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?
Maybe if you would tell us a little more about your setup we can help you figure out what the problem is.
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.
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.
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?
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...
What kind of devices are you using for a router and wifi?