Jay said:
Where are you going to store all these Blu-ray titles anyway? A $250 Blu-ray player is too expensive, but tossing a couple terabyte drives into a media server to store a modest Blu-ray collection (in addition to the costs of the discs themselves) is somehow reasonable?

It's not necessarily anymore reasonable, but it makes the entire collection available with a single click. With my DVDs I just navigate to the folder with the remote and press play (my folder structure is very simple...genre, title, and then movie).

It's just like navigating through the DVR. With the entire collection on the drive, it becomes a matter of ease of use. It's kind of nice not having to get up to select the movie I want to watch.

I used to be in the same camp. I built several crazy HTPCs and had grand designs of a media center with all my DVDs ripped and stored. Then I realized how much easier it was to put in the damn disc and press play.

Yes, that's fairly easy to do. Unfortunately, a lot of DVDs still come with previews and bullshit that I don't want to sit through each time. By ripping the movie from the DVD, I press play on the remote and the movie starts. No FBI warning BS, no "Coming soon" that I need to skip over, nothing. Right now, that's the difference between watching "Cars" and "Wall-E" since I haven't finished my rip of Wall-E.

Geeks tend to geek out and do things for the sake of doing them and not because they really make sense. Only nerds care about this shit. DRM and media server friendliness have had zero effect on Blu-ray's adoption and will have zero effect on its future. 99.999% of consumers just don't care.

They care when it bites them in the ass. They care when they end up needing to replace a disc because their kids scratched them up. They do it and just accept it until someone shows them a better way.

With everything ripped to the hard drive, my son just hands me the remote and asks for the movie. No need to find it on the shelf, load the disc, navigate through the bs, and then watch the movie. I don't obsess over ffdshow settings though.