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Hi, as the title says, when streaming to the jellyfin app an a fire TV, the video freezes every two minutes. This happens when direct streaming, so it shouldn't be a transcoding issue. Useing the website it works just fine. Any idea how I can find out what this is?

Edit: I just noticed, when forcing transcoding by limiting the quality (Bitrate) on the client to lower values, it does not freeze...

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Hi,

Every time it happened to me was either transcoding, either a real poor network speed.

I would double check the transcoding option

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Checked on transcoding, it happens on direct streaming....

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There is an option to disable transcoding completely, try that. Also check is it working with subtitles disabled.

I used to have issues sometimes when I had rpi4 as media server

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

tried with transcoding disabled, no joy, still freezes. Subtitles were also disabled, I rarely watch with subtitles. Edit: I just noticed, when forcing transcoding by limiting the quality (Bitrate) on the client to lower values, it does not freeze

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

just fyi, direct streaming isn't really direct streaming as you may think of it if you have specified samba shares on your nas instead of something on the vm running jellyfin. it will still pull from the nas into jellyfin and then http stream from jellyfin, whihc is super annoying.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How is that annoying and how else would you expect that to function?

If the data is local doesn't it still stream over http?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

jellyfin has a spot for each library folder to specify a shared network folder, except everything just ignores the shared network folder and has jellyfin stream it from https. Direct streaming should play from the specified network source, or at least be easily configurable to do so for situations where the files are on a nas seperate from the docker instance so that you avoid streaming the data from the nas to the jellyfin docker image on a different computer and then back out to the third computer/phone/whatever that is the client. This matters for situations where the nas has a beefy network connection but the virtualization server has much less/is sharing among many vms/docker containers (i.e. I have 10 gig networking on my nas, 2.5 gig on my virtualization servers that is currently hamgstrung to 1 gig while I wait for a 2.5 gig switch to show up) They have the correct settings to do this right built into jellyfin and yet they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory (a common theme for jellyfin unfortunately).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

My dude. Even 4K video is ~50mbps, you don't need to worry about this as much as you do.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Edit: whoops, just realized you said freezing not crashing, and probably have a separate issue. I'll leave this here in case it helps anyone that finds this thread with crashes a couple minutes into videos.

Had this issue ages ago, then my dad did too a year later on a different client version. Manually changing the "preferred media player" option fixed it on my firestick 4k, 4k Max, and my dads standard firestick.

Jellyfin app>settings menu>Playback>Video section>preferred media player>libVLC (in my case, Exoplayer seemed to be causing the crashes approx 2 years ago but you can try both, I just tried exoplayer again and it doesn't seem to be crashing either when set manually now so it may have been patched)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What is the bitrate of the file and what is the bandwidth of your router?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Bitrate varies, some files work, some don't. Even in one season of a show episode 1 streams perfectly fine, episode 2 freezes every 2 mins.
Bitrate of a file is around 8Mbps, local bandwidth is 1Gbps.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

What are the bitrates, codec, and containers of those 2 files?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Maybe its due to a slow connection?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

you could double check the codec with mediainfo. also check it is mp4.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

container is mkv, codec says AVC

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

that surely is the issue. you can convert it to mp4 with ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i input.mkv -c copy output.mp4 If you want to keep subtitles this will probably work: ffmpeg -i input.mkv -map 0 -c copy -c:s mov_text output.mp4

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Out of curiosity, why would that be a problem?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

in my case if I use mkv it starts transcoding and mp4 works fine on every device (desktop, android app, Chromecast, browser)