Streaming 4k and Dolby sound

[fable]

I have a i7 4700 cpu and a low profile GT 610 card on a media pc. My jellyfin server has a 1080 GTX used for hardware acceleration. I also have a good gaming PC, but if possible I'd like to keep that out of this.
The media pc is connected to a samsung tv from 2018 and a stereo receiver capable of all formats.  All in LAN.

I spent my entire day yesterday trying to find solutions on how to get 4k and dolby dts-hd to work. The media pc is weak and seems to have issues rendering that much data.
I don't know what actually happens on the client side.  Is there a way to lighten the load? Is it already decoded and the client just renders? If so I reckon there's not much I can do, but if jellyfin transfers data that needs to be decoded by the client then maybe there is a way to decode on my main computer or my server and just render it on my media pc?

I'm grasping at straws in order to make this work. I don't want to do a partial upgrade for a new gfx card on an old computer. So any advice is welcome! Thanks!

[TheDreadPirate]

The client will always have to decode, period. Newer codecs are more complex and require more computational power to decode. Adding to that, higher resolutions require even more compute.

The GPU in the media PC does not have any decoders, and the CPU doesn't have a modern enough iGPU to support modern codecs. So any decoding of HEVC, the likely codec for 4K HDR content, is happening on those old CPU cores.

Your options are to force transcoding on the server to simpler codecs and lower resolutions (1080P H264) or upgrading your media PC.

[fable]

Thanks for your input!