What app were you using to convert? From my way of looking at it, drive space is pretty darn cheep now. Like you can even get a 6TB drive sub $300. So, uncompresses, you could fit 100 bluray onto it.
For backing up my disks, I break it into two parts. First part is a simple rip of the disk to the hard drive that removes the DRM and gets the files local. That takes about 20-30min per full length movie.
Once local, I can convert it into a x.264 mkv file to watch. On the current software they offer the new CRF encoding (level 24) that takes a 35gb bluray down to around the 10gb with the sound directly copied. the process takes about 3 hours on my i5 or 2.5h on my i7.
It's not that I buy that many movies that I want to store forever. if it's a great movie then I will, otherwise I just watch it on the disk and then return it (rental) or sell it off at the local fle market.
To be quite honest, most of the shows I watch, it's far easier to simply torrent grab them the following day. I am about 9 months behind in any of the TV watching that I do. There are quite a few shows that I started to watch but just got board and figured the jumped the shark and don't bother any more. Some times it just waiting for the right mood to watch.
What I really like about Kodi, is that it runs as a database so it can track what shows that I have watched, gives me a synopsis of old episodes so I can remember. has a great interface to quickly jump forward/back while watching. Have setup so if I pause for more than 8 seconds, it will jump back 5sec in the show from the pause. Helps with my slow brain.
I know it's not like a cable/sat PVR for recording shows. It does take work to keep ontop of it, but I take it as just one of the things I do in the day. I find it quite fun.
