this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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As others have said, GPU may not be required.
I use a 2019 SFF desktop (no dedicated GPU) for Jellyfin, and transcoding for my 65" TV hardly increases cpu.
If you can figure out why it's transcoding and fix that, it makes a big difference. Mine transcodes because of subtitles and there's no fixing it (the Tizen Jellyfin app is the problem - I'm just glad to have the app at all).
The key is to know what formats, aspect ratio, etc, your TV handles natively and save files in that version. Fortunately my TV handles MKV natively but Jellyfin on Samsung doesn't respect the Display Aspect Ratio flag, so I have to hard convert everything to square pixels in the proper aspect ratio (16:9,4:3, 3.5:3,etc) based on the original source. It's a little extra work but scripting ffmpeg solves it. Future devices will surely handle square pixels and forced aspect ratio fine.
Do you save the source video as well? And does the jellyfin ecosystem have anything where I can have multiple copies of a video and it switches based on transfer conditions?
I don't save the original as I'm converting largely to save space anyway.
Some movies at 6+ gb, after converting to a 1gb file they look the same on a 65" TV. Since most of this is DVD source, I'm not really losing any quality (DVD is 720*480).
Even if my sources were Blu-Ray I'd still convert, but I'd target a larger screen size, just in case.
I don't think Jellyfin can choose a different source file for different devices, it just doesn't really make sense. Transcoding when needed really takes so little I don't even notice it. I've run multiple video conversions (4+) while streaming, and syncing my media folder to the NAS and never have a glitch. And my hardware is old.
You could setup a movie library using the "Shows" type, which will support multiple versions of the same movie under a single poster/name in the library. It would take a little manual work to name the movies so you'd know which was "mobile friendly".
Or you could just create 2 movie libraries, one for large screens and one for mobile. You just keep the actual files in 2 different folders, so when you create a library it only uses that folder as a source.