My target was Emby. While Emby can and does support AV1, it needs some hardware decoding to shift it back down for most devices, because most devices can't handle AV1.

I picked HEVC (H.265). I can still throw cores at it to CPU decode to target, AVC (H.264) which is the best most devices support, so I don't need to finagle a GPU into my R710.

For the encode, I wrote a script to scour my movie and tv collection for anything huge (movies > 4GiB, TV episodes > 1.5GiB), and in anything other than HEVC already (pulled from mediainfo --Inform="Video;%Format%" "$file").

Once I had the list, batch processing of copy file over to desktop, ffmpeg re-encode, tag it in [] for Emby, copy it back into place, and finally delete the original file.

It took the better part of 3 months to complete.

However, my collection went down in size from ~38TiB to ~26TiB. That's a win in my book.

I rewrote the scripts to be manual triggers and just folder watching, now (inotifywait -q -q -e close_write) the shared folder, and it just fires whenever I drop shit in that folder, and spits out much smaller, still high-quality HEVC MKVs for me to pick up later :)