I've honestly been considered going the other way. I have a bunch of h.264 files that I'd like to convert to h.265. I recently heard about Tdarr, and am considering that for a future weekend project to reclaim storage space.

I think directing my friends that can to move to players that don't suck would help with the transcoding bottleneck. But some of the other responses make me feel like I'm overly concerned about it.