I was having some dropped frame issues on my PC, and my phones video is pretty much unusable so I figured its probably a lack of hardware acceleration. Is it worth it to buy an Intel A380 which I’ve found for $120, or is it not worth it? For reference I currently have an i5 8600k and 16gb of RAM running Ubuntu Server headlessly.
Is Jellyfin all you run on your server? If yes, it’s unlikely a hardware horsepower problem and you should look closer at your local network and devices used for viewing. Well thinking longer about it, it is also depending on the media watched (codecs especially - how often do you need to transcode) and number of concurrent streams… Afaik the A380 is great for transcoding and the AV1 support offers a great future proof GPU. LTT made a video about using this GPU for a Plex server - the results shouldn’t be too different for Jellyfin I think
I run a few different self hosted applications on this PC, Nextcloud, Gitea, and Navidrome. It seems I need to transcode pretty often it seems, I’m pretty technical in most aspects but I’m a noob in this area so I might be wrong, but the player info says stuff like 74.5% transcoded and stuff like that on all the media I’ve played. For 120$ and just for the love of tinkering it might be worth it anyways.
The percentage shows how much of the currently watched media is already transcoded - if your hardware were too weak and the transcoding is slower than the playback, you could wait for it to transcode like 30% before you start watching. I feel that :D if my 1070 wouldn’t be more than enough at the moment, I’d bite the bullet, too