I haven't done much Blu-ray ripping, but I try to keep an eye on it to make sure it's still "working" as a thing. I want a movie collection, but I don't want to invest heavily in maintaining a RAID array of live drives to store giant 25 GB archives of each movie. I'd much rather just hang onto the Blu-ray discs, and know that inevitably they all get cracked, so I'll always have ripping options if I need it.
As a physical disc you can keep in your possession, it's still really the only way to "own" a movie these days. Vudu is nice, and I'll do a lot of casual watching via my digital copy codes, but the discs are my "collection".
A WD 4TB external drive can store 160 25TB blurays for $100. That adds a "tax" of $1.60 per disc if you rip the raw disc.
I tend to re-encode as libx265 (preset veryslow CRF=18) which is a fairly transparent reencode at 20-40% the size, which lowers the storage cost to under $1 per disc. If you also have backups, that will double the cost, or you can accept the risk and re-rip them if you lose the drive.
[edit] They have 6TB and 8TB options now that are cheaper per-disc if you have more than 160 bluray movies.
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.
Blu-Ray rips from Handbrake etc aren't the raw on-disc encoding, and aren't actually that big. ~2-3GB is typical with decent quality. Often the filesize is surprisingly close to that from a DVD, presumably because the DVD one is encoding a bunch of unwanted compression artifacts.
I'm not saying the BD rips aren't bigger, just that they're nowhere near as much bigger as the resolution and quality improvements might suggest. So BD averages maybe 2.5 GB, and DVD averages maybe 1.5 GB, while a BD frame has nearly 7 times as many pixels.
I do set CQ a couple of stops higher for DVD, as per Handbrake recommendations, just because DVD has to get enlarged so much when watching fullscreen.
2.5 GB will give you terrible picture quality for a Bluray. Even streaming from Amazon or Netflix will be 5-6 GB for a two hour movie, and those are usually just passable.
Eh, I'm old, I can remember watching VHS and doing graphics at 320x256, my eyesight's not what it was, and I'm playing these things on a 7-year old laptop. That "terrible picture quality" does me fine.
As a physical disc you can keep in your possession, it's still really the only way to "own" a movie these days. Vudu is nice, and I'll do a lot of casual watching via my digital copy codes, but the discs are my "collection".