Compressing SD DVD’s to 265 is a terrible suggestion. 265 should only be used for high def content, ideally 4K media.

White labels aren’t “rejected drives” 🤦‍♂️

Are you using the same machine for your media storage?

I would say Unraid. For the home user it’s easily the most flexible, has a great hypervisor for VM’s as well as an excellent container manager, an absurd amount of ‘one click install’ community apps, while being GUI based and easy to use and offering features like array expansion on a single disk.

Unraid.

There is no better home server OS imo.

For what you’re doing, I would suggest that you’re running a home server, not a home lab.

And with your workload, I would take a i3 12100 or a 13500 well before I stepped back in time to now almost decade old processors.

Empirical data; I went from dual 2660v4’s to a 12600k (now a 13500) and have better performance in every single metric, while also having the best transcoder for Plex (UHD 770), while saving $30/mo on my electric bill (200kwh/mo for the 2660v4’s, 80kwh/mo for the 13500 which is doing more with more disks than the 2660v4’s ever did).