https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.265

Most of the “commercial apps” are just wrappers for ffmpeg.

I’d start with FFmpeg. Once you see what your output is like you can then decide to move over to something more fancy.

After following up on a post on Reddit and two years of investigation, the reporters came to the conclusion that Tor users can be de-anonymized by correlating the timing patterns of network traffic entering and exiting the Tor network, combined with broad and long-term monitoring of Tor nodes in data centers.

I’ve been saying this for years. It’s an open system, all you need are entry notes and exit nodes and you can launch exits for a pittance.

It’s your media you do what you want with it.

Pick a busy movie with a bunch of stuff going on, and then pick a really dark movie.

Try different encodings with each one of those. You’re playing a game of time versus quality. And you keep in mind, the electricity for those encodes isn’t free either.

Try them with a fixed bit rate, try them with the two pass. If the fixed rate doesn’t look good try bumping the rate up. You’ll get a feel for it eventually.

Back when I was hard up for disc, I made everything 1080p HEVC single pass constant rate. I don’t even remember exactly what the bit rate was but I would just encode everything and then watch a sample out of it. If one of them turned out bad I would reincode it with better settings.

Dual pass will get you a little smaller and better output, But it takes forever, and you’re sitting there burning watts all night long.

In the end you just need to fiddle with it, and weigh the output versus your resources.

Different people have different needs.

If someone has a lot of time and not a lot of money re encoding video is a decent answer.

I’ve been there and done that before.

Replacing (or adding a 10TB USB to your ) single 2 tb drive isn’t a horrible idea. It’ll take you quite a while to go through that 10 tb. In the meantime you look toward getting an old case and some kind of modest motherboard and setting up an Unraid. It’s a journey, and unless you are made of cash you’re not going to get to your endpoint all in one jump.

Unraid is budget friendly because you can add whatever size disc you want to do it, It supports a parity drive so you have some support against failure. The only truly difficult part is that the parity drive must be as big as the largest drive in the box.

In the end only you can decide what works for you. If you want to re-encode your stuff, 2 pass is best. You are going to lose quality, that’s unavoidable, But if you’re watching it on a TV 12 ft away, You’re going to forget about any quality as soon as you get in grossed in anything you’re watching.

Left off New Zealand like the rest of the world.