So I’ve been trying to use Jellyfin for a long, LONG time now, and I’ve never really been able to use it remotely reliable.
I can go on for a long time about all the problems I’ve faced, lets just say that after years I can still not use it to watch something with the family because there is always something not working, I could start about hardware decoding having worked for a while and then suddenly without explanation no longer working, but lets start with subtitles…
I just want to have subtitles actually load without having to sacrifice a goat to whatever god is out there to have subtitles work. What is the problem that subtitles just 99% of the time don’t work?
Worse, sometimes they work while watching a show, and a jellyfin update comes by and, you guessed it, subtitles no longer work for that show, even though they work for some other movies, sometimes…
I am a software engineer, I do loads of devops, I can find my way around, but jellyfin is just… I dunno what to do anymore. Is there a reliable alternative, perhaps, that actually just works?
I’ve long given up on the dream that I could have something similar to netflix for all my movies and shows that aren’t on netflix, where I can scrub with images, for example, I just want to be able to watch a show with the family with subtitles without fiddling for 30 minutes to try and get it to work.
Current setup is google-tv with 0.17.9 client, and the latest docker server. Shows seem to have okay subtitles on web client, but on google-tv, every time I select a subtitle, I get a “subtitles loading” message, and then 10-20 seconds later a “failed to load subtitles” message.
Anyone?
I had loads of issues when my NAS was the server, but after moving it to a N100 NUC it’s been rock solid.
Playing back on a Chromecast with Google TV.
What are you hosting it on? And is your internal network setup decent?
My setup is way over kill. 32 core CPU, 64gb mem, AMD 7900XT class gpu with 24gb mem, 100TB storage, computer has UTP connection to router, Google TV obviously over wifi. Router is ISP provided but not the problem
Oh wow, well it’s not your server then, and I refuse to believe UTP makes any difference in a normal house.
Just as a fun experiment: do you have the same issues if you use your tablet/phone on the same WiFi?
When you look in the dashboard during playback; does it need to transcode or is it Direct Playing?
Playback currently isn’t a big issue anymore. It was before when everything was WiFi. Then the biggest issues were subtitles, which now seems mostly resolved with 0.18 client.
Now the latest issue mostly is the client/server not automatically selecting the correct language, it always starts with the wrong language which is not critical but it is annoying.
Smaller issues are that for example 0.18 is supposed to have scrubbing with images but that doesn’t work at all on 0.18, and on the web client on my computer, I see a stack of like 8 images on too of eachother, so that really isn’t working well :)
On transcoding: I think most does transcoding as I arr have many many different formats; avi, mkv, mp4, sometimes raw dvd files, etc.
That reminds me: raw blueray files don’t play either, so I have to convert those first manually with handbrake. I take it I can only find info on direct play or transcoding in the logs, or can I find it elsewhere. I typically watch on TV which is far away from the computer, so I rarely check logs during playback
Utp makes all difference when streaming. Computer streams to wifi router which streams to Google tv, double bandwidth. I had loads of issues with that. Calling the computer fixed half my issues
Have you tried Kodi?
I switched to Kodi on my Chromecast 4K to fix most of my video playback issues. However, I still have a few cases where Kodi can’t decode the subtitle track, so I use subtitle edit to extract out the srt. Also, getting Kodi to always play subs is tricky, so I remapped the up key on the remote to always enable subs.
Kodi is also slower to show library updates on start, maybe a minute or so later and then it’s don’t with the sync. Maybe I didn’t setup something correctly… Anyway, give it a try. On my Sony with google tv the jellyfin app is great.
I looked at Kodi and it looks a lot less nice than the kellyfin app. I’d like more something that resamples Netflix. Also read about usability issue with Kodi, like you just said where it works slow to start up. I’ll continue searching for improvements
My jellyflin server is really stable and everything works great, but the “official” clients are really not great. I also had issues with subtitles on Android TV. If the subtitles are so important better find a third party client. Maybe you can use transcoding to fix the subtitles. There are some options, but I never touched them
It depends on the source subtitle. But there is an option in Jellyfin to periodically extract embedded subs from movie files in to separate files, which might work better. I think with the latest update, that will no longer be necessary since they’ve done a lot of improvements around subs.
Man subtitles is one of the reasons I started using jellyfin as I always had problems with them and Plex.
