With some of the cats I’ve interacted with, letting them outside would probably be cruel itself. One is scared of the weirdest things, like string, and complete fails at even hunting bugs in the house. Not to mention the crazy heat waves we’ve been having that would definitely be a problem for an indoor cat with thick fur.
I'm not OP, but if transcoding is happening on user CPUs, it's theoretically possible to modify or inject stuff into the transcoded video. There'd need to be some way of validating a transcode matches the original, which is non-trivial.
A consensus algorithm could work, but that would massively increase the required compute. I'm not even sure things like NVENC vs CPU ffmpeg are deterministic in how tbey compress video. Different encoders could very likely end up with visually identical transcodes, but the hashes wouldn't always match.
Maybe someone else has a better idea for validating transcodes?