What is Hardware Acceleration and Transcoding

[TheDreadPirate]

To add to what FireSale said, the reason for having transcoding is that it is very difficult to ensure all your devices can direct play your media. Some devices support X and Y codec, but not Z codec. Another supports Y and Z codec, but not X codec. So you setup transcoding to ensure that regardless of what you put in your library you can play it on any device.

We aim for direct play as much as possible. But we have transcoding available for when that isn't possible.