Forced server transcoding for everything. Ouch. Thought maybe at least mpeg2 or something would play directly.
Intel ARC 380's are ideal at 4k realtime transcoded streams. And theyre cheap as well.
You could probably do a sticky round robin reverse proxy with a few backends doing transcode.
The biggest issue is bandwidth, but you probably knew that.
it's 480p. every box i've used in the last two decades could do that on the fly without breaking a sweat.