Overview: Hardware pipelines and their limits
Hardware pipeline behavior depends on picture transfers, synchronization, shared resources and the stages actually accelerated.
A fast engine can still wait for data or another stage. Mixed software and hardware filtering, session limits and driver-dependent behavior affect the whole operation. This branch follows those relationships into Emby's processing path, including the CPU work that can remain when media engines are active.
Frame memory and transfers
Frame memory and transfer paths determine how processing stages share, copy and retain pictures.Concurrent encoder sessions
Concurrent encoding is constrained by session policy, supported configurations and available processing/memory resources, with encoder sessions differing from client count and physical engine count.Driver-dependent media capabilities
A usable media capability depends on the hardware and the driver/runtime/application path that exposes a particular operation and picture configuration.Mixed hardware and software filtering
A mixed video-processing route connects hardware and CPU operations through the picture representations each consumer accepts, with operation order and transfer placement affecting the result and cost.Why hardware acceleration can still use the CPU
CPU activity during accelerated media processing can come from unaccelerated stages, host coordination and concurrent work, so its meaning depends on the complete selected workload.Hardware acceleration in Emby Server
Emby Server’s accelerated conversion uses supported selected decode, picture-processing and encode paths whose source/target, runtime and resource evidence establish the actual session route.