Unsure about Hardware for Media Server

[JonnyBrate]

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..

Thank you that explanation quite did it for me. Might want to look into getting a cheap GPU. I just may have issues with he power draw. I want to keep it as low as possible. Any Ideas on that maybe?

Thanks in advance!