I’ve designed my media set-up around Jellyfin on a weak server that can’t handle transcoding, and very-capable clients that don’t need it. This lets me avoid like half the bugs on the Jellyfin bug tracker and all the instability an Nvidia or AMD video card would introduce to the server itself.
I’m very interested in this, but can’t use it if it must transcode.
I believe there is a container you can use where it doesn't transcode, but it trips up every player I have tried, as they do not like having different resolutions/codecs suddenly swap.
Intel Quicksync is very capable (even more so than most AMD/Nvidia cards) and any 7th gen or newer Intel CPU with integrated graphics has it and has good codec support.
I’ve even seen it turn into a slideshow remuxing original video with transcoded audio. It’s not very capable.
> HLS Direct does not transcode content and can perform better on low power systems, but does not support watermarks and some clients will have issues at program boundaries
Sounds like that might be what you’re looking for?