The best way is to make multiple copies on multiple storage mediums and regularly check for any data degradation. There is no one single format that will last long term. Everything has a chance of failure for an infinite number of reasons.
You only need to store one TB, just buy a pair of 2TB hard drives, check the data yearly, and then whenever the warranty expires buy some new drives and copy the data over. That’s about as simple and safe as it’ll be for you.
Don’t ever use hardware acceleration for encoding video ahead of time. It produces the same quality for much higher file size, or lower quality for the same file size, as software encoding.
On the fly transcoding is fine for GPU since it’s transient, but if you’re preparing ahead of time, only software encoding.
That being said, it’s entirely up to you. Get some short 30-90s clips of your library, encode them with different settings, and see what you like and what the file sizes are. Then make a decision.
Use the wikiteam’s dumpgenerator.
It’s deleted now but I definitely recall them asking about compatibility across different operating systems and filesystems. And as long as you stick to Windows’ restrictive naming scheme, your filenames will be compatible with everything.
But you don’t understand! My question is actually unique! I would know that, because none of the 0 other posts I read mention my incredibly specific and niche use case that I developed because I don’t understand the fundamentals!
I don’t think any of your rules actually have anything to do with compatibility between operating systems.
As long as the filename doesn’t contain <, , :, ", /, \, |, ?, or * then it can exist on any operating system.
If you’re going to use the file creation time as the filename, just adhere to ISO 8601 with precision to the millisecond. If you’re creating multiple image/video files at the same millisecond, your engineering staff can solve that problem for you.
Instead of using keywords, have you heard of this thing called a folder? It’s great for organizing arbitrary files!
That’s not what fragmentation or defragmentation means.