Welcome to the site,
@Jenner!
Interesting that you still use VB - any specific reason why or do you just simply prefer over all of the "cool" new stuff like C#?
Also, I love the idea of movie ripping. What notable films have you enjoyed from those sessions?
Welcome again!
Thanks! I've always preferred the more "modern" syntax of Visual Basic. Also, I'm NOT talking "old" Visual Basic, like VB6. I'm talking the Visual Basic formerly called "Visual Basic .NET" that's part of the .NET eco-system, the same one that C# belongs to. There's nothing that I know of that you can do in C# that you can't also do in Visual Basic, though syntax may differ wildly. It all compiles down to the same MSIL code.
But I suppose I like the compiler knowing the difference between when I'm using "=" to mean "set this variable to" and "is this equals to", as well as know where the ends of my lines are by context without the need for semicolons and knowing where my class ends, my function ends, my while-loop ends and my if-then block ends without staring at the "flock of seagulls" and wondering which ones I'm going to shove my code between.
Code:
End If
End While
End Function
End Class
vs.
}
}
}
}
LINQ always seemed a lot cleaner as well.
I've programmed in .NET since 2003 (Framework, Core, 5/6) with both C# and VB and Visual Studio just seemed so much "smarter" when I use Visual Basic. It's difficult for me to program in C# without something like Resharper, but I have zero need for the tool when I'm programming in VB.
As for my "personal Netflix" server as my wife likes to call it. I'm running a Synology DS920+ NAS with 4x Western Digital Red 10Tb HDDs in a RAID-5 configuration and a 256Gb Samsung 980 Pro NVME SSD as a cache. The NAS is running a PLEX server. It took about 3 months to rip all those disks, but the amount of wall-space we freed up in the rec-room was unbelievable! We packed all the disks up into storage boxes and tossed them in the attic.
For the playback device, we have a first generation NVIDIA Shield Android TV which still runs playbacks beautifully thanks to it's overpowered ARM processor.
For the ripping, I bought a license of MakeMKV which packages up the video, and potential multiple audio tracks and subtitles into one container file. There was another MKV utility program I also used... I think it was just called "MKV Toolbox". One thing we noticed on a large number of the movies ripped is there may be two "English Subtitles" tracks. One is "full subtitles across the entire length of the movie" the other is "subtitles only for those scenes where the actors are not speaking English".
Normally, the later is "enabled by default", but after the rip, while present, it didn't get marked as such in the file. Every time we watched a movie and saw a scene where actors were speaking in a foreign language and no subtitles were popping up, we had to question whether the original had subtitles, or if it was simply "left it to the audience to wonder and guess by context", so we were running to grab the original disk and checking. In the cases when there should have been subtitles, MKV Toolbox allow that little tweak.
Recently, we watched
The Brothers Grimm (2005), Priest (2011), Dune (2021) and
Three Amigos (1986). If you have a LARGE video collection taking up space in your home, and the means to do so, I HIGHLY recommend this project!
