Transcoding anything >720p is painful.
I run ancient hardware for desktop/laptop >10yrs old apple stuff running linux. I consume media mainly via rpi4 or android.
What’s a minimum level system capable of trans-coding 4k video to x265 in at the very least real time? Is there a tiny trans-coding device out there somewhere?
Would a NUC do? How old or new to churn out 4k x265
Can I avoid hardware? Are cloud gpu’s a thing?
Intel 7th gen & higher CPUs have Quicksync that does hardware h265 encoding.
You can get an old i5-7500 PC pretty cheap these days. That’s what I have, and tDarr converts about an hour of 1080p h264 content to h265 in roughly 10min.