I think many people dont get this. Let's do simple math. Let's imagine an 8TB drive costs $100 and can store 200 movies as their raw bluray encoding. that me

I think many people dont get this. Let's do simple math. Let's imagine an 8TB drive costs $100 and can store 200 movies as their raw bluray encoding. that means each movie costs 50 cents to store without any real work. If one can divide the space needed by half, one only saved 25c. But how much did it cost to save that 25c. Lets imagine one can encode a movie with x264/5, but it will consume 100watts of cpu power over 10 hours to do that (or a kilowatt total). If one is paying 20c a killowat hour (US national average is 19c a kilowatt hour, california is 33c per google) one just paid 20c more to encode it, so if one cut the size in half, one in practice only saved 5c. If one spent 5-10 minutes setting up the encode, did one spend 5c of one's time doing that? Personally, the setup for me was also 25c worth of time. Now, one can "save more", if one is storing duplicate copies. (i.e. I'm storing it on 2 or more hard drives, not 1), but its still not really that significant. Now, if one isn't spending one's own time and energy to encode it (i.e. is pirating it as others did the work), then perhaps one can argue that a "good" encode vs the raw is better and makes more efficient usage of one's space. But the argument here isn't about pirating, but about storing one's own legally obtained media. As I've argued elsewhere, the only reasonable reason I've found for encoding is that one runs into "physical" space limitations (i.e. how many hard drives one can keep online). I'm just unconvinced that should override the time and cost of doing the encoding oneself.