My Plex library had grown far too giant, and it was time to downsize it. I might delete stuff, positive, however I wished to maintain most of what was there. So, I turned to changing my total library to H.265, and it saved me almost 10TB of house.
Downsizing my NAS meant downsizing my library
Deleting outdated motion pictures and TV reveals solely obtained me to date
I just lately made the transfer from working my outdated enterprise-grade NAS with 12 drive bays and 80TB of storage to a UGREEN NAS with 6 drive bays populated with three drives and a complete of 40TB of storage.
This downsize saves me fairly actually a whole bunch of {dollars} monthly in electrical energy, but it surely did not come with out its downsides. My Plex library is sort of sizable, measuring at nicely over 40TB earlier than the transfer.
So, I began off by deleting issues that no person had watched in years. I have been working my Plex library for about 6 years at this level, and a few content material had been on there because the starting and by no means watched.
I take advantage of Codex for all the things nowadays, and I had it combine with Tautulli to search out the media no person had been watching and provides me an inventory of delete candidates. An analogous factor could possibly be achieved with Maintainerr, I simply selected to do it with Codex.
From there, I nuked tens of terabytes of media from my server that I simply actually did not “want.” I by no means did it earlier than as a result of I had 80TB of usable house, so I simply saved all the things.
As soon as I deleted all the things I did not want, I used to be all the way down to about 30TB. Which may sound like rather a lot, contemplating I had 40TB to work with, but it surely nonetheless wasn’t comfy sufficient for me. So, I made a decision to take the following step: transcoding my total Plex library.
The final time I attempted transcoding it took perpetually and was a ton of labor
I had Gemini writing my ffmpeg scripts and it wasn’t fairly
In early 2026, I spent a while transcoding a few of my motion pictures from H.264 to H.265. It was a ache within the neck and an entire mess, to be trustworthy. I positively obtained the job performed, but it surely was difficult.
I used to be utilizing AI to assist me give you the ffmpeg scripts, but it surely was all handbook. I’d feed my wants and setup to Gemini (the AI I used to be utilizing on the time) and it will give me a script to make use of. I would check it till it failed, then attempt to debug it with Gemini.
There was plenty of back-and-forth right here, and that was essentially the most painful a part of all. Issues would appear to be they have been working superb, after which fail in a single day and waste hours upon hours of time that would have been spent transcoding.
Total, it labored but it surely did not work how I wished. I used to be working with an enormous library and solely regained 7TB of house.
This time round although, after I began with proper round 30TB of media, I went a special route—I had Codex deal with it from begin to end.
Shrinking my library this time was easy and simple
H.264 to H.265 was straightforward after I let Codex do the heavy lifting
One in all my favourite options of Codex is that it will possibly run scheduled duties. So, after I got down to transcode my library this time, I made a decision at hand the duty off to Codex.
Codex used SSH to configure all of my nodes that I’d use for Tdarr, in addition to constructing customized ffmpeg scripts and plugin flows within Tdarr for every node. In complete, I ran 5 nodes to get by means of the transcoding as quick as doable.
I selected to transcode to H.265 as a result of my Plex server now runs on a more moderen platform that is able to dealing with HEVC content material natively. Plus, H.265 takes up significantly much less house than H.264.
A number of the nodes used NVIDIA CUDA, whereas others used built-in Intel graphics. This was one of many greatest issues after I arrange Tdarr the primary time, because the plugin stream was a ache. Codex dealt with it like a champ although.
I principally informed Codex what I wished and it configured all the things for me. From there, I informed Codex to observe the transcode standing each quarter-hour. So, each quarter-hour, it will replace the thread with the present progress and likewise flag any errors.
This is the place Codex began to actually pull its weight—I had it repair the errors robotically for me. I wasn’t apprehensive about dropping media at this level, I had a backup on my outdated NAS and I might re-rip something I wanted to.
So, throughout the 15-minute checks, if Codex noticed a difficulty, it will repair the script and re-queue no matter failed. I principally let Codex run the transcode for about 72 hours, as that is how lengthy it took for all the things to course of by means of.
On the finish of all of it, I regained 8.5TB of house simply from Codex transcoding my media. Total, I shrank my media library from round 40TB to round 16TB, which left me with loads of headroom for the server to develop over time once more.
AI has confirmed its usefulness in my homelab time and time once more
Whereas AI is much from good, it is positively nice at a superb many issues. Having it run this transcode was like having an IT professional sitting in my workplace monitoring it each quarter-hour with out taking a break for sleep or meals. I positively could not have achieved this with out Codex’s assist, at the least, not within the time I did it in and with as little frustration as I had.
