OP mentions Plex and Jellyfin, that means decoder for 1 standard AND encoder for another standard is needed if client cannot decode file video standard. Jellyfin does not support the HW HEVC decoder in Raspberries, it did/does? support H264 encoder. I have done a quick test with Jellyfin using SW decode+encode on RK3588 for 1080p50 HEVC -> 1080p50 H264 and it was too much. In theory it might work, but there is various other things ongoing that it gets into stuttering and frame loss. Jellyfin does support this in HW as well on RK35xx but it is not v4l2m2m but rkmpp. Same on N100, no v4l2m2m but Intel specific.Pi 5 (and CM5 and Pi 500) use the BCM2712 SoC which has only has hardware decode for H.265 aka HEVC. The legacy VideoCore codecs present on the older SoCs were limited to (around) 1080p anyway. Unless you need to do something else that is particularly CPU intensive at the same time as watching videos, the Pi 5 will be fine doing video decode on the ARM for Kodi.
If only about decoding/playing: My N100 with Opensuse Tumbleweed (VERSION_ID="20250711") plays .mp4 HEVC HW accelerated, 4Kp60 I have tested.
FireFox 140.0.2 (64-bit) reports:
Code:
Codec NameSoftware DecodingHardware DecodingH264SupportedSupportedVP9SupportedSupportedVP8SupportedSupportedAV1SupportedSupportedHEVCSupportedSupportedStatistics: Posted by redvli — Sat Jul 19, 2025 7:36 am