The time is free. It's machine time, which means that it doesn't reduce the amount of time you have to spend on other things. If we're talking about time spent doing actual work, installing something like Tdarr and pointing it at your collection is probably going to take less time than buying and installing a new hard drive.

Makes you go...Hmmmm... LOL

Not really. Google has been getting progressively worse at search for years. The results were probably there, you just didn't see them under all the ads and sponsored results (AKA more ads).

I know that this is a non-answer, but the best thing to do is reencode a few files at multiple bitrates and see where the line is for you.

Try to get a few dark scenes, since that's where compression artifacts tent to be most noticeable.

Do we know if there's a way for me to check if I've been effected without trying to download every file I have on Drive?