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?

  • navigatron@beehaw.org
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    7 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.caOP
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      7 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 [he/him]@feddit.nl
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        7 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.caOP
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          7 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…

      • markkoops@lemm.ee
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        7 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