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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[–] desentizised@lemm.ee 5 points 10 months ago

This. Also unless you have raw BluRay sources recompressing already compressed video isn't exactly a great idea either way. The space savings will never be worth the loss in visual quality. If you were to retain the quality the space used would probably be similar even with a more efficient / newer codec.