I currently have a jellyfin setup running on my pc which I access when away from home by tailscaling into my home network. This works great for my partner and I while we are away from home.
I have given my siblings access to my jellyfin setup as well, and I’ve added them to the tailscale network too. They live in a different country though and have had some latency issues (media buffering constantly) making it kinda suck to use.
I would love to be able to improve this performance but I dont really know where to start. Would this be a bandwidth issue somewhere between my pc, tailscale, my router, their router, and their device? Would this be caused by some setting in my jellyfin setup or in the jellyfin client on their device? I would really appreciate any advice on where I should start to troubleshoot to improve this performance.
When they are streaming is it transcoding?
If not, it should be reducing the stream quality to adjust to the available bandwidth.
If it is, it could be limited to your pc’s available resources. You may want to turn on hardware transcoding.
Jellyfin has logs that will tell you if its transcoding and how well it’s working.
Tailscale does add additional hops to their route and has bandwidth limitations but it should be fine for streaming.
I believe that jellyfin has been transcoding using jellyfin-ffmpeg. I do have logs labelled “FFmpeg.Transcode-…” which seem to look fine. I have just turned on hardware acceleration though. Is that what you meant by “hardware transcoding”?
Ill check to see if the buffering is improved and will let you know how it goes! Thanks for the advice!
Yes, hardware transcoding = using hardware acceleration for decoding/re-encoding the video files. CPUs do it pretty slowly (or they use a ton of electricity if they’re fast enough to do it quickly) but the special decoder/encoder chips on GPUs (including integrated graphics GPUs) can handle that sort of task no sweat in most cases as long as you’ve got it preperly configured.