Welp, today is decision day. WD’s sale on 18 gb Red Pro drives ends 1/26 and while I expect that means tomorrow is really the last day, I always err on this side of never remembering.
Tl;dr: I’d love if some members who use any mix of ISO and MKV to put their discs on servers could share their thoughts and maybe even post images of how their chosen interface works on their monitors/TVs. I’m leaning towards Infuse and Plex
/tl;dr:
This week I successfully ripped several music-related titles to both ISO and MKV formats to test in Plex (MKV only) and Infuse. I’ve stuck with those since both have official Apple TV support and that’ll be my main viewing/listening. I’m not sure I’m up to the task of sideloading Kodi.
For plenty of reasons, this has been a very frustrating process but it leveled my head. Excited as I still am about potentially doing this, it’s clear that my expectations aren’t clear.
With Homer’s and others’ help I got a better understanding of the two paths. ISO. MKV. I personally prefer ISO because it preserves every aspect of the disc, has the simplest file management, has the cleanest path to guarantee everything is 1:1 (I don’t trust myself not to mess with settings), and if I change my mind then I can always make MKV from those files.
That said, I’ve found Infuse on Apple TV to be iffy about ISO rips of DVD-A rips both in support and navigation. Blu-ray not much better. The White Album jumps straight to the second disc. I verified the file is complete in VLC. Side-note: If only VLC had a library interface… it’s the perfect player: responsive, full interactive menus, and what I’d hoped for.
Across the board in Infuse, all navigation is hidden behind a gear icon on the playback screen and song titles are just Title #. So it preserves the menu visually but not functionally. That’s probably not surprising to members here with experience but I had no idea what to expect since I couldn’t find much about that aspect on the wild world web. The scrub bar just shows the full album with no breaks. There’s probably a way to workaround that but then it becomes more like the MKV/Cue file model.
I didn’t spend as much time with MKV but largely because I’ve bumped up against space limitations, discovering the old external drive I un-retired for this test is faulty. Not a surprise but not an expense I’m incurring for this test.
Best I could see is that Plex created a “poster file” for each song. I’ll mess with it later today if I have time but my tank is kinda empty.
I somehow suspect I’ll still buy the drives today. A NAS makes sense for me even for some non-media reasons. Unfortunately I also have an unexpected $900 HVAC repair discovered a few days ago that’ll push back the Synology itself. Troubleshooting how to set up these programs, learn the fairly simple but out of my experience Windows sharing, and dealing with the etc. of it all was a little harder with frozen fingertips!
But I’ll flip a coin. Certainly, screen grabs of ISO or MKV on the forum’s favorite media players could only help bolster my sense of a workable end result. Either way, thanks to this community for putting this in my mind and for the various threads which discuss this stuff. It’s been a help. I was tempted to start a thread about NAS-streamers but decided it might be too gray an area for that.
You can go your own way 
