I’ve amassed a sizeable hoard, nearly all encoded h264 or h265.
The space savings made by AV1 are attractive, but I don’t want to move on it until after I’ve acquired hardware capable of AV1 GPU accelerated decode.
Even then, the cost of reacquiring some works has to be weighed. Storage space gets freed; but how often do I actually revisit some cherished items?
Anybody else having to make similar evaluations?
Maybe I have a different point of view here, but I have actively converted all my TV series to AV1 and will probably to the same to most of my movies.
The space saving is huge, and the quality is identical to my eyes and hardware. True that storage is cheaper than ever, but this is not a reason valid to waste it anyway.
I have only 6TB of storage for my media and the power needed to run additional disks would only be waste on the long run, and so buying new bogger disks would be a waste for stuff I don’t wantch often (more like hoarding than…).
So AV1 is the way. Software encoding is the best quality, I have heard, rather than hardware encoding. As for playback, I have a fire stick with AV1 support that works flawlessly, so.
Edit: I have FV at home, so converting to AV1 during daylight is actually free for me.
Can you estimate % of space saved?
No, because i did it over long time since I encoded only during the day hours and a few episodes at a time.
I can say that I fit a good 30% more episodes in the same space, but at the same time I also have added movies and reduces sizes too, so hard to tell reasonably.
I can say that all my collection was mostly h264 before.