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datahoarder
Who are we?
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). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
Codec has huge impact.
Yup! Where possible I try to get everything in x265 for this reason. It takes a little more processing power to transpose, but the difference in file size is worth it.
I've heard you'll take a quality hit to re-encode something from x264 to x265, however. If you care about that, it's better to just find a new source recorded with x265 or AV1 (if all your devices can run it).
I'm not very knowledgeable in that end of things, though, so I could be wrong.
Edit: Fixed AVC where I had meant AV1