SOLVED: Jellyfin buffering... is my hardware acceleration working?

[TheDreadPirate]

You should be using Intel Quicksync. VAAPI should still work, but QSV is more performant on Intel GPUs.

I'd have to see your logs to see what is happening. But 10Mbps is well above your video's bit rate. The screenshot you included before showed that the video bitrate was only 1.7Mbps (plus the audio, not shown). So setting the quality to 10Mbps wouldn't trigger a transcode since the video is below that.

But setting "Always force transcode" sounds like it should. I'm looking at the JMP code related to that setting and all it does is not include any information about what the client can direct play. I'm wondering if there is some server side logic that sees that the original video codec is already H264 and ignores that? IDK.