Acceleration on Intel n100

[cpottle9]

I am trying to enable hardware acceleration for transcoding on my new n100 mini PC.
No success so far. Other than hardware acceleration, the n100 works fine.

Previously I was running Jellyfin on a Raspberry PI 4 with 4GB of RAM.
The RPI 4 worked OK for our use: 1 user, blu-rays reduced to 720p using handbrake.
But most of our content came from DVDs (480p).
I was able to enable hardware acceleration on the RPI 4 which helped performance a little.
We frequently transcode to display subtitles.
There was a recent update that broke the RPI 4. Issue was /tmp too small.
I was able to fix this, but I saw several comments online saying the RPI 4 was not suitable for Jellyfin.
So I bought the n100 mini PC (minisforum UN100L).

The good news is software transcoding on the mini PC is faster than hardware encoding on the RPI 4.
About 60% faster. 

Here is my n100 config:
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Jellyfin 10.11.1
Debian bookworm 12.12 kernel 6.12.43+deb12-amd64
CPU Intel n100, RAM 16 GB
OS drive 240 GB nvme SSD
storage drive 120 GB sata SSD (temporary will switch to 2 GB external drive)
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Question: Should I try another distro (maybe ubuntu) that might work better?

I've been reading the online documentation:
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-i...eleration/
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-i...ion/intel/

They say it I need to use 'Intel Quicksync(QSV)'.
When I try to view a video with subtitles I get a popup saying ' Playback failed because the media is not supported by this client'.

In the ffmpeg transcode log I see:
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[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x7fdb96a8a080] libva: /usr/lib/jellyfin-ffmpeg/lib/dri/iHD_drv_video.so init failed
[AVHWDeviceContext @ 0x7fdb96a8a080] Failed to initialise VAAPI connection: 1 (operation failed).
Device creation failed: -5.
Failed to set value 'vaapi=vadev/dri/renderD128,driver=iHD' for option 'init_hw_device': Input/output error
Error parsing global options: Input/output error
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I installed package intel-opencl-icd.
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apt policy intel-opencl-icd
intel-opencl-icd:
  Installed: 22.43.24595.41-1
  Candidate: 22.43.24595.41-1
  Version table:
*** 22.43.24595.41-1 500
        500 http://mirror.it.ubc.ca/debian bookworm/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
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Has anyone been successful turning acceleration on running linux on an n100?