When I first switched from Plex to Jellyfin, I was immediately taken with how easy it was to set up and how reliable it seemed in use. And yet it took a while before I discovered all of Jellyfin's capabilities. What seems like a fairly stripped-back app actually hides many powerful features that can enhance your user experience.
Hardware acceleration
Help cut buffering when transcoding
If you're coming from Plex, you'll probably know that hardware acceleration for transcoding is locked behind the Plex Pass paywall. And there's a good chance you decided not to bother with it as a result. With Jellyfin, hardware acceleration is free, just like everything else with the software.
Hardware acceleration uses your GPU for transcoding files rather than the CPU. It's generally faster and more efficient and can significantly reduce things like buffering and stuttering, especially when you're transcoding more than one file at a time. In Jellyfin, there's support for most common GPUs, including Intel, Nvidia, Apple, and many more. To use it is as simple as toggling it on.
In fact, hardware acceleration is just one of several free features in Jellyfin that you have to pay for in Plex. Another one that I've taken to using all the time is the download feature. It makes it trivial to watch files from your Jellyfin media library even in places where you don't have an internet connection.
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