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?
I am using a Raspberry Pi 4 and I am literally streaming 4K VR videos on my Meta Quest 2 without any problem at all, I can’t understand how you can have these problems without misconfiguring something
I don’t think your experience is normal. I have a Jellyfin instance serving media from a NAS; I’m using a dedicated GPU for transcoding. I can play 3 or 4 high-bitrate 4k streams, with tonemapping enabled and burned-in subtitles, and it just works. I have an android phone, two android TV boxes, and my desktop PC. I just click on the media and it plays.
The ONLY issue I ran into is it tries to stream DV content to one of my TVs that doesn’t support DV. I just lowered the bitrate on that device slightly to force transcoding, and it solved the problem.
There has to be something with your configuration that’s causing the issues. My guess would be your GPU; I understand that Nvidia cards are much better supported in ffmpeg. It did take some tinkering to get everything working, but my point is that Jellyfin can be a better alternative than streaming services for the end-user.
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 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.
Sounds like a network problem to me.
Source: am network plumber
I’d think so too but this is an at-home network, were the only two there, there is nothing streaming, nothing in the way, and Netflix, for example, is a breeze.
This is the behaviour I’d expect if you were selfhosting and both the client and server were on WiFi.
There might be nothing else, but WiFi isn’t fullduplex.
With Netflix, it’d hit your WiFi in only one direction.
With self-hosted, if both devices are wireless, it’d be on the WiFi network twice and performance would drop like a brick.
I use an old wifi router, a raspberry pi 4, which accesses an old NAS on wifi, which plays to the TV via wifi. I have a mix of h265, h264, vp9 in various formats from over the years.
I don’t have any problem with streaming (except with exoplayer on my Android phone which sometimes, not always, wants to transcode vp9 YouTube downloads).
I’ve even used it from outside the network in relatively slow internet and it’s okay.
It’s got it’s issues sure, but not clear what that guy is doing wrong!
