This is something that has been increasingly prevalent with my server, for the longest time I could torrent, have two people watching and everything’s fine, but lately, especially with specific shows, it will take upwards of a minute for a show to start.
I’ve looked into it and the culprit is ffmpeg most of the time, I assume this has something to do with the specific files not having transcoding “baked in” but I don’t know enough to know if that’s the case. Can anyone help me optimize my pipeline at all?
What is the client situation?
The easiest fix is to find a client that can direct play all of your files and take transcoding out of the equation. Ugoos am6b+ as an example but if you don’t need Dolby vision there are cheaper options that are easier to configure with native jellyfin clients (instead of coreelec/kodi). Or if you need av1. But this needs to be done per user and costs money
Alternatively what is your hardware? Do you have intel quick sync video? If so do you have hardware transcoding setup? Like if you have Jellyfin setup in a docker are you passing through the igpu to the container? And if you’ve done that have you set up the hardware transcoding in Jellyfin? What gen cpu and what kind of files?
If you have the transcoding happening on the CPU and not the iGPU (assuming you don’t have a discrete gpu in a mini pc and frankly with quick sync you don’t need one unless your cpu is ancient, save the power usage) transcoding will crawl. But if you have quick sync video it should be fine with <4-5 users
So I did actually find and turn on quick sync, there’s still a bit of a delay on the problem show, but it’s like 30 seconds rather than a minute, weirdly though where it was saying “playing directly” earlier, it’s now giving a subtitle error, it’s fine since I’m not using subtitles but still was something I noticed
Subtitles force transcoding a lot of the time depending on playback situation and media. A lot of compatibility issues there - downloaded movies often will have the PGS subs from a bluray, anime can often have ass/ssa, ibx subs, etc plus they all tend to be embedded in the media (and in anime’s case often with extra fonts and attachments).
all of these (basically anything but external srt) can interrupt direct playback depending on users Jellyfin client. Some have better sub support than others, android vs apple vs some esoteric client like webos all have their own niche weirdness. You need to search what the best option is for each users scenario. Like for my users that have apple devices checking this box in settings>playback allows direct streaming of a lot of content:
But for “the problem show” what do logs say? How is it encoded? Quick sync can’t transcode everything. The older your processor the less it can do and niche formats it definitely can’t do at all. Like unless you have a real new cpu (13th or 14th gen) it’s not doing av1 or vp9 content and that’s still getting offloaded to cpu for transcoding. And if it’s some ogg vorbis thing or whatever it won’t work. And do logs verify igpu is being utilized for transcoding/mapped correctly? It can be a bit of a pain in the ass (unless they improved the process, it’s been a while since I’ve had to do it)
Does turning off subtitles at the settings level avoid this? Like if I turn subs off for all users will it stop it?
Until users turn them back on
AFAIK there’s no setting to outright disable subs. Maybe there is one somewhere, or you could strip them from media, but that’s terrible because subs in is always the correct choice. What can help is running the extract subtitles plugin though that won’t help for format.