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Fair enough, I can see why you'd need a lot of storage for that! I could do with more HD space and a RAID backup system but I'm currently trying to streamline my life and reduce clutter, not increase it. I have all my CDs stored in my parents loft but I will be donating [nearly] all my DVDs to a charity shop soon. I can't see the need for physical media is going to come back and I haven't watched many for years.
I wonder whether the google music scan/match thing will expand to video at some point?
Dramatic_Hammer-
I found the Google Music Scan/Match very odd.
I think it's based more on the meta-data than the files, and actually I should experiment with that and prove it because it would mean free albums.
The discovery I made is that I uploaded a missing album from the UK Play Music library... Ladytron's Gravity the Seducer. The version that then appeared in Play Music is an entirely different mix from the one I uploaded, and it turns out that they released different mixes for different markets and that what I got in Play Music was the US mix.
I figure that the uploaded files merely had metadata searches done, matched, and that they then de-duplicate their store by pointing my Play Music at the existing files that they have which match the metadata.
End result: You may get different files than you uploaded, and it appears to match on metadata rather than actually giving you the binary files you uploaded.
Velocio
My wife teaches film, and it's inconvenient for her to lug around the thousands of DVDs that she owns.
I rip them, and store them uncompressed, and then allow her to sync and view the films on her mobile device which she can then use with a ChromeCast to send it to a larger screen. Or she can watch online.
We use https://plex.tv/ for that, but we still need to store many TB of video somewhere, uncompressed (because she sometimes needs to make clips, or access DVD menu features/extras, pause and analyse a frame without compression artifacts, etc).
And then we have my music collection, some 7,000+ CDs all manually ripped over 3 years and encoded as FLAC.
And every digital photo we've ever taken, stored in the highest possible format... usually both .raw as well as .jpg.
We store everything digitally. Even though we still keep all of the DVDs and CDs. But this system is so valuable to us, most of the music I own doesn't exist on a streaming service, and the vast majority of films we own are not available on a streaming service.