[Rounin]

Recompressing an already lossily compressed file is almost guaranteed to produce information loss, whereas storage media is getting cheaper and cheaper over time. An 18TB hard disk is now within the budget of many people, and they're likely to get cheaper still.

So if your purpose is to archive these files because they're worth keeping, buying a bigger disk may make even more sense.

[akasakahakada]

I don't consider hardisk now although I have tons of them. I keep multiple copies of those files but it is a pain in the ass to distribute the same backup to different disks simply because their R/W rate is too slow. After transfering files, I run validation program to make sure they are all right. These processes take me a week or so. And I have to do this regularly to ensure errors do not accumulate through time. Therefore now I want SSD but the price is still 4X of HDD per TB.

Slight degradation in quality is not my concern, since ultimately I use realtime upscaling tools to watch them. But I don't know how exactly H.265 affects the quality of a video.

By making the file smaller, I can 1) distribute to other disk faster, 2) validate correctness faster, 3) set a higher redundant rate because now I have more free space.

But the problem is will H.265 become obsolete before it becomes infrastructure. You know AV1 is a better algorithm and companies are pushing it.

Or H.265 is not available in the future due to I don't know royalty issue or something like that?