I remember using Gordian Knot to create avi files from my DVDs back when XviD was the pragmatic method for encoding videos, and the whole goal was to get movies under 700mb so that you could write them to a CD. Avisynth and community filters were largely geared towards undoing all sorts of crap done to an image because artifacts that were relatively unnoticeable on a general CRT television were quite apparent on a computer monitor, as well as to then prepare the video to look good once it has been highly compressed with XviD or DivX.

These days I'm much more inclined to try and transparently encode the source material, tag it appropriately in the media container, and let the player adjust the image on the fly. Though I admit, I still spend hours playing around with Vapoursynth filter settings and AV1 parameters to try and get a good quality/compression ratio.

I have to say that the biggest improvement to the experience of watching my videos was when I got an OLED TV. Even some garbage VHS rip can look interesting when the night sky has been adjusted to true black.

Given the increasing abilities of TVs and processing abilities and feature sets of players, I'm not much persuaded to upgrade my DVD collection to Blu-Ray. Though I admit some of that is that I enjoy the challenge of getting a good video file out of my DVDs.

I partially disagree with the use of ASS subtitles. For a lot of traditional movies, using SRT files is sensible because more players support it, and because it's often sensible to give the player the option of how to render the text (because the viewing environment informs what is e.g. the appropriate font size).