I love AV1 for compressing my movies to 720p. I also convert any audio to Opus. I get to archive a ton of content on peanuts. The videos look great on my PC monitor or my phone and they come in at around 452MB (1hr 24m video).
Here's my script if you're interested in trying it out on your content.
And I just invoke it against a folder to recursively convert stuff.
.\av1-convert.ps1 -sourceDir 'D:\Movies to convert\'
As soon as there's something that can decode AV1 that's like an nvidia shield I will replace both of my shields. So far nothing like that exists to my knowledge. Even Roku 4k Pro's say "AV1" support in their spec but they still trigger transcoding on plex when doing a playback.
As someone who also has a 2019 Shield TV Pro and is waiting for the "next best thing", one resource I've been keeping my eye on is androidtv-guide.com:
wait, you convert to 720p and want to play that using a shield pro type of device. This might be ok in your current setup, but as soon as you upgrade the panel to 1080p or 2160p, you would want the source to be in at the same resolution, or better.
Here's my script if you're interested in trying it out on your content.
And I just invoke it against a folder to recursively convert stuff. As soon as there's something that can decode AV1 that's like an nvidia shield I will replace both of my shields. So far nothing like that exists to my knowledge. Even Roku 4k Pro's say "AV1" support in their spec but they still trigger transcoding on plex when doing a playback.