So I’m back with Netflix and Amazon. I’m kind of done with jellyfin at this point. I’ve been recommending it to everyone and honestly I’m not sure that I still would.
Jellyfin as a product simply doesn’t work. There, I said it.
For a media system I’d hope for the basics to be able to play a movie or show with subtitles, selecting audio channels, and scrubbing and it to remember where I was left. I wouldn’t even need posters and all that, I’d get my own subtitles, etc.
I have multiple TVs, but let’s go with the old one with a chrome cast. I use my Android phone to cast a show episode. Scrubbing sometimes works. it works better than before because before it would just break everything to the point of the app requiring a reinstall. At least that’s fixed now but scrubbing still is SLOW, 10 seconds ahead takes 20-30 seconds to do. Worse though, it borks up subtitles by leaving the subtitles that were there when you started scrubbing, and places the new ones on top of that. The only way out is to exit casting completely, kill the app, restart all from scratch. Obviously JF doesn’t continue where I stopped (seriously, requests on that timeframe were made, it can’t be that hard to register that, can it?) and so I need to scrub again which, you know, borks up subtitles. So I’ll start just from the beginning, I can rewatch the same 5 minutes twice but it annoys the hell out of my wife.
Then, subtitles is a mess. The above, but also switching subtitles will cause similar issues. Don’t touch anything when having subtitles!
Then: it’s slow. It’s godunholy slow. I have a 16 core and Rhyzen 5 cpu, 64gb men @3200mhz, 1tb M2 Samsung Evo 989 pro, and ~60tb over 3 exos drives. An AMD rx7800 XT finishes up the config. It’s not the best of the best, but my system, u believe, ranks in the higher ranks of jellyfin installations
Jellyfin cannot play a movie or show without stuttering at least a few times, flat out freezing for minutes during shows, especially in the second episode for that day… If I run transmission in parallel, it just freezes up so much that it’s undoable.
Logs don’t indicate any major issue, I saw a freeze and had all logs on tail and literally saw no messages whatsoever during that freeze. System utilization was near zero.
Wife isnt tolerating jellyfin anymore and now I have Netflix and Amazon accounts again.
I understand it’s open source software, you do what you can, but right now it simply isn’t a system that is for the general public. It can be used by nerds like me who have the patience to deal with all the issues.
Edit: Really? 17 downvotes? I’m trying to tell you that the thing doesn’t work and that I’ve spent plenty of time trying to fix it, reading docs, posting questions, nothing has fixed anything so far but can’t have people talk about that, or what’s wrong?
Great to know. Transcoding is done by my phone, though? Is that a joke or are you serious?
Edit: and if all that is true, why does Netflix have no problem? Lower bandwidth, perhaps? Netflix always has kind of a crappy quality on tv…
I kinda figured that casting would have some weird network routing but I didn’t really think it would go all through my phone.
What is the solution then, from here? That TV I have only had Chromecast, it’s a 10 year old Samsung without “smart” TV crap (which I like)
How would I get jellyfin on my tv?
The Chromecast with Google TV is less than $30 right now and runs Android TV. There is a native Jellyfin app for it. Or get a Shield TV. Or Roku. Or Kodi.
If Netflix always has crappy quality I’d try lowering the bitrate in the Jellyfin player to a very low value, say 6 Mbit/s or something. If that works bettery your problem is likely a network issue. You could also try connecting a monitor to your server and seeing if a Jellyfin client running on the same machine also has these issues.
Just bought a Chromecast with google TV, I should have it within a few days and then we’ll see how well it works. I’m really rooting for it but it really must work well…
Let me know how it goes! I also bought one as a present for my gf, so I need it to work myself :P
Lol that’s serious, but it’s not too bad.
Your phone can watch netflix / youtube, so it can understand h.264 and probably h.265 too. It receives the stream from jellyfin the same way. The difference with chromecasting is that it then has to relay that stream to the chromecast.
I’m not well versed enough to know if it’s re-encoding for that hop, or passing along a raw copy of the h.264 stream. In any case, the bottleneck is probably the networking capability of your phone - it has to receive the stream and send it back out on the same wifi channel.
The best path forward is probably a laptop - jellyfin has an official desktop client, and it works pretty well, you just need that and an hdmi port.
The only tough part with the laptop setup is the lack of remote control. A good bluetooth mouse should have enough range though.
If your server isn’t already on a wired connection, that would be the first thing. It will ease the burden on your AP. And if you’re still using your ISP’s router, that would also be a good candidate for upgrading. A unifi dream machine is a touch pricy but it’s all-in-one and simple.