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?
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While I have not experienced these issues, it sounds like your problems come from casting your media. Have you tried using a proper Jellyfin client? I primarily access Jellyfin through the Android TV app, or though Kodi, and it has always just worked.
What would be a proper client? This is an older LCD screen that doesn’t have any "smart"capabilities, so I’d have to buy something like an apple tv, I guess? But obviously then an open platform that allows a jellyfin client to run… Any suggestions?
Ive been extremely happy with jellyfin on my Roku 4K stick. Quite fond of it, overall. But for jellyfin the only issue I’ve ever come across was with a maaaaasssive 4K file that saturated my WiFi. I downscaled it a little and back to perfect.
Got a Google TV device, it’s a huge improvement over chrome cast, but still issues. I’ve had multiple movies freeze on me requiring to restart the TV, subtitles many times refuse to load, and still if transmission is running, jellyfin server just completely freezes up, though one should have nothing to do with the other since “server” load is next to nothing
I don’t have any of these problems casting from Android to Roku.
I have an ancient hp proliant with 8gb of RAM and it’s not butter, but not far off it. Something is up. It is excellent software.
Your network flow is from your server, to your router, to your android phone, to your router, to your chromecast. If that’s all wifi, then every frame crosses the air 4 times, and you’re doing transcoding on the phone in the middle.
Casting sucks.
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.
but scrubbing still is SLOW, 10 seconds ahead takes 20-30 seconds to do
Probably because your TV needs the media to be transcoded, but not sure what’s wrong there as it’s much smoother here on a Ryzen 1200 (!), media being read from HDD (!), with no help from a GPU. When you skip ahead to a part that hasn’t yet been transcoded, the process needs to start over basically, and that always takes a few seconds, maybe for keeping a minimal buffer but not sure about that, but it really shouldn’t take that much time.
Obviously JF doesn’t continue where I stopped
Not sure how you kill the app, but if you actually kill it, it has no chance to save where you were if it wasn’t able to do so continuously. These 2 might be implemented differently by the client, so the “success rate” may differ. Though, so far every time I was casting it (not to chromecast, but to various jellyfin clients) it followed nicely where I was, that may work differently in devices made by certain user-hostile companies. I don’t know that.
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.
That’s just resource exhaustion. If your system is overloaded (even if just the media disk’s queue being full) Jellyfin can do nothing with it. Either move other IO-heavy processes off of that disk, or set them to a lower IO priority (or Jellyfin to higher), or try a different IO scheduler, maybe also apply more of these if needed.
System utilization was near zero.
Where do you measure that? Did you look at disk utilization stats? Or how much the CPU has spent on waiting on the disk to respond? This last stat is called “iowait”, you can graph it in e.g. btop/bpytop, or see details in iotop-c/iotop (former of both is better when available, but linux-only tools).
If you are using for server for other things too, you might want to look into a monitoring system with grafana, prometheus and node exporter. It records a lot of different stats, most of which you won’t use, but cpu stats including iowait, memory stats including used and cached, and the like can be very useful in these situations. Sometimes there’s a bottleneck that’s not obvious without seeing how a stat was changing over a longer time or out of context, and depending on what monitoring too have you used so far, it might have not shown you important things like aspects of disk utilization. Enterprise grade drives can also have poor performance in certain situations.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?
I’m honestly sorry for that instead of everyone else. I think it’s just that we haven’t experienced problems like these, and you were a bit harsh, in the sense that you are confidently saying it’s Jellyfin’s fault, where it is probably something else.
If you feel like it, you could keep testing it “in secret” (not from us, from your wife), and when you have fixed it and been going stable for a week or two announce to her that you found the problem, it was on you (if it was), and now it’s much better, and reintroduce it to “production” use.
Though it’s a bit weird that besides perf issues, if I understand right you also have major bugs. If you only tried it with the chromecast, test it with normal jellyfin clients (web client, desktop client, mpv shim, tv app, whatever you like), and see if it’s better there. I suspect it has to do with the chromecast.Try Plex.
