Also, one day I hope to have a home theater where I can call up everything by a remote and not leave all day if I'm feeling lazy!
Let me tell you just how great it is to have a Mac Mini, Harmony remote, and all of your optical disc-based digital media ripped to hard drives: It's freakin' awesome
Like many others here I started my computer-based media system as a hobby project, but once I started it became more and more alluring. It's a lot of workespecially for those like me who love the art of film and want to keep detailed entries in their databases (I use
DVDpedia) and get the most out of their mediabut in the end you never have to swap discs or worry about them getting damaged. You also have your library at your fingertips, and, depending on the software you choose, you'll probably also have the cover image, synopsis of the film, and the duration, making it easy to choose a film that fits in the time you can spare.
For DVDs I rip the video_ts folder and edit the files to remove the promos, ads, FBI warnings, etc. I also disable any menu selections that lead to promos and ads. I usually spend about 30 minutes, maybe a little less, per film.
For Blu-rays I rip the disc to mkv files, convert the HD audio tracks to flac, add the flac audio to the mkv, tag all of the tracks in the mkv, and, finally, make a new mkv as a final file. The whole process takes about two to three hours per disc, but, in the end, I have HD video to match the original and HD audio, up to 8 channels. Except for the menus my BD rips are just like watching the actual disc.
How do you store 20 TB of stuff and how is it backed up?
All of the files are on external drives (10x2 TB). My DVDs are stored alphabetically and I move things around if need be. The Blu-ray started that way but I quickly learnt that the drives fill too fastI'd spend hours just copying from one drive to anotherso I resigned myself to the necessity of just leaving the movie folders wherever there's room.
As for backing it up, well, the original discs are my backup

When I edit the DVDs I save the modified files (bup, vob, ifo) and backup those to disc so if I ever have to "re-install" a DVD I just rip it and copy over the modified files. For the BDs all I have are the original discs and what I can fit on old hard drives.