Your whole Jellyfin library, also in 720p

quality-gate-encoder watches a Jellyfin library and adds a 720p copy beside every film and episode, so phones and remote viewers direct play the copy instead of making the server transcode live for each stream. It runs as a Docker container on Linux, encodes on an Intel or NVIDIA GPU or in software, leaves the original file untouched, and Jellyfin lists the copy as a second version of the same title. The Quality Gate plugin is optional: it caps chosen users at the 720p copy and tells the encoder which titles to make first.

Features

• Keeps the original untouched and adds a - 720p copy beside it; Jellyfin shows both as versions of one title, never as a duplicate.
• Phones and remote viewers direct play the copy, so the server stops transcoding live for every stream.
• Encodes on an Intel iGPU (QSV) or an NVIDIA card (NVENC), decodes on the same GPU, and falls back to software by itself when the GPU refuses a file.
• Output in HEVC, H.264 or AV1; H.264 comes out as MP4 with AAC for the widest direct play, and switching codec never re-encodes what exists.
• Skips anything already 720p or lower, and a restart on a finished library checks the destination instead of re-reading the originals.
• Works on NFS and CIFS shares: it polls instead of relying on inotify, and a Jellyfin on another host gets a manifest instead of symlinks.
• The titles your viewers are about to watch get encoded first when the Quality Gate plugin writes the priority list.
• Jellyfin never sees a half-written file: encodes go to .tmp and are renamed once verified.
• A broken mount is caught before cleanup runs: orphan cleanup refuses when the source looks wrong, and delete events are rate-limited.
• Holds new encodes while the destination is under a free-space floor you set.

Quick start

docker run -d --name quality-gate-encoder --restart always \
  --device /dev/dri:/dev/dri \
  -v /srv/media/movies:/app/source \
  -v /srv/media/movies-720p:/app/destination \
  -e HW_ENCODING_TYPE=intel \
  -e SYMLINK_TARGET_PREFIX=/srv/media/movies-720p \
  drumsergio/quality-gate-encoder:1.5.12

SYMLINK_TARGET_PREFIX is the destination folder as Jellyfin sees it, and the source mount must be writable, because the - 720p link is written beside each original. It worked when docker logs quality-gate-encoder shows Encoding succeeded and Created version symlink, and the film's page in Jellyfin gets a Version menu with a 720p entry. The image is linux/amd64 only; drop --device to encode in software, and Getting started has Docker Compose, NVIDIA and the switch from drumsergio/jellyfin-encoder (releases under the old name until 2027-03-31).

Documentation

• Getting started: Docker Compose and CLI, Intel and NVIDIA, what the log and Jellyfin show when it worked, upgrading, moving from jellyfin-encoder
• Configuration: every variable and its default, quality presets, H.264/MP4 output, free-space floor, priority list, FFmpeg log level
• Cross-host manifest mode: Jellyfin on a different box than the encoder
• Utilities: compare_encodes.py, the coverage report
• How it works: the pipeline, why it polls, what a rename costs
• Safety and cleanup: the guards that stop a bad mount from deleting encodes
• Development: run from source, tests
• Related projects: the plugin and the other Jellyfin tools

With the plugin: One library, two qualities and Encode priority on the Quality Gate side.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later