Unsure about Hardware for Media Server

[Efficient_Good_5784]

2. I read about transcoding (still completely unsure if it will be the case since I don't understand it 100% since English is not my mother's tongue and more complex topics take me a while to fully grasp) and that it uses quite some power.

Think about transcoding this way:

Lets say that you only know how to read English. You can natively read (direct play) all books in English.
You get a book that is written in Italian. You have no idea how to read it, so you give up and don't attempt to read the book.

If you do want to read it, you now have two options:

1. Grab an Italian to English dictionary. You are able to translate the words using the dictionary, but it takes you a long time and a lot of effort to read through the book.
   
2. Instead, you can get someone that knows both English and Italian to translate and rewrite the book into English. Now, you can read the rewritten book with minimal effort.
   

You can think of option 1 as software transcoding, and option 2 as hardware transcoding.

This same concept applies here. If the client (Jellyfin app on your TVs in this case) doesn't know how to natively read the media, your server will attempt to transcode the stream so that the client can natively read it.

You got two options to transcode. Software (CPU) or hardware (GPU) transcoding. GPU transcoding is also referred to as "hardware acceleration" or HWA. CPU transcoding usually is slow and takes up more power. GPU transcoding though is usually faster and requires less power. With CPU transcoding, your CPU is busy which means everything else that needs the CPU will have to wait a bit longer. With GPU transcoding, most of the workload is taken off of the CPU cores so that the CPU can handle other things at once.

Jellyfin lets you to disable transcoding completely, or have it enabled with either CPU or GPU transcoding.

How many users do you have in your network? Does that make any difference?

I'm the only one that uses my server. But I have tested how many streams I can open in a browser before. I don't remember exactly, but 5 streams were not much of an issue with the 5600G doing HWA.
I will say that using the Android TV Jellyfin app, the only times I have had issues are with subtitles sometimes causing media to not play.