Jellyfin: The Free Software Media System

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.

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

Oh no Anyway

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.

Maybe if you would tell us a little more about your setup we can help you figure out what the problem is.

I use an old crappy asustor 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 progress, syncing from trakt, pulling in new shows, movies etc all automatically.

The only issues I've had are from either trying to stream some high BitRate 4k films on my shitty network, or media that requires transcoding that my poor overworked nas can't handle.

Issues are generally hardware, config or media related. Jellyfin isn't perfect, but it's far, far better than you give it credit for.

I have Jellyfin installed on a windows machine with a Ryzen 3 and not GPU on an HDD. No issues with speed at all.

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.

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'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!

If you’re mainly looking for a good way to watch your movie/tv library, separate from content acquisition, just install Kodi on a FireTV stick (edit: or the Chromecast, forgot that as I typed this), and point it at your content hard drive. Install the opensubtitles.com plugin if you need that. (No need to login to it if you’re downloading 10 or less subtitles a day.) Install the Trakt plugin with an account to keep track of what’s watched, in case you ever need to reset Kodi without losing that history, and to sync the watched list between different Kodi apps.

I have Kodi on my FireTv, android tablet, and PC, and for me it all works great with none of the headache I keep reading about Jellyfin. The only concern is having enough storage space on each device for a copy of the library database, since it isn’t on a central server.

Add new content whenever, tell Kodi to update the library, and that’s it.

edit: as a reference point, I have 2230 movies currently in Kodi, and with its database it takes up 1.4 GB on my Fire stick.

—

edit2: I don’t know how jellyfin operates remotely, but one reason I love Kodi is because I don’t need a server when traveling. I have a gl.inet Beryl travel router with builtin USB3 and OpenVPN (or Wireguard)

https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt1300/

and all I have to do is plug my 5TB usb-powered content hard drive into the USB3 port, and point Kodi at the router’s shared drive. The router says it requires 3A but I can easily power it with the drive, and a Raspberry Pi Zero W pihole, off a split usb cable plugged into a 2.4A battery pack if necessary.

(this usb cable: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08596XGMW)

and I recommend this case that can hold both the router and drive: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09C5QSK5Y

Buy a 2nd for a Raspberry Pi 4 in a Flirc case (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WG4DW52) with its own usb drive for wireless torrenting on the go, with a headless hdmi adapter and controlled by RVNC Viewer on my tablet.

constant transcoding is the issue. Doesn't really seem to matter how powerful the server is. I've found the best option is to standardise on a single codec format and a set of bitrates based upon resolution.. EG: older DVD based 720P I use AV1 at 800Kbps.... Then all my clients will direct play

Transcoding the library outside of Jellyfin allowed me to use an 4th gen i3 with 12GB RAM for the jellyfin server itself as it now just streams everything, no transcoding on the fly whatsoever

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

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...

Do you have an Xbox or PS? I grabbed an Xbox Series S to use as my media center (Series S is super cheap). Works quite well...

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

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.