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
let it watch a folder and it will convert what ever goes in that folder and shove it into a new folder.
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.
