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so I'm back with Netflix and Amazon... (lemmy.ca)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by phoenixz@lemmy.ca to c/jellyfin@lemmy.ml

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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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[-] sv1sjp@lemmy.world 26 points 11 months ago

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

[-] notfromhere@lemmy.one 2 points 10 months ago

What’s the format of the videos? I’ve tried everything I could think of to rip and transcode a 3D bluray.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

Basic configuration, I haven't changed much, really. No idea why this is so problematic

[-] corroded@lemmy.world 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

I've tried software transcoding too, not much of a difference

[-] atomWood@lemm.ee 13 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] matey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 11 months ago

I don't have any of these problems casting from Android to Roku.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

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?

[-] BronzedBonobo@midwest.social 0 points 10 months ago

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.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

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

[-] InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works 11 points 11 months ago

Sounds like a network problem to me.

Source: am network plumber

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works 7 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] CarrotBottom@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

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!

[-] makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml 11 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] the_q@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

Oh no Anyway

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 0 points 11 months ago

[-] the_q@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Your problem isn't jellyfin.

[-] matey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 11 months ago

something something airport

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 0 points 11 months ago

Meaning?

[-] navigatron@beehaw.org 7 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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?

[-] Chaphasilor@feddit.nl 2 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

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...

[-] Chaphasilor@feddit.nl 1 points 11 months ago

Let me know how it goes! I also bought one as a present for my gf, so I need it to work myself :P

[-] markkoops@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

suggest buy an apple tv, and grab FireCore's Infuse player (free with a sub for other codecs) Jellyfin has a plugin, heck the infuse player will offer to install it for you.. I direct stream everything 264, 265, AV1 without issue from an I3

[-] CodeMonkeyUK@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 4 points 11 months ago

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

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

I'm not sure what more I can tell. What would be useful for you to know?

I'm not giving up myself and I wrote that message when I was rather pissed off at yet jellyfin again not working.

My server is my desktop development computer, runs Ubuntu Linux, runs a shittonne of services like mysql, apache, PHP, nginx, redis, MongoDB, elasticsearch, it runs chrome and Firefox both with a large amount of tabs, phpstorm, yakuake with about 50 open or so shells... What else..? It runs transmission with ~300 slow torrents doing about 1MB/sec, but I always have to shut that down because with transmission running, jellyfin android app won't even load the main screen, it just sits there frozen. Most services are taking damn near 0 cpu when I'm watching because they're not doing anything.

So with all that I'm using an android phone (OnePlus 8t, also heavy) to stream to a Chromecast 2 device on an older flatscreen TV that doesn't have any "intelligence" sonto speak.

The experience has been crap at best.

I heard something about different casting apps, but haven't looked into that yet.

I am a highly qualified computer engineer, I won't have any trouble doing stuff, it's just frustrating that the logs give WAY too much info that shouldn't be there when all is acceptablr, but when those freezes occur, for example, logs say nothing.

Also the subtitles... That just looks like the dev never tried to test those him/herself because they're damn near useless.

Don't get me wrong, I know it's open source and people work on it for free in their spare time, I have my own OS projects, but I'm just saying, jellyfin as it is now is NOT ready for the general audience.

[-] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 5 points 11 months ago

My server is my desktop development computer.

This alone can be the source of innumerable problems, and not just for Jellyfin. Your workstation should have more than enough resources but using it to host services can create major headaches. You don't want to host a service where the environment has the potential to change frequently, which it will with a dev workstation. I would strongly suggest using a dedicated server for self hosting. Even if it's just a Raspberry Pi. It helps eliminate so many issues.

It runs transmission with ~300 slow torrents doing about 1MB/sec, but I always have to shut that down because with transmission running, jellyfin android app won't even load the main screen, it just sits there frozen.

This is worth investigating. There's a bottleneck somewhere and I doubt it has anything to do with Jellyfin.

Are your services running in containers, VM's, or natively? What does your home network look like? Is everything just running through single a Wi-Fi/Router?

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

All services run natively and are completely idle during streaming as the machine isn't used during streaming. Literally, system utilization is less than 5%, so that can't be the bottleneck. I've thought about hard / soft limits on files that would cause the slowness with transmission, but after some experiments I haven't seen any change...

I've just bought a Chromecast with google TV, maybe the client is the issue?

Still doesn't explain the slowness with transmission though...

[-] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

What kind of devices are you using for a router and wifi?

[-] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 3 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

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

[-] CCMan1701A@startrek.website 2 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] mateomaui@reddthat.com 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] Chaphasilor@feddit.nl 2 points 11 months ago

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!

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

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

[-] Meuzzin@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Sorry to butt-in here, but I have the same processor, and can't seem to utilize it for transcoding. What OS/Drivers are you using? I'm on Ubuntu Server. My thoughts were maybe Ubuntu doesn't recognize the APU, since I don't have X or any kind of GUI installed, as it's a headless server. Tried installing amd-gpu and amd-gpu-pro, but no dice...

[-] Chaphasilor@feddit.nl 1 points 9 months ago

No need for drivers, since I'm not using the GPU at all. It just has enough performance.
I'm running TrueNAS SCALE based on Debian. What do your transcoding settings in JF look like?

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

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

[-] LoganNineFingers@lemmy.ca 1 points 10 months ago

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...

[-] Meuzzin@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

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...

[-] Lem453@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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

[-] markkoops@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago

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

[-] Scary_le_Poo@beehaw.org -3 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 11 months ago

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.