theres little reason to transcode a bluray. an 8TB disk can hold 200+ 1:1 bluray images. it costs ~$100ish on the low end for a usb drive (i.e. very minor price relative to cost of buying all the discs originally). therefore its just an issue of time. If one can decrypt 1 a day (say overnight to not waste ones time babysitting it) thats a few hundred a year (not a small collection imo). and if one can do more (say kick off one before going to work, kick off one when come home before eating dinner + the one overnight) one has now passed 1K discs a year (+a few hundred in hard drive storage needs)
800+ movies at 40GB a pop and we're looking at around 32TB. That is not including shows, which run over multiple discs.
Movies can be sourced second hand (or sometimes even new if you wait a bit) for around 5€, for 800 that's 4K total. 8TB is more like 150€ around here, closer to 200 if one goes CMR. Adding a 4 (or 8 to add shows) disk enclosure to that significantly adds to the bill, which tallies around 1k, and double that if you add redundancy for ZFS to repair bitrot which at these scales starts to statistically matter. But even then, 1k is certainly not minor compared to bluray price.
$/byte will inevitably come down, but we're still quite a few years away from crossing such a rounding error threshold. Re-encoding cuts that down by a factor of 5 to 10 with minimal impact on quality.
25% is somewhat minor to me. i.e. one can view it as each bluray costing you 6.25 euro instead of 5.
reencoding takes time and effort. i.e. lets say an encoded movie could be stored for free (not true but useful for argument). that means if it costs you 200 euro to store 200 simply decrypted movies, it means if you would spend more than 1 euro of your time, energy ... on each movie, its better economically to not reencode it. from my experience, one ends up spending a decent amount of time per disc.
edit: the above is just my logic for why the added cost isnt much to me and something i think others should consider. there might be good reasons why it doesnt apply in specific situations, but i still think everyone should think long and hard about it.
