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?
You should not be having transcode issues with anything less than four concurrent streams on that server. https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/1ae6683/intel_n100_vs_ryzen_7_1700_1st_gen_an_interesting/
It’s likely that you have hardware transcoding disabled. Enable it, and these issues should go away. This forum post has good settings in jellyfin for an n100, https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-solved-correct-transcoding-settings-for-the-n100-processor
You should be able to find instructions for enabling hardware encoding in your bios by searching for it with your specific device model.
*edit
Handbrake does a bad job of explaining the difference between software encoding and hardware encoding. Or at least, it felt that way to me when I last used it. You likely were trying to software encode your videos, which, while theoretically makes the end result better quality, definitely won’t be quick on an n100. You’ll want to pick the option that has intel quicksync/qsv in it in order to get the most speed out of your handbrake encodes. https://www.reddit.com/r/handbrake/comments/z2m814/comment/kxu2a8x/