I use a 2019 SFF desktop (no dedicated GPU) for Jellyfin, and transcoding for my 65" TV hardly increases cpu.
If you can figure out why it’s transcoding and fix that, it makes a big difference. Mine transcodes because of subtitles and there’s no fixing it (the Tizen Jellyfin app is the problem - I’m just glad to have the app at all).
The key is to know what formats, aspect ratio, etc, your TV handles natively and save files in that version. Fortunately my TV handles MKV natively but Jellyfin on Samsung doesn’t respect the Display Aspect Ratio flag, so I have to hard convert everything to square pixels in the proper aspect ratio (16:9,4:3, 3.5:3,etc) based on the original source. It’s a little extra work but scripting ffmpeg solves it. Future devices will surely handle square pixels and forced aspect ratio fine.
Do you save the source video as well? And does the jellyfin ecosystem have anything where I can have multiple copies of a video and it switches based on transfer conditions?
The other day I wanted to watch a movie. I had it all set up. I started streaming Jellyfin to my tv. The movie started playing at 5 frames per minute…
Turns out my pc can’t handle heavy transcoding at all. It also doesn’t have a gpu, so that doesn’t help.
Will it not play the raw movie if you are on LAN?
Also, many CPUs have hardware transcoders these days, so I’m not sure which Jellyfin supports.
To your point, there can be a little groundwork to get cpu transcoding to work right with Jellyfin on Linux. It’s a little easier on Windows.
As others have said, GPU may not be required.
I use a 2019 SFF desktop (no dedicated GPU) for Jellyfin, and transcoding for my 65" TV hardly increases cpu.
If you can figure out why it’s transcoding and fix that, it makes a big difference. Mine transcodes because of subtitles and there’s no fixing it (the Tizen Jellyfin app is the problem - I’m just glad to have the app at all).
The key is to know what formats, aspect ratio, etc, your TV handles natively and save files in that version. Fortunately my TV handles MKV natively but Jellyfin on Samsung doesn’t respect the Display Aspect Ratio flag, so I have to hard convert everything to square pixels in the proper aspect ratio (16:9,4:3, 3.5:3,etc) based on the original source. It’s a little extra work but scripting ffmpeg solves it. Future devices will surely handle square pixels and forced aspect ratio fine.
Do you save the source video as well? And does the jellyfin ecosystem have anything where I can have multiple copies of a video and it switches based on transfer conditions?
Doesn’t need a GPU, your CPU might have a transcoder, just need to configure it in Jellyfin.