Jellyfin on machine, transcoding on another

[DYNAMIC]

Hello, to you all.

I am trying to solve a problem I faced due to my weak hardware.
I am running Jellyfin 10.10.3
This is the machine specs, let's call it B:

• CPU: AMD A6-5350M
  
• GPU: Integrated AMD HD Graphics
  
• RAM: 12GB
  
• OS: Linux
  

I have another machine let's call it A.
Now the problem is the hardware is very weak, It can't handle playing one stream!
It can't even buffer in real time even if I don't skip anything from the content.
Tried to play with hardware acceleration with no luck, setting any settings caused the player to crash (Fatal error)

Since I have another machine I tried to search for solutions that can do the setup I want, and found 2:

• Tdarr, which looks like something that has the same idea I want to implement.
  But from my understanding, it deals with converting the media files, not transcoding them on the fly.
  

• rffmpeg, it does exactly the thing but machines should be Linux on both ends.
  The only solution I can think of is installing a VM on machine A, to be able to establish a connection between A and B using rffmpeg.
  

This is machine A specs:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7-6800HS
  
• GPU: RTX 3060
  
• RAM: 32
  
• OS: Windows
  

Now I can install Jellyfin directly on machine A, but where is the fun part this way?

Any suggestion ?

[TheDreadPirate]

It sounds like your server is transcoding and is not able to handle it. Tdarr is an option to pre-transcode your media to more compatible codecs. But you'd need to do that on your Ryzen/3060 machine. I wouldn't recommend rffmpeg due to the added complexity.

Is purchasing new hardware an option? It really doesn't take much if you only have one or two clients. Intel N100 based mini-PCs are pretty cheap and the N100 is pretty capable for running Jellyfin.

[DYNAMIC]

It sounds like your server is transcoding and is not able to handle it.  Tdarr is an option to pre-transcode your media to more compatible codecs.  But you'd need to do that on your Ryzen/3060 machine.  I wouldn't recommend rffmpeg due to the added complexity.

Is purchasing new hardware an option?  It really doesn't take much if you only have one or two clients.  Intel N100 based mini-PCs are pretty cheap and the N100 is pretty capable for running Jellyfin.

It's possible to put my Jellyfin server on my main machine or buy hardware capable of transcoding.
But this would be not fun at all.

Also, it appears to be a big challenge to do it, because rffmpeg is for Linux only.
Since I can't fully transition to Linux on my main machine, I need to find a way to use my hardware on VM, it will be very limited and not ideal because all type 2 supervisors limit this kind of ability.

Regardless, it's a very fun problem to solve.

[TheDreadPirate]

I, personally, wouldn't be able to help with the specifics of this. But WSL2 is an option as a way to use rffmpeg from your existing server to utilize the Nvidia GPU on your Windows machine.

[DYNAMIC]

I, personally, wouldn't be able to help with the specifics of this.  But WSL2 is an option as a way to use rffmpeg from your existing server to utilize the Nvidia GPU on your Windows machine.

I did some research and currently experiencing Hyper-V and WSL2.
Those 2 are not the problem, the real one is the setup of rffmpeg.
I will keep this thread updated for future reference.

Thank you for your reply.