Option to disable transcoding, atleast video transcoding.

[Premicheal]

I have a mini pc setup to run stremio-service, if any client that cannot support the native format connects, the server goes to 90% cpu load and all streams lag. Is there anyway to turn off transcoding since servers without hw accelerations won't be able to do much anyway, especially arm ones. My apologies if I have missed something.

[TRtomasz]

If you disable it you will not be able to play the stream so there is no point in this.

[Premicheal]

Oh. Something like my setup on Jellyfin where remuxing and audio transcoding is allowed but video stream re-encoding / transcoding is restricted would also be impossible?

[TRtomasz]

@jaruba will have to answer

[hyperion4]

If you disable it you will not be able to play the stream so there is no point in this.

Reasons of transcoding in plex/emby/jellyfin servers.

1. You want to save your upload bandwidth and you "send" from your plex/emby server to your phone a 720p instead of your 4k video file.
2. You have people who use your server and you don't want them to use the 4k video file you have, you don't want to upload that big files.
3. You want to watch to your browser and the browser doesn't support the video codec, for example hevc.

I don't think 1 or 2 are case scenarios for Stremio.

The 3rd reason.. today all browsers have support for hardware hevc decoding.
They have added support the last 2 years. So it is very possible your browser to be capable to play hevc if your GPU supports it.
I personally have disabled in my emby server video transcoding because my browsers can play everything including hevc.

Unfortunately Stremio service insists to transcode hevc to h264 with ffmpeg even if my browser supports hardware hevc decoding.
Emby does the same and transcodes hevc to h264, but it has the option to disable video transcoding and let the browser to try and play hevc itself.

[aayushrautela]

Yes, it would make stremio server on low end server useful. Most other devices can play h265.

[AlvaroRojas]

This would be very usefull for ARM based servers