I automated my Blu-ray ripping setup, and now building my movie library costs next to nothing

Physical media has massive appeal, including uncompressed 4K HDR Blu-rays, lossless audio tracks, freedom from streaming service licensing removals, and more. But digitizing content disc by disc feels like sheer misery: spending hours at a desktop, manually feeding discs into an external drive, waiting for MakeMKV, setting up Handbrake queues, and renaming folders to match Plex naming conventions. It can all start to feel like a second job.

Luckily, you can build a fully containerized, automated optical ripping pipeline using tools like Automatic Ripping Machine, linked directly to your home lab NAS. Preserving physical media shouldn't require manual babysitting or bankrupt your storage pool. By automating your Blu-ray ripping, transcoding, and tagging workflow, you can build a pristine local media library for pennies per film while reclaiming your weekends.

Raw ripping comes with issues

It takes up time and storage

Raw ripping is a storage nightmare. Manual media archiving comes with a range of logistical hurdles. For me, the raw size penalty alone was one of the biggest turnoffs. A full 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray ISO or uncompressed MKV can easily span 50GB to 90GB+. Storing raw rips without intelligent compression or smart feature stripping will fill even a multi-terabyte NAS pool in a heartbeat.

This doesn't even consider if you want to keep any extras that come on the Blu-ray disc, too. This makes digitizing your collection feel expensive, since you have to invest in large hard drives just to store all your MKVs.

As if this wasn't frustrating enough, raw ripping is also a major time sink. It can take hours to rip a single disc, which would be fine if manual ripping didn't demand constant attention. You have to swap out discs, verify title tracks to avoid fake playlist obfuscation (common on Lionsgate or Disney discs), and hand-code metadata. Sometimes, even something as simple as renaming the file can start to feel like a drag.

Automation makes a large difference

No more manually completing each step

Luckily, you can set up an automated pipeline from Tray to Plex in a single drop. Unfortunately, you can't automate putting the Blu-ray into your disc drive itself, but with the other hurdles out of the way, manually swapping the disc becomes much less frustrating, since it's the only chore.

First, you want hardware pass-through and disk detection. Setting up an internal or USB-attached Blu-ray drive flashed with LibreDrive firmware for optimal speed and region-free reading inside a Linux host or Docker container, using UDEV rules, can instantly trigger specific actions when you insert a disc. This means once you load the disc, you don't have to do anything manually.

Next, set it up to intelligently rip by automating MakeMKV to scan the disk, query online databases like OMdb or TMDB to pull accurate titles and years, and extract the main feature while bypassing complex segment map obfuscation. Without doing anything, your disk is ripped and formatted exactly as you need it to drop straight into Plex.

Lastly, hand off the raw MKV to Handbrake CLI running on your server's GPU, using NVENC on an Nvidia card, to compress the file into an efficient HEVC/H.265 or AV1 container with pristine visual fidelity at a fraction of the size. This step stops your MKV files from clogging your NAS and requiring far more storage than necessary.

Once Handbrake CLI is done, have it automatically drop the file at the required location on your media server so Plex can access it automatically. And with that, you're done. All you have to do is put the disc into the disc drive; the process is automated, so you don't have to lift a finger or monitor each step.

Save yourself storage space

But be aware of the risks

Enterprise-grade hard drives can be extortionate. If you're looking at 12TB to 18TB drives running in ZFS pools, the costs add up very, very quickly. This means that by compressing a 70GB 4K rip down to a visually transparent 15GB HEVC file, you can actually drop the hardware storage costs to literal pennies per movie. You no longer have to worry about digitizing your 4Ks alongside your standard-definition Blu-rays because they take up far less space after compression.

However, keep in mind that you might run into playlist obfuscation nightmares with major studios that output 99 fake playlists on a single disc, which can be frustrating. It's worth having a manual fallback rule for tricky titles that automated tools can occasionally misinterpret so that you don't end up with the wrong file sitting on your media server.

You also want to ensure your process maintains audio pass-through. You don't want to inadvertently downmix lossless Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA tracks into stereo. Preserve pristine home theater audio for your local Plex client, too. You can do this by selecting the correct settings in MakeMKV and Handbrake CLI.

In MakeMKV, make sure it grabs all English (or your preferred language) tracks available on the disc. This means it will capture both the lossless HD-MA/TrueHD track and any secondary commentary or legacy Dolby Digital tracks) rather than defaulting to just one lossy core.

In Handbrake CLI, complex audio tracks are transcoded into stereo AAC. You can bypass this by using the copy encoder flags as below:

HandBrakeCLI -i input.mkv -o output.mkv --aencoder copy,copy --audio-copy-mask ac3,dts,dtshd,truehd,flac,opus --audio-fallback ffac3

These flags tell Handbrake to pass the audio tracks through raw and uncompressed without re-encoding them. If you have multiple tracks, it ensures both attempt pass-through. It also explicitly permits advanced lossless and high-bitrate codecs to bypass the encoder without specifying them, Handbrake may reject the pass-through and force a stereo downmix. You can also set the fallback so that if an obscure audio format is encountered that cannot be cleanly copied, it transcodes to standard AC3 surround sound rather than failing or defaulting to a broken stereo track.

Digitize your collection today

Without feeling like you're stuck with a new job

Building a digital media archive shouldn't feel like a part-time job. By automating the handoff between optical drives, MakeMKV, and hardware-accelerated transcoders, you turn physical plastic into an effortlessly managed streaming-ready local vault. Dust off your old Blu-ray collection, hook up an optical drive to your home server, and you can set up an automated ripping pipeline and take back complete ownership of your media library without having to spend extortionate amounts on storage.