Or I could just get the disc off the shelf and pop it in the drive on the rare occasion I want to watch it. What's the benefit to spend the time ripping it?

Like, I manage an ebook library, and I easily spend more time and effort managing said ebook library than I actually spend reading the ebooks. So I'm hesitant to bring myself into movie library management when I have a fairly robust physical storage medium already handy.

Kodi has a great interface for browsing movies, and automatically tags things like director, year, nationality, and summary. My fiancée likes to flip through that to pick things to watch; it's a lot easier and faster than trying to figure out all those details from the backs of BDs, which often make it very difficult to even see the duration of a film.

And it allows me to mix together video files from BDs and DVDs with files from other sources (a lot of which are commercially unavailable, such as an Ethiopian film which has never been released except on VHS and a version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg which has been modified to fix a color error) into one seamless interface.

Obviously, though, this is just what works for me. If physical BDs are easier then by all means go for it.

If you spend more time managing your ebook library than reading your ebooks, then this might not be for you. I have ~100 ebooks and it's "load in calibre then forget about it until I want to read" Movies took me slightly longer as while (Author, Title) is unique for books, (Title) is not.

More recently I discovered (Title, Year) is near enough to unique that I can name my rips that and Kodi is happy.

There are a variety of benefits that not everyone cares about:

Files don't get scratched or lost.

You can play them on your PC.

You can get right to watching the film.

You can use your favorite player.

You can use smooth video project to interpolate frames. Especially helpful, since the vast majority of content is 24/30fps, yet the vast majority of displays are 60hz or more.

Time and effort wise it would be unsmart to not keep them properly backuped up. Otherwise reripping 4-8tb of data is time consuming.

25gig costs 50 cent / month to store on something easy like google drive.

For keeping a zfs cluster up and running and maintained, its probably way cheaper but still you pay for power, hardware and your labour.

so that $6 a year. at $6 a year, it could be better to just buy a replacement in the future.