Have you tried handbrake?
Second this. It’s great. I’ll also add that if you have a meaty GPU, look into how to set up GPU-based encoding. This takes strain off the CPU and drastically reduces the time required per job.
Compress to a HEVC MKV codec and you can quite easily shrink a video down to a quarter of the original size and still have 1080p.
Ffmpeg is quite good for this
Depending on your hardware strength and what media you’re converting, the handbrake suggestion might be best. But I’m coming in to say that does take a lot of compute power. You mentioned watching cams, so if it’s popular TV/movie data you’re compressing, it’s often quicker to just download a different, lower resolution source from torrent.
let it watch a folder and it will convert what ever goes in that folder and shove it into a new folder.
I like the Internet Friendly Media Encoder. Works on most computers and it’s got lots of useful features and presets so you don’t need to think too hard.
