I'm looking to streamline my summer media experiences, specifically movies and music.
At home I have a Roku smart TV hooked up to a 5.1 reciever with a sub and it's lovely. I stream music on the TV apps, I have accounts with Netflix and Prime, plus all the free TV apps in the world, and an HD antenna for locals.
My summer home isn't quite as fancy. I have a powered sub/satellites, and a Smart TV, but it was manufactured before a lot of the apps were in existence, and it doesn't seem that Vizio is in bed with a lot of the apps I like. Since I live in an RV for the summer, I don't really have a lot of space for things.
Hurdle #1 - even when wifi is good, the source service is DSL and not very fast, so streaming anything is usually not an option unless you do it at 3am when the campground is asleep. For this reason, I want some way of ripping my DVDs to some kind of storage/playing device. The TV has HDMI and USB, but the USB will only read picture formats like TIFF, JPG, or PNG. It doesn't appear that the TV has the drivers to access something like an external HD, just a simple photo viewer. The sub/satellites are simple audio inputs only, so no joy there. Is there something I can set up to rip maybe 20 DVDs onto an HD that has its own player? Raspberry Pi? Some other device already set up for this kind of thing?
Hurdle #2 - I want to do the same for music, hopefully on the same device. Problem is, nearly all of my music is in iTunes, some of them were authorized on my now-ex-wife's account so I don't have permission to play them, and tons of them are AAC. The Ex would be 100% willing to let me sign in as her to listen to those tracks, but she already has her maximum 5 devices authorized and uses them daily. None of the conversion software I have tried was ever successful at breaking the AAC lock. Some of them work for straight up conversion of formats, but has anyone ever succeeded in finding some way of picking that lock? I don't feel like it's immoral since we actually purchased the CDs a long time ago, or purchased them in the iTunes store.
TL;DR...
1) need a standalone storage/player for movies and music
2) need to pick the AAC lock.
Plex or Jellyfin on a laptop (or NAS), DVDs ripped to a HDD, and either a Chromecast or Roku stick for the TV to make it smart.
A work of warning, Jellyfin's Roku api has been deprecated so if you go that route Plex is the better option.
Sounds like you basically have a DRM problem. Once you have non-DRMed media, you can play it back with just about anything - a cheap Android TV box could be a good solution for the TV.
Ripping DVDs is easy, there's a program called Handbrake that does it.
Here's a guide to cracking the iTunes files: https://www.instructables.com/id/Crack-itunes-protected-music-remove-DRM-protectio/
My home server makes a cornucopia of DRM-free material (most of which was not sold DRM-free 
) available over the LAN (or over the Internet via SCP/SFTP) from a Samba share, which can be accessed by just about anything. One note is that some clients don't like unauthenticated Samba connections so I made a dummy account which gives that same level of access just to keep them happy.
I can do a roku box or something to get the apps I'm missing on my already-sorta-smart TV, but the internet is unreliable at camp. I can't count on streaming as a source of media. I'm looking for a storage and player setup that will do music and movies.
Thanks for the DVD and DRM crack info. I'll give it a shot.
... and what's the IP and password for that home server? (kidding)
Why not just plug a laptop full of ripped media into the TV?
Mostly because my laptop doesn't often travel with me to camp, but I have a few 1TB EHDs sitting around. The setup is also a little awkward in my camper and there really isn't a home for the laptop. But a small EHD could literally be mounted to the back of the TV with double sided tape if I wanted. I was just wondering if there was a good GRM media player solution. Like a Pi, or some software I could load/hack on the TV, or something like repurposing a DVD player by flashing it with some freeware.
Like, for example, if I had the music and movies on a HD that was plugged into [insert standalone media player here] that was plugged into the HDMI2 on the TV.... that's what I'm aiming for.
I have the media (and now a way to rip it), I have external drives, I have the TV and the sound. I need to find a way to play the ripped media.
In reply to Curtis :
You probably don't want to go the Pi route with Plex or other media server. While the package exists to install and create a server out of a Pi 3 and 3B+ the video encoding hardware is pretty lack luster and it really struggles to do anything at 720p.
A Roku with a USB port (I know the Roku2 and Roku3 have them but it looks like you need a Premier on the NIB ones now) or WD TV Media Player (now defunct but 30 bucks or so on eBay) will play movies off an HDD. Neither likes DLNA or other copy protection mechanisms, so you have to make sure you strip the DRM. WD TV media players were pretty commonplace to do what you're describing when I was in Afghanistan. Otherwise you're looking at a Dragonbox or something similar, which are pretty hit or miss, and usually all they're doing is loading a copy of Kodi for you onto some cheap hardware.
MakeMKV can be used to strip any DRM from either a DVD or Blu-Ray then Handbrake can re-encode it to your choice of container. I'm not much help with the ACC files but Gameboy already has you covered there.
