awraynor

Wow! How do you ever find anything to watch? 

I encoded all of mine to HEVC video in an MKV container with no perceptible loss in quality. Choosing MKV was due to a bug with FFMPEG and copying PGS subtitles as binary data in the M2TS container. BUT, MKV does not support LPCM audio, so I had to convert those tracks to PCM at whatever bit depth and endian the source had. Overall, it resulted in just over 50% space savings. Here is what I have using less than 24 TB on the pool and being served by Emby:
Movies Episodes unkown 0 0 < 480P 0 0 480P 149 39 720P 0 24 1080P 1889 236 1440P 0 0 4K 0 0

Well, why wouldn't you?  It's awesome.  
Movies Episodes unkown 0 18 < 480P 217 11943 480P 134 5180 720P 392 14777 1080P 1078 4207 1440P 0 0 4K 5 32

using the Statistics plugin i see 

I've heard talk of that strategy â˜ºï¸ It's the 30 plus drives that would be expensive. A friend has shared his >3k movie and TV cloud library with me. If I only had time for all of that.

I'm not a purist either, by any means. Most of my stuff is MKV/H.264 stuff, mp4.  
 
And only 1100?  I've got 1900 movies.
 
As for affording, *cough* netflix *cough* physical disk service *cough* 

similar to Chris
 
Large part of mine is Blu-ray backup copies, Movies and TV series ripped, home movies plus historical data etc etc
 
Duplicated mostly except the Blu-Ray backup copies as still have the original media
 
I think you better start collecting to catch up