2025-08-03, 08:20 AM
(This post was last modified: 2025-08-03, 08:34 AM by justasking2025. Edited 4 times in total.)
For anyone facing the same problem, I found two solutions that worked for me.
1- I changed the TV box to a Xiaomi TV box gen 3 and configured Jellyfin not to use transcoding (hardware acceleration). The CPU utilization went way down. My explanation is that when you disable transcoding you are actually disabling hardware transcoding (or hardware acceleration), but software transcoding still takes place. My old TV box was not powerful enough to handle it; my new one is.
2- My second solution was to create another container in docker(this was before I got the new TV box) so I could test new settings. I followed a step by step guide provided by Microsoft's Copilot. This time I believe the settings changed were:
2-A) Creating a jellyfin.yml file with the proper UID and GID (for my previous container I didn't do this).
2-B) Fixed permissions because DSM doesn't allow access to the drivers. So fixing permissions HAVE to be done, otherwise, step "2-A" is useless. Also, this step has to be done manually (with some terminal or command-line interface).
These two steps were with help of Copilot AI. I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise.
2-C) Disabling HEVC encoding option in the transcoding tab of the playback tab (which DS218+ couldn't handle, and I stupidly enabled). I did all that and set the hardware acceleration option to "Video Acceleration API(VAAPI)" and voila! It worked!
Ideally, like many posts said in other threads and websites, you want no hardware acceleration if you can afford to bypass it, so the first option is better, but not at the expense of low CPU utilization. So, having high CPU usage is worse than using transcoding.
1- I changed the TV box to a Xiaomi TV box gen 3 and configured Jellyfin not to use transcoding (hardware acceleration). The CPU utilization went way down. My explanation is that when you disable transcoding you are actually disabling hardware transcoding (or hardware acceleration), but software transcoding still takes place. My old TV box was not powerful enough to handle it; my new one is.
2- My second solution was to create another container in docker(this was before I got the new TV box) so I could test new settings. I followed a step by step guide provided by Microsoft's Copilot. This time I believe the settings changed were:
2-A) Creating a jellyfin.yml file with the proper UID and GID (for my previous container I didn't do this).
2-B) Fixed permissions because DSM doesn't allow access to the drivers. So fixing permissions HAVE to be done, otherwise, step "2-A" is useless. Also, this step has to be done manually (with some terminal or command-line interface).
These two steps were with help of Copilot AI. I wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise.
2-C) Disabling HEVC encoding option in the transcoding tab of the playback tab (which DS218+ couldn't handle, and I stupidly enabled). I did all that and set the hardware acceleration option to "Video Acceleration API(VAAPI)" and voila! It worked!
Ideally, like many posts said in other threads and websites, you want no hardware acceleration if you can afford to bypass it, so the first option is better, but not at the expense of low CPU utilization. So, having high CPU usage is worse than using transcoding.