What is Hardware Acceleration and Transcoding

[Mkhansen981017]

Hi there. Yesterday I finished setting up Jellyfin on my home server.
The home server is an HP EliteDesk 800 G5 DM | i7-9700 | 16 GB | 1x1TB NvME | 500GB NvME setup. Is this sufficient for 1080p content?

Last night I tried to stream a movie from it and the fan absolutely hit the shits. I did see a post about upgrading the bios somewhere should help on that but I'd like some opinions on the topic here. A second family member did stream some media on the server earlier in the day and I didn't really hear anything of the machine - tho I was doing a bunch of other things so it wouldn't have been easy for me to hear if the fan also went nuts there.

Now, in the title I mentioned Hardware Acceleration and transcoding. What exactly is this and would it help in my situation with my fan going nuts to cool the thing? Is it recommended to set it up regardless?
Best regards!

[FireSale]

Your hardware specs seem pretty solid for handling 1080p content, especially with an i7-9700 and 16GB of RAM..

Transcoding is the process of converting media files from one format or resolution to another.This process can be resource-intensive, causing your system to work harder, generating more heat, and subsequently causing the fan to spin faster to cool things down.

Hardware acceleration, often supported by dedicated GPUs or certain CPUs with integrated graphics, can significantly reduce the load on your main CPU by offloading some of the transcoding tasks to specialized hardware. It can speed up the process and lower the strain on the system, thus reducing fan noise and heat generation.

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Enabling hardware acceleration in Jellyfin, if supported by your hardware, can be a great idea. It could potentially alleviate the strain on your system and result in smoother playback experiences without the fan going wild. However, not all hardware supports hardware acceleration, so it's essential to check if your specific setup does.

[yshi]

It appears that your CPU supports video, so as long as your motherboard does also, you should be able to configure hardware acceleration (HWA).

I have a, i5 6600k, which is enough to transcode 1080p videos, so yours should be even better (that generation should be able to transcode to 265, and might be faster in general).

The reason your CPU fan kicked in is because your client was unable to play the video, audio, and/or subtitle codex, so your Jellyfin server transcoded on the fly and streamed that instead. In this case it was probably video, either to convert to a different codec, or to burn in subtitles. The other person playing something else not doing that would be because their client was able to stream directly without conversion. It might be worth going into settings on the client app(s) and making sure it's set to use a video player of some sort rather than web as the render engine, as web has the least number of supported formats.

FireSale already explained what HWA is, and the instructions linked in the server settings page should hopefully be enough: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/admini...celeration

[TheDreadPirate]

To add to what FireSale said, the reason for having transcoding is that it is very difficult to ensure all your devices can direct play your media. Some devices support X and Y codec, but not Z codec. Another supports Y and Z codec, but not X codec. So you setup transcoding to ensure that regardless of what you put in your library you can play it on any device.

We aim for direct play as much as possible. But we have transcoding available for when that isn't possible.