Comment by vundercind

7 months ago

Do you know if that can operate with no transcoding?

I’ve designed my media set-up around Jellyfin on a weak server that can’t handle transcoding, and very-capable clients that don’t need it. This lets me avoid like half the bugs on the Jellyfin bug tracker and all the instability an Nvidia or AMD video card would introduce to the server itself.

I’m very interested in this, but can’t use it if it must transcode.

6 comments

vundercind

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einsteinx2  7 months ago

I was checking out their docs and ran across this option for channels:

> HLS Direct does not transcode content and can perform better on low power systems, but does not support watermarks and some clients will have issues at program boundaries

Sounds like that might be what you’re looking for?

l72  7 months ago

No, it must transcode to work correctly, which can be a problem for me too (although I just have an intel card and use vaapi).

I believe there is a container you can use where it doesn't transcode, but it trips up every player I have tried, as they do not like having different resolutions/codecs suddenly swap.

  • vundercind  7 months ago

    Damn, kinda what I figured. Thanks. Maybe some day I’ll upgrade/downgrade to a less perfectly-stable server that is transcoding capable.

Saris  7 months ago

What CPU?

Intel Quicksync is very capable (even more so than most AMD/Nvidia cards) and any 7th gen or newer Intel CPU with integrated graphics has it and has good codec support.

  • vundercind  7 months ago

    It’s an old used Lenovo workstation. It has a some kind of quad-core Intel processor but can’t usefully transcode from h.265 at all (no hardware support, I assume) and is bad at most other codecs at resolutions above 720p or so. Even transcoding within its limits seems to tax it, so I doubt it could maintain two transcodes at once in any case—we sometimes have three streams going, or one or two plus someone playing on its Minecraft server, and it can keep up with all that just fine, but transcoding’s out.

    I’ve even seen it turn into a slideshow remuxing original video with transcoded audio. It’s not very capable.