What are you trying to find

That’s correct, I misspoke, I clarified that with the rest of my post though

I don’t understand what you are arguing?

If you’re arguing that downloading remuxes and only flac is foolish then yeah, 99.8% of the time h264 and 320 mp3 are going to be indistinguishable on most setups with most content. H265 will be the same on like 99.5% of setups with slightly less content and will save tons of space. Sure. But this assumes the lossy encodes were done properly from a lossless master

if you encode lossy to lossy it will result in visible and audible distortion of the image and audio. Sometimes it’s minimal, sometimes it’s quite bad, sometimes it’s masked by your equipment, but it’s always there. Further, you’d spend more money on electricity running your cpu on full blast encoding terabytes of video files when you could simply just redownload your library in whatever format by someone who knows what they’re doing (if you’re so concerned about space and don’t care about quality go av1)

But you do you

Don’t encode lossy to lossy. The encoding will take forever and the image quality will suffer. If you want file size savings redownload your media in h265 or whatever. Or temporarily download a lossless copy, encode, and delete.

You’re correct that it will reduce file size but encoding lossy to lossy is foolish. You will introduce compression artifacts and have an objectively worse quality image, the encode will take much longer than if you used a proper lossless source, and if you don’t set your configs right you’ll strip out subtitles, tags, chapters, etc

Additionally if the h264 was already compressed by a lot h265 won’t save all that much space, giving you all the downsides with basically no upside

Only dummies encode lossy>lossy. The debate about lossy>h265 is one thing (h265 is not for archival) but h264>h265 will result in visible distortion

Do you have sonarr set to copy or hard link on import

Copy will fuck over your ability to seed, hard link will result in the files staying on your torrenting drive

Usenet is good for some things, torrents are still king for others

Like if I want a specific release of a movie in a certain quality, like a dv remux then I might pop on blu or ptp. 90% of the time I’ll just grab a dv/hdr10 remux on usenet though

Anime is all about trackers, ab/baka/nyaa destroy usenet. Animetosho makes usenet passable but still destroyed by the first three

Music is the same. If I want some basic mainstream release in scene quality then sure usenet is fine. If I want to be sure it’s tagged decently and actually a solid 16bit flac? Red/orpheus. If I want anything remotely niche, international artists, indie shit, like even singles and eps by popular artists? Or I’ll pop on soulseek but the downside there is I can’t figure out how to automate it

https://libgen.li/torrents/

Anna’s archive, as mentioned

Libgen has academic papers, which is really important. I’m not aware of any torrents that back up scihub, this is the closest thing

Stuff like kiwix gives you offline backups of Wikipedia