The server that runs the bulk of my homelab does not have a graphics card. My TrueNas Scale server does as well as my desktop. The video’s are stored on the NAS and the remote shares are available on any system. So no graphics card in the server(s) is not ideal but They are beefy servers and still plenty capable of running ffmpeg but the conversion does not have to happen there.
I am not looking to adjust quality of the video or audio just change the codec. I am not necessarily converting ONLY from h264 my media consumption goes back many years and as such is a huge mixed bag of codecs. My videos are not coming exclusively from streaming services.
I am investigating TDARR I know a few people have suggested it. I like the nodes feature so I can use my desktop running a heavy GPU as my 2U server cant really run a graphics card (no power connectors for it). I am using a multi node server with E5 XEON chips.
Totally agree with this and to add everyone’s tastes are different which is why there are so many different distros. It is true there are some tailored for specific things but no one distro is better then another. Any app you install on one can be installed on another
I use fedora kinoite atomic fedora with KDE. I have had no stability issues on a day to day usage for going on 2 years. I agree plasma is plasma regardless of distro but some distros update slower. Fedora is not bleeding edge but does do a pretty good job of staying ahead of the curve. I have been a Linux user since the 90’s and have been around the block a few times with different distros. I always fall back to redhat/fedora for my desktop day to day.
I use navidrome for the streaming and lidarr for downloads. I am not totally thrilled with navidrome as I can not play genres. I want to setup an icecast streaming server with individual “channels” for each genre
It is not necessarily about saving space so much as it is about uniformity. And yes my server is beefy but you get 3 or 4 people all transcoding at the sane time and that beefy server will choke. As I have said I have been collecting for many years with a very large mixed bag of codecs I am just trying to clean up the mess that is my media.