

not knowledgeable about them things but normal movies and shows with multiple audio streams and subtitles play just fine with directplay, selecting them from the client works fine, etc.
the only reasons I know of for transcoding would be if you have ancient clients that can’t play e.g HEVC or something, or if you’re on shitty broadband and it ain’t feasible to stream 4K to a phone.



have the data drive (movies, backups, etc) get decrypted with a keyfile from the system SSD. you’re safe to lose, throw away, sell your data drive and don’t have to bother with shredding the data. this takes hours for drives of any significant size.