I’m doing software transcoding of 4K movies using a Ryzen 3600G, what the hell.
Are you running on Windows or something like that?
Maybe the clients are the problem, but the server should be running great!Ubuntu desktop.
There are loads of other services but they’re on near 0 resource usage as it’s only used for development.
There is transmission with 300 slooow torrents, but I always shut it down before I touch jellyfin because with transmission on jellyfin android app won’t even load the main dashboard.
When there are freezes, I check my machine and it’s not doing much, just tweedeling it’s thumbs.
Subtitles has little to do with that all, but that too is barely functional
I’m a Plex user lurking in foreign waters but even with my Plex server, when I hard wired the computer instead of WiFi it was significantly better. Even if you’re hard wired in it sounds more like network issues than software…
There is a reason that most of us that actually run our own servers keep repeating “Plex”.
Jellyfin is not ready for anything other than pure hobbyism atm. As of this moment, Plex is the only realistic option.
What exactly are you doing with streaming videos that is not “hobbyism”? That is such a weird argument to make.
I mean I have seen some people talking about using Jellyfin in a hotel situation for streaming stuff to rooms or whatever, and its definitely not going to be a smooth experience necessarily. But other than that every other usecase is “hobbyism” and thats not a negative thing.
Hobbyism as in just playing around with the software.
If you want to use it in the real world and share it to real family members and friends, you need to be using Plex.
eh, I have a jellyfin server with family using it, and it works pretty well for my usecase.
Which client are you using? I was having subs issues with the Roku one and switched to the Google TV one. Works good, but lite on features. When I’m remote, I use tailscale to watch 4k videos on my phone no issues.
I only enabled audio transcoding.
I can only assume the primary issue you are having is because of the clients you are using. I run jellyfin in docker on a ryzen 3600x. Database and install files are on NVME drives and media is on a separate NAS on unraid using HDDs. The docker container does an NFS mount between the two. Transcoding is via CPU, no GPU.
I primarily use the nvidia shield app, but also the android app on a samsung tablet and also the app on a sony TV. At my computer, I’m often lazy and watch regular 1080p files on firefox rather than a proper app.
They all work extremely well. Scrubbing takes almost no time, less than a second when not transcoding. Maybe 1-2 second if transcoding. Does not seem to matter is subs are on or not, it works the same. And yes, I’m including 4k files that are 100+ gb in file size with dolby vision and atmos all working.
Chromecasting has always been a bit of a shit show, that is a google issue primarily. As soon as the phone sleeps for a bit, it looses the connection and then the phone remote is no longer synced to where the file actually is. I stopped using that almost immediately and moved the the shield. This has been a limitation of chromecast since its inception, long files always lose connection to the phone unless you use an app to keep the phone screen on the entire time.
I strongly suspect if you move to a shield or apple TV box (infuse app), your performance will be excellent given your hardware.
A few weeks ago I even streamed a 1080p file into a Tesla dashboard web browser. Worked flawlessly. 1-2s lag to start the file at best.
I use finamp to stream music. Playlist management is very rudimentary but the files themselves stream with no issues. Have listened to 100+ hrs so far.
Clients are everything when it comes to the user experience. Native clients on all the TVs don’t exist yet but devices like shield and apple TV provide a great viewing experience on TVs and the android client on my tablet and phone work very well.
In additional to watching at home on LAN, I travel a lot so this setup works extremely well for remote viewing as well (gigabit internet helps with that)
or nas. With a dozen docker containers all fighting over 2Gb ddr3 ram. Jellyfin, without transcoding, as one of those docker containers works great.
Subtitles, tracking prog
Things improved with a Google tv device, though some issues persist. I guess amongst the larger issues is sudden freezes with movies, subtitles many times not working at all, and jellyfin just being dead if transmission is running on the server even though load is next to 0, and one thing really shouldn’t influence the other