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 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)