Does Jellyfin always compress video to the same bitrate?

[AlternateWitness]

When I've been watching 4K movies on my server, I noticed in my dashboard that if the video needs to transcode it always specifies that it’s transcoding at 11 or 14 Mbps.

Some of my movies are encoded in AV1, others in HEVC. If the video transcodes, it transcodes to AV1, but I noticed that the average bitrate in VLC for my HEVC encoded movies is around 20Mbps, so that’s higher than what is playing on my TV.

Does Jellyfin always compress movies when transcoding? I mean, more than specified. I don’t have a bitrate limit set on my server, or TV. I use NVENC hardware acceleration, but I’ve tried multiple CRF values between 20 and 15, and it always plays at the same bitrate across the same movies.

I guess this isn’t a huge deal, but I want to be able to get the highest quality as I can.

[abpjf]

just my $0.02 worth: if it looks fine to you, stop bit-chasing. life's too short to putz around endlessly with settings when you can be using that time to actually watch / enjoy your content.

I speak from experience - sometimes ya just gotta say "it's good enough and I don't see a difference between the quick-and-dirty settings output and the one I spent half the day on for the extra few kilobits"

[AlternateWitness]

just my $0.02 worth: if it looks fine to you, stop bit-chasing. life's too short to putz around endlessly with settings when you can be using that time to actually watch / enjoy your content.

I speak from experience - sometimes ya just gotta say "it's good enough and I don't see a difference between the quick-and-dirty settings output and the one I spent half the day on for the extra few kilobits"

Thanks, but it’s more than a few kilobytes. I like to get the maximum amount of quality possible, that’s why I use Jellyfin, and host my own media.

For some devices Jellyfin needs to transcode to H.264, and it keeps the same bitrate for that. 11Mbps on H.264 is pretty noticeable, I want to have really good quality among all of my devices.

[nyanmisaka]

CRF/fixed-QP/global_quality/intel-ICQ cannot control bitrate as specified. The goal of on-the-fly VOD transcoding is to produce a controllable (usually lower) bitrate video, with the best compatibility, and ensure the quality as much as possible (this depends on the SW/HW encoder implementation). If you want the best video quality, change the encoder preset to 'veryslow'.

If a client doesn't set a bitrate limit, then the target bitrate will always be higher than or equal to the source file's video bitrate + audio bitrate. If not, it may be due to audio transcoding or display errors.