Seeking help understanding and optimizing transcoding on my TrueNAS server

[mooch91]

2 CPU cores is pretty limiting.  Audio transcoding always happens on the CPU.  As does subtitle burn in.  With subtitle burn in, the GPU will still decode and encode, but the CPU renders the subtitle in the video.

So limiting Jellyfin to two cores can potentially be a factor.

The list of codecs at the top does not force Jellyfin to transcode those codecs.  It only informs Jellyfin which codecs your GPU can decode when it does need to transcode a video.  If it is not checked and Jellyfin does need to transcode, the CPU will decode the video before sending to the GPU for encoding.

Use this wiki to check the correct boxes.  The "Coffee Lake" column.  Basically, check everything in the list except AV1 and HEVC RExt.  You can also check "Allow encoding in HEVC format" and both tone mapping boxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quic...d_encoding

You should also enable Low Power encoding, but only for H264.  But this does require additional configuration in the OS.  This is optional, but can increase performance when you are tone mapping HDR to SDR.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/admini...r-encoding

Thanks very much for the response.  Is there a recommendation for number of cores of an 8-core processor, as well as memory, that one should allocate?  Right now, the server is being used as a NAS as well as for Home Assistant, along with Jellyfin.

Thanks also for the explanation of the codecs - very helpful - as well as the chart.

I'll also need to read up on the subtitle piece a bit more.  I don't generally use the subtitles, though I've been ripping at least the English tracks with any discs, as I know others in my family do - to aid in catching everything when they are walking the treadmill, for example.