The Lord of the Rings Trilogy - 15 disc set from 2011

[Mr_Orange]

This:

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I'm really not interested in the 4K box set but I would like to upgrade my DVDs of the extended editions to Blu Ray.

The above is available for $80 on Amazon which is pretty expensive for 3 films given that I will have zero interest in all the extras.

I see that this is MPEG4 AVC encode compared with the earlier, theatrical releases that used VC-1 with fairly low bit rates. Is the encode on this box set better/higher?

Why are there 15 discs? Are the films split over 2 discs as per the DVD extended editions? If so, that takes care of 6 discs so are the other 9 all extra features?

Sorry for what are probably basic questions but there are so many editions out there it is a bit hard to track down the information so if anyone owns this set I'd appreciate some feedback.

TIA.