Could not agree more with those watermarked movies, it transforms a jewel into a garbage, same is true when a HD film is reduced to a horrible .flv. But the culprits will not read those lines but if ever will not care anyway, so their garbage factory will continue to work on.
The original quality should not be touched, unless the guy knows what he does, there are well done conversions from huge Blue-ray in quality tiny HD (.mkv, etc.).
clashoftitans, what would be cool before you start is to provide an index of your big collections with storyboards, can easily make it (batch mode) with the free and open source AMT (Auto-Movie-Thumbnailer :
-----funk.eu/amt/).
Regarding the hosts, I just mentioned what I experienced and used (or still use), we may encounter, or not, different problems depending on our situations (where we are, how we surf -no proxies, proxies, VPN, Tor, etc.), using a downloader or not, and so on. So a specific host can be a wonder to a person but a hell to another, there is no ideal or universal solution, unfortunately.