Rip/Backup Blu-ray/DVD to FreeNAS Home Server

Date February 10, 2016 Author Catherine Category Blu-ray Tips, DVD Tips, NAS

once upon a time, the media server has shifted from a convenience–a place to store files that I want to access anywhere and an easy way to stream music to the office for free–to a necessity. Today, a home server is a place to back up your family’s computers and the home for all of my media–a few hundred ripped DVDs and Blu-rays plus your family’s movie collection. 

When you decided to build a home server, the first thing you should do is to figure out what you want to use it for. For movie fans and big Blu-ray/DVD collectors, what they want likely to be the convenience to stream all of their media–like using Plex Media Server to stream ripped Blu-ray/DVD movies and TV shows. A FreeNAS will be a safe and secure place to store my personal movie library. 

FreeNAS makes it relatively simple to set up a multi-purpose machine that can run headless—that is, without a video card or monitor connected. As an added benefit, FreeNAS’s native filesystem, ZFS, makes it easy to add multiple hard drives to a single volume, and even supports using a SSD as a smart cache for the volume. And yes, if you want, you can even add redundancy to the system. 

Now, when you finally navigate to FreeNAS, then let us build our own home server with FreeNAS. 

What Do You Need to Build Your Own? 

1. Hardware 

– Old computer or new media server components 

– Hard drives (internal HDDs or external USB disks) 

2.FreeNAS Software 

Setting up a computer with FreeNAS is quite easy, and you will need to reserve an hour to complete the following steps. 

Steps to build home server using FreeNAS 

1. First, you’ll need to download an ISO image here. 

2. Next, burn the ISO image to a CD disc using a commercial burning software such as Nero or free software such as Free ISO Burner. 

3. Once have prepared a bootable CD image, simply boot your home server with the CD. Make sure you have set the booting order so that the computer attempts to boot from the CD drive first. 

4. Install FreeNAS 

– After booting, select install to hard drive 

– Select hard drive where to install FreeNAS 

– Remove the CD disc from the drive and boot the computer 

– Make sure you have connected the Ethernet network cable (WLAN does not work) 

– After booting, FreeNAS says that you may try the following URLS to access the web server interface 

5.Setting up FreeNAS 

To set up a FreeNAS, you will need to use another computer with an Internet browser. Go to the URL address that was given to you in the previous step (e.g. http://192.168.1.40). 

Follow the steps to change your admin password, create a new user account and set up storage volumes. 

– Account – My Account – Change Password 

– Go to Account – Users – Add User 

– Storage – Volumes – Create Volume 

Please note that the storage disks need to be separate from the FreeNAS operating system disk drive. You can also use external USB disks as storage disks. 

Next, let’s activate the file sharing services. 

– Sharing – CIFS Shares – Add CIFS Share – Services – Control Services – CIFS = On (Activate CIFS service) 

Congratulations! Now you are ready to start transferring media files to your home server, and set it up as a source in your media center software. 

Before add Blu-ray/DVD to FreeNAS, you must get rips 

1. Download and install Pavtube BDMagic on your windows computer or BDMagic for Mac on your Mac. 

2. Launch this Blu-ray/DVD Ripper and click “File” icon to load disc-based content to the software. 

3. Click “Format” to choose your wanted format, like MP4, MKV. 

4. Back to the UI to hit “Convert” to start to backup Blu-ray/DVD to digital file. 

5. Open output folder to locate the Blu-ray/DVD rips. 

Add media files to the FreeNAS 

You can transfer media files as follows depending on which operating system you use. 

– In Mac OS X FreeNAS will appear to your shares after activating the AFP share 

– In Windows 7, simply Map a Network drive and you are ready to copy files 

– Connect with FTP to FreeNAS 

Add FreeNAS as a Source 

To complete this guide, I will show you how to set up your home made NAS as a source in XBMC media center. 

– In XBMC go to e.g. Videos 

– Select Add Source 

– Add source smb://FREENAS/your_NAS_name 

I heartily recommend FreeNAS as a free (or very inexpensive) solution for a home media server. If you got interested, here is a complete video tutorial from the guys at FreeNASTeam to walk you through the whole installation process. 

About Pavtube BDMagic 

Pavtube BDMagic is a software developed by Pavtube Studio. This software is designed for circumventing copy restriction in Blu-ray/DVD discs and save the content to digital file. It has rich output video/audio format and can fulfill nearly all your needs in video playback on your devices. 

– Convert Blu-ray/DVD to 4K/SD/HD MP4, MKV, AVI, WMV, MOV, M4V, FLV, H.265, M3U8, etc

– Adjust A/V size, bitrate, codec, frame rate, channel and aspect ratio. 

– Built-in video editor to trim/crop video, add subtitle/watermark, deinterlace video, replace audio. 

– Batch conversion and GPU acceleration 

Free download and install: 

Free download and install: