I meant that devices purchased within the past 8 years or so have hevc decoding now. so even your grandmother who’s known for holding on to old tech most likely has something that will work with it.

just in the past year or two I’ve found that those devices have become common enough for incompatibility to be extremely rare. and the software support is far better within that timeline too. firefox had issues with it as of a few years ago, but it’s become pretty seamless on most browsers and devices.

compatibility with devices. it wasn’t long ago that many cheap TVs and such didn’t support hevc and required h264, or work on browsers, etc.

as others have mentioned mp4 with h264 is almost certainly the most compatible. that being said, I transcode everything to hevc if I can’t get it natively, and never have issues. my server literally cannot transcode. it does not have a GPU, and hevc plays natively on every target device I need. even works in browsers these days.

most people will still say h264 is best. but if you’re limited on storage space or want to optimize streaming bitrate hevc works wayyy better than it did even just 1 or 2 years ago.

if the hard links everyone else is mentionining aren’t feasible for you, take a look at tvnamer. I’ve found it works quite well for scanning and renaming files, it even supports custom renaming pattern and you can pass it a tvdb series id if it doesn’t automatically detect your series.

I use it cause all my torrenting is done on a different machine, and those files get transferred over to my server. so the arr suite isn’t the best solution for me

for now. I feel like it’s only a matter of time before they say those lifetime passes are expired, or that the product has changes so much it’s not valid, etc. they’ve proven they don’t really care about the user base anymore, it’s all about the money for them now unfortunately.