We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
Have any of you made any comparison between the 2 options ?
H265 hardware encoding you mean , not x265 - which is an encoder that doesnt support hardware encoding.
H265 hardware encoding is worse quality than x264 slow - there are thousands of comparisons out there
The "time and power" gets you the high quality.
Unless your time and electricity are free, don't bother. Hard drives are cheap.
But if you can't be swayed, x264 (which is software H.264 encoding) quality will always be better at equivalent settings.
The time is free. It's machine time, which means that it doesn't reduce the amount of time you have to spend on other things. If we're talking about time spent doing actual work, installing something like Tdarr and pointing it at your collection is probably going to take less time than buying and installing a new hard drive.
Don't ever use hardware acceleration for encoding video ahead of time. It produces the same quality for much higher file size, or lower quality for the same file size, as software encoding.
On the fly transcoding is fine for GPU since it's transient, but if you're preparing ahead of time, only software encoding.
That being said, it's entirely up to you. Get some short 30-90s clips of your library, encode them with different settings, and see what you like and what the file sizes are. Then make a decision.
Already on AV1. Have 10gb 264 files being transcoded to AV1 by my 4090 to 1.8 gigs in around 10 minutes. Depends on the hardware, but oh boy, it's freeing up my drives a ton.