at minimum 100GB of free space on your drive before starting space will be needed for overhead, the copy process and the encode process. It takes about 30 to 40 minutes to copy the blu-ray to the hard drive, on a MBP i7 2.66GHz about 1:35 minutes to encode. Even longer on slower systems EX a i5 2.27Ghz windows7 laptop took 3:45 to encode the same movie.
When I have more time I will come back and clean this up a bit..