I have started a modest Blu-Ray/4k Blu-Ray collection. For me, it is by far the best movie experience I've had with any format. It takes maybe 90 vs 20 seconds to get the movie playing, but in return I get noticeably better quality. 4k Blu-Rays' bitrates are around 128 Mb/s. For comparison, Netflix tops out around 17 Mb/s. It really does look and sound noticeably better if you have the TV and surround setup to take advantage of it. Sometimes WAY better.

Also, for most physical movies, they had a "+ digital" code included that lets you redeem a digital copy of the movie too. So I can stream most of them on my laptop anyway if I'm away from home or something.

Physical media for movies is super underrated, at least for the situation in my country. It's often cheaper than "buying" the digital version! I can even go to my local used bookstore/Goodwill and find tons of Blu-Rays for cut rate prices. And then I own it forever, and it's 100% legal.

I buy blurays, rip them and then store them on a NAS to play back via Plex. Much, much better quality than any stream from Netflix et al.

How do you handle the storage for this? One bluray disk is about 60gb. I'm not sure if movies typically take 60gb but if you watch TV shows they do. 15 disks is 1TB. In a short while you're running a data center, especially if you collect a lot of video content.

I've heard that you can get efficient re-encodings, but that typically means torrenting it from somewhere. I'm not aware of a way to make high quality re-encodings locally without lots and lots of tweaking/testing/re-encoding and it takes a particular set of skills.

It uses HandBrake, FFmpeg, MKVToolNix, and MP4v2 with some custom tuned settings and has really good results from my experience.