I use proxmox because I am a tinkerer and VMs help me tinker without worrying about making major mistakes that might brick my server. If I want to try something new, just spin up a test VM and try it out, the rest of my stacks are safe and if I muck up the test VM I’m tinkering with, just delete it and start again.

I started with KVM-QEMU, which proxmox is based on, with virt-manager front end. Can do all the same things, but can be installed on most distros. Will let you get your feet wet with VMs without having to format and install proxmox.

Tdarr is what I use to unify my media. It does a good job of converting my files to h265. Runs in the background with my tesla p4 transcoding 3 streams at a time. Ripped through my 30ish tb library in a few days. It can change bitrate and resolution as well, but I haven’t had the time to play around with that yet. Can watch you library for change and transcode automatically, or you can run it when you like.