Curious: What’s the deal with all the transcoding on servers?

Don’t you just need some good rendering on the client? And if you need it on the server, why need it on the fly? You can do it before, and store the result, can’t you?

Compatibility and storage.

Do you want only 2 devices of the 10 your family possibly owns to work?

Do you want your family to complain that jellyfin “isn’t as good as Netflix/Disney+/etc…” Because it constantly stops to buffer and a can’t keep up the framerate?

It is completely fine if you are single and have 1-2 devices that work with AV1 and h.265 client side and that is all you need, but then you don’t have to bother with transcoding. When you start letting other people into it, compatibility becomes an issue.

As for storing it beforehand, the entire point of AV1 and HEVC is to significantly reduce the size on disk. If you have to store 10 versions or each file, 5 resolutions each, half h.264, then you are taking up about 20x the space per file compared to 1 copy

A transcode GPU like the A380 or new QSV compatible CPU is MUCH cheaper than a new good quality 12TB drive lol

Very much agree on all these points; I just wish I could get the transcoding to actually work.

I’ve been running Jellyfin in a container and giving it access to an old GTX970 but it just refuses to do anything with it.