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

[TheDreadPirate]

Transcoding does NOT improve video quality and does not increase responsiveness. You shouldn't be aiming for more transcoding. The goal is to direct play as much as possible. Transcoding allows for client flexibility.

But there are other considerations if you have come limitations. You'd change the codecs if, for example, you're running low on disk space or you have a slow upload speed.

For me, I'm using AV1 because I only have 40Mbps upload, the fastest I can get at the moment. Both my phone and my wife's phones support AV1, and my friend's Roku 4802X supports AV1. So all my remote clients support direct playing my content in the, currently, most efficient codec to minimize the use of my limited upload. All my Android TV devices in my house don't support AV1 (yet) so I'm transcoding a lot of the time on those devices. But those are on LAN so that isn't a concern.

So don't re-encode just to trigger more transcoding for the sake of more transcoding.