Im currently doing the exact opposite; burning all my mkv's to dvd so I can have a physical collection, with kunaki.com to print the dvd case and cover.

Main issue is that dvd covers are ugly as sin, and there's no archive of the disk image that isn't a literal photo of the disk (but the case covers are scanned on http://www.cdcovers.cc/), so I've been creating my own,

and dvd authoring is a pain in the ass if you want soft-coded subs, and multiple audio tracks

But since my target player is ps3, which apparently supports avi w/ xsubs and mpeg4, I'm planning to switch out to that: video quality is much better for the disk size between mpeg2 and mpeg4 (kunaki only produces cd and dvd5, so a blue-ray archive is out)

Honest question - why go the other way (unless the answer is because you got them with questionable legality)? I have stacks of DVDs that I bought over the last 15 years, and I’m ripping them all because I hate having the discs around and would rather have them in Plex. Going deliberately in that direction isn’t something I’d see desirable, but I only see from my point of view.

Same reason I have a bookshelf instead of just a list of pdfs and ebooks; its a lot nicer to browse through a curated collection physically.

I don't like caring about individual copies though, so having a way to recreate them cheaply on lost/damage/borrowed-but-never-returned is pretty useful imo. I get to treat it both digitally and physically on preference.

Ofc, all the stuff I haven't watched, like but wouldn't recommend, etc will never leave digital. The ideal scenario is just that I can pull a dvd off a shelf when I recommend it, instead of scrambling for a usb or mega or scp; if its possible, physical sharing is a lot nicer than digital

Because why wouldn't you drop multiple grands on NUCs to encode your DVDs.

It's weird the things that people do when discovering personal computing. No sense in transcoding one's DVDs (and even buying more machines to do it faster?!) when they can be torrented quicker and with higher quality even! But we've all got to start somewhere, I suppose.

The simple approach is to make a list of your physical media collection, stow it away for backup purposes, and download the collection over time. Then eventually you can even move towards torrenting the rest of your media and drop that netflix subscription that's supporting the destruction of net neutrality!

"we've all got to start somewhere" is pretty condescending.

If the author is in the united states, torrenting the videos would violate copyright (when you torrent (if you don't have uploading disabled somehow), you redistribute without authorization). Transcoding DVDs you've already bought is not distribution.

In the United States, ripping the DVD's to a drive violates the DMCA. You are illegal either way, just by transcoding you are violating a grossly unjust law instead of a disproportionate but justifiable one. And no one will catch you for ripping discs, except possibly if you brag about it on the internet.

.... IANAL but yeah I think you're right. walp

Okay, putting aside the legality (although in Australia there's some provisions for "format shifting"), are you really happy with the "backup" quality provided by most scene groups?

I find I can do a better job (at least to my eyes) than most 4.7/8GB movie rips, and the standards for x265 aren't set yet.

Ripping your own media gives you a lot more flexibility.

If you're part of the large segment of the world population that needs subtitles to watch most movies, it can be very difficult to impossible to find well-made subtitles that match your video.

They have a 1TB ingress cap (Comcast)

Unless you pay them $50 more.

I Pay 79$ for uncapped gigabit fiber. I can understand why they wouldn’t want to pay such a premium.