Basically everything useful uses ffmpeg under the hood. So bash+ffmpeg is just fine. But tdarr exists too

OK, I installed tdarr and... Well, not impressed. Quite messy, low quality UI and... Paid features. Meh

Tomorrow will try Unmanic, feels much more refined, I will see.

Nothing against "paid" in tdarr, just doesn't seems worthwhile given the low quality of the UI.

I am sure I am judging the book by the cover, but hey, even the Unmanic documentation feels better.

For batch converting ISOs to a specific resolution and format while preserving folder hierarchy on Linux, you can indeed use ffmpeg with a bash script. However, you might also consider using HandBrakeCLI, which is a command-line interface for HandBrake, a popular video transcoder.

Here's how you could use HandBrakeCLI to achieve your goal:

1. Install HandBrakeCLI if you haven't already:

sudo apt-get install handbrake-cli

2. Write a bash script to iterate through your directories, converting ISO files:

#!/bin/bash

# Set input and output directories
input_dir="/path/to/your/input/directory"
output_dir="/path/to/your/output/directory"

# Convert ISOs to 720p h.265
find "$input_dir" -name "*.iso" -type f | while read -r file; do
    output_file="${file%.iso}.mp4"
    handbrakecli --input "$file" --output "$output_dir/$output_file" --preset="Super HQ 720p30 Surround"
done

Adjust the preset according to your needs. You can check available presets with HandBrakeCLI --preset-list.

3. Make the script executable:

chmod +x convert_iso.sh

4. Run the script:

./convert_iso.sh

This script will convert all ISO files in the specified input directory to 720p h.265 MP4 files using HandBrakeCLI while preserving the folder hierarchy.

Usually it's not worth it. Redownload your videos in the desired size. Use radarr et al to manage it. There are People who are specialized on the task.only use raw material to encode. Reencoding makes quality worse. And time and effort isn't worth it.

It's much cheaper to buy more drives than to reencode a large library to av1 in order to save space.

I had the same need and didn’t want to read tooo much about ffmpeg and its options. I ended up using fastflix which uses ffmpeg under the hood with built in presets. Supports queues and lots of more stuff.

Alternatively you could look into av1-svt and av1an (!av1@lemmy.ml). But there are far more tools for x265