Self-Hosted Main

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 :)