Tdarr leaves a lot to be desired as far as the friendliness of the UI goes. They do include a tutorial mode when you first fire it up, I definitely suggest slogging through it, or else you will likely be totally lost. Once I got it dialed in and my custom library transcoding logic tweaked the way I want it, it’s basically set-and-almost-forget.

I do check it every couple days, because I have some size threshold guardrails. Some shows it will fail because the final size is actually larger than the original, in which case I add them to the ignore list.

I have a Quadro P2000 that is pretty much dedicated to transcoding. The sweet spot for me seems to be 2 simultaneous x265 10bit transcode jobs, using handbrake (versus ffmpeg). This puts me at ~90% encoder capacity. I would say your average full length movie takes a job 10-15 mins, including some hygiene steps in my logic. TV shows can be much swifter. This is using the following flags:

-e nvenc_h265_10bit -E copy --encoder-preset slow -q 24.0 --all-subtitles --all-audio

The great thing is you can set schedules. So basically I have it grind through any new files from like 11PM - 7AM, when no one’s really using the server for anything.

I feel like I should say this is all anecdotal, I am not an expert at this, I’m still very much learning, but I do spend A LOT of time working on my server.

EDIT: One more thing. By default Tdarr will use your drive for transcode cache. If you’ve got RAM to spare, consider spinning up a tmpfs ramdisk and pointing the cache path at that. Just be sure to make it’s max size bigger than whatever file sizes you’ll think you’ll be transcoding at once.

For instance I don’t expect to be transcoding individual files bigger than 24gb, multiplied by two simultaneous jobs. So I create my tmpfs max size to be 48gb.

I am lucky to be running 128gb RAM, so I can get away with this, especially at night when nothing much else is using resources. Your mileage may vary.