Headless server hardware transcoding without X or Wayland? - eviltoast

Hey lemmings,

I have a headless server that works beautifully. B450 with 2700X and 32GB of micron 3200MHz RAM.

I am currently running Debian 12 Bookworm on it. I am at kernel 6.1, but in preparation for 6.2 or 6.3 being backlogged, I want to buy an Arc A380 for transcoding since they are only 150€ here. Software was fine for a single video stream, but I bought a new house and will have 4 camera streams running. Plus I want to dabble in AV1 transcoding for media or storage of my camera streams

Currently there is neither X nor Wayland installed since it is exclusively with SSH that I do all of my work on it. After I install the GPU, I was wondering if it is possible to not even install X or Wayland since I will literally never use a display on it?

Would I still be able to do Jellyfin and Frigate transcoding without an X server? If I have to get one, does it matter if I choose X or Wayland for hardware transcoding?

Thanks!