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?
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.
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!