Hi there. With my shiny new 1019+ set up with Plex server, I’m looking to upgrade my 700MB to 1GB movies to something higher quality. Storage capacity isn’t too much of an issue - I can assemble a 15TB library if I want to. So far I have downloaded the Harry Potters and Star Wars at around 15-20GB per movie for Blue Ray versions. I can see some versions are smaller and some up to around 40-50GB each. I know there is no right and wrong answer, but for a longer movie like Star Wars, at what storage point would you generally expect to get the equivalent of Blue Ray quality? Is there a rule of thumb?
Don’t be ridiculous, there are plenty of wrong answers. 
I use 1080p/h264/5.1 for 99% of movies because it’s universally compatible with players and I’m allergic to transcoding. Pretty consistently 2-4GB.
I don’t see the point of incrementally bigger files. If you think a 4GB 1080p/h264 is ugly and you have the space, consider keeping the original. It’s not quite transparent, but it takes 8-10GB to be transparent. It’s possible to produce a really poor 2GB version, but with good modern software encoders, I never notice encoding issues in 2-4GB files while eating popcorn and watching a movie.
I absolutely don’t use h265 for 1080p. It’s cool tech, and is absolutely better and smaller than h264. But it isn’t perfectly reliable like h264. There’s too much “doesn’t play in my browser”, “makes my ____ hot”, and “stutters on my _____” for brand-new devices. I’m allergic to doing tech support for my family.
For 1% of movies I also keep the full version, or I target a 4k/h265/HDR/10bit version. That’s in a different library only shared to internal devices.
Oh and read this before considering 4K.
I don’t 100% agree with the “use this” recommendations, but I agree 1000% with the First Rule, Second Rule, and Third Rule.
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NO.
But there is a “rule of eyes.”
Alas yours are the only ones that matter so you are the only one that can answer your question.
When your eyes stop noticing a difference you found your PERSONAL sweet spot.
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That’s a good explanation. Ears too. I can tolerate lower video quality if the audio is solid. If the audio is poor I won’t bother.
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I usually get a 3:1 compression shrink on a Blu-ray (including all the audio tracks) without losing enough quality to tell in a side-by-side comparison on PC. Anything smaller and I can usually find artifacts especially in foggy scenes.
When I do the main audio track I always do a 2 channel Dolby Pro-Logic II mixdown to AAC for compatibility with everything and then the 5.1 pass through for better sytsems.
Now, if I only include the main track without alternate languages and commentaries I can usually get files sizes down to about 1GB per hour on clean video and 1.5 GB per hour for noisy video. That’s for 1080p. If I do 720p or DVDs things can get a lot smaller.
A good point that wasn’t mentioned in the OP.
Sat in front of a PC screen is one thing and watching on a 65" TV will obviously give even more variants.
Well, in my case I’m talking about two 27" 4K monitors. I can see a lot more detail on those while sitting 3 ft away than I can on a living room TV across the room. A single laptop screen would be totally different for sure.
Here’s basically what I use:
A recent update of sorts:
… and I suggest you make some 240 second previews with some bit rates that might suit you better than mine suit me - you can then drop 'em in an Other Videos Library and play on everything you have so your eyeballs can see them.
With trial and error - for a 12ft projector screen about 8G per movie seems to do it for me if I want blue ray/cinema quality.
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