From Disc to Drive: A Beginner's Guide to Preparing Your Media for Jellyfin

[TheDreadPirate]

There are two reasons for pre-transcoding your media, saving disk space and saving bandwidth. Or both.

For those of us with limited uploading bandwidth (40Mbps for me) an uncompressed 1080P bluray pretty much saturates that and 4K blurays greatly exceed it. Thus requiring real time transcoding to lower the bit rate. And that doesn't take into consideration other services I run that also require some, but not a lot, of bandwidth.

As for the power requirements, if you're using a GPU to pre-transcode the power commitment is MUCH MUCH MUCH lower and transcodes A LOT faster. Minutes vs hours or days. An Intel Arc GPU in my case. But Intel iGPUs can be used with almost the same results. Using the iGPU is also a lot faster and a lot more efficient.

An additional benefit of pre-transcoding is the option to use a much slower, higher quality per bit, preset and other custom options to increase codec efficiency. Speaking of efficiency, pre-transcoding allows for using more efficient codecs like AV1.