I'm wondering if anyone has created a plugin to automatically transcode SD recordings to H264 ?
I'm now using Kodi on the Raspberry pi as frontend to vdr + VNSI plugin, it's pretty good aside from live HDTV which can still stutter (but version dependent, so I expect will be fixed soon).

I have about 3TB of SD recordings and could probably save at least 1.5TB if converted to H264, rather than buy & power more hard disks.
I did a couple of "manual" test conversions using ffmpeg, and they play OK, vdr reindexes automatically when it finds the index missing.

ffmpeg -i 001.vdr -vcodec h264 -threads 2 -acodec mp3 -f mpegts 00001.ts

The plugin should:
a) Do a conversion automatically after recording, nice'd
b) check it was error free (ie success code from ffmpeg or whatever)
c) delete mpeg2 file if OK, cleanup if not, log.
d) ideally force a reindex
e) Option to iterate through old recordings, testing for mpeg2 and converting as required in the background. Handle .ts and old .vdr files.
f) Join old 2GB max sized files before creating smaller H264 version .ts.
g) Nice to have - option to enable function or not
Need to handle various flavours of stream too, subtitles etc.

I've seen scripts like the one below, but the author reports some issues and obviously not a complete solution.
Maybe vdrrip and/or a noad type approach could be used as the basis?

#!/bin/bash

profile="-vpre hq"
quality="-crf 26"   # constant quality
prefix="nice"         # "nice ionice -c3"

for i in "$@"; do
    [ -r "$i" ] || continue
    output="$(basename "$i" | cut -f 1 -d .).$profile.mp4"
    [ -e "$output" ] && continue

    $nice ffmpeg -i "$i" -acodec copy -scodec copy -threads 0 \
        -vcodec libx264 $profile $quality "$output"
done