on my 1080p PC monitor I often think movies are quite watchable at 800 or even 600 lines after scaling up.

I often recode blu ray std movies to half the resolution and they still look very watchable and when I also recode the audio to stereo (say 192k) the audio is still ok too, to my ears.

This brings a 25gb movie down to about 2gb which is a huge reduction for not a great loss in enjoyability.

I'm not advocating that everything should be crunched down to its minimum but you can make gains that are acceptable and recoding much depends on the type of film, big action films I prefer to leave as high res as I can, but more narrative based films can be reduced much further, also TV programmes.

Wondering your thoughts on recoding to lower resolutions and what your minimum spec is.

As long as they fit on a 4.7GB DVD then job done!

I think you are right in that many films are perfectly watchable at a lower res. But you would be a heathen to do this to a film where the cinematography is an important factor in the watching experience.

Depends on the screen size I guess. 800 lines may look OK on a 20-something inch PC monitor, but play it on a 50 inch TV and the image would probably suffer.

Personally, I wouldn't bother recoding. With the price of USB hard disks being so cheap, just store it on a hard disk and stream it back using a wd tv live or equivalent.

that's true but 25-30gb movies don't half add up when you have a few. I'm just saying there is a mid way point that with some movies recoding is fine, modern compression algorithms are really impressive - just don't use a low bitrate compression.

I wondered why I hadn't thought of that, but then realised that my Sony Hard Disk / DVD recorder doesn't have that option. I suspect that's the same with many others for copyright reasons.

Your Sony hard disk/dvd recorder is "only" standard definition anyway. Files will be no more than 4.7GB per hour. You could store each hour on a dvd at the best (lowest) compression then rip from it on your pc to a usb hard drive if you wanted to start a HDD library. If you use rewriteable disks you can do the same thing repeatedly quite economically.
For films I'd use automatic mode and fill a dvd per film rather than 1 hour per dvd for ease of use. I might split films over 2 or 3 disks if it is longer than 2 hours though.

My solution was (over the years) not to recode, but instead to buy a Blu-ray recorder for my PC (with BD disk packs in case of need) and a Blu-Ray player for my TV.

I do tend to keep the .iso files on my PC though, so have ended up with a few TBs of hard drives but the whole lot cost less than an iPad. And I could record Wagner's entire Ring cycle on 4 BD disks (albeit DVD HQ) - you can't do that with DVD-Rs!

Sorted.