It is definitely not worth converting x264, even less x265, to av1, if you are the only consumer. Just think about it. To get any "significant" space gains, while keeping a close to original quality (you will inevitably lose some detail), you need to spend maybe at least 3-4x more time encoding than the actual total video length, probably more, maybe 5x. Taking an average of 3GB/hour, 2TB is about 650 hours. x5 that's like 3250 hours. An 8 core ryzen will have like 150W total system load encoding av1. 3250h * 0.15 kWh =~ 500 kWh. 500 kWh * 0.15$/kWh (I took an optimistic electricity cost for these days, might be a lot more depending where you live) = $75 in electricity costs. Setting encodes, moving files around, will also take up some significant amount of time. You will gain maybe 1TB, if compressing audio to opus as well, less than that you will have significant video quality losses. 1TB of hdd space is worth $15 these days. And you don't waste time/electricity+money/video quality.

So it's only worth to get existing published encodes of the material you own, of if you are planning on publishing yourself. Or just for fun, if you want to experiment and encode one movie to see what's the best you can get out of av1.

source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/ymrs5v/id_like_to_encode_my_entire_library_to_av1/

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[–] Faceman2K23@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 9 months ago

I have several media libraries so I set up file flows to only perform compression based on a few specific rules. I never used to compress, but 2 years ago I ran out of space and had no money to upgrade disks, so I started compressing, intending for it to be temporary until I could add space. but it became part of my servers automatic setup and it works great.

TV show episodes between 3 and 5gb that aren't already H265 get compressed with RF21 H265, but files over 5gb get RF22. only files older than 6 weeks get compressed to give people a chance to watch them in original quality. the compression flow also includes making a stereo aac downmix audio track for added compatibility. so anything that is already H265 or low bitrate is left untouched to avoid unnecessary compression.

Movies get a similar treatment and H264 files under 5gb are ignored, 5-20gb gets RF21 and 20gb plus gets RF22. All of this is done with 10bit H265 as it tends to look a little better. the amount of compression I;m doing is pretty small, a 3gb TV show for example might end up being 2gb or so, and a 30gb movie will usually end up around 12-15gb at most. I could push harder, particularly for movies but I don't see a need as i've saved 13TB so far with this setup.

If sonarr/radarr download new versions of something (a TV show gets released on bluray for example) it will go back into the loop and get compressed again, but now it will be a higher quality.

4K shows and movies are always left untouched, they are in a separate library and are only accessible to certain clients.