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+--- Thread: Episodes won’t start when a series has many seasons/files (/t-episodes-won%E2%80%99t-start-when-a-series-has-many-seasons-files)
Episodes won’t start when a series has many seasons/files - thymon - 2025-08-15
Hello There
,I’m seeing a very strange issue with Jellyfin. I’ve identified what seems to trigger it, but I don’t understand how to fix it.
I have the series “One Piece” and no episode will start playing, whether through the app or the web UI. There’s no issue in Streamyfin—playback starts immediately.
I tried replacing the files. Whether H.264 or H.265, it makes no difference.
I deleted everything, then re-imported only season 1 and everything worked.
I imported season 2—still fine.
Then I slowly imported the remaining seasons one by one.
After a while, the problem returns. Right now I’ve added 10 seasons (out of 21), and at that point episodes no longer start. Nothing shows up in the logs—nothing happens. It still works perfectly in Streamyfin. I tested with direct stream for everything.
If I force transcoding (lower bitrate and lower resolution), playback eventually starts—but only after a long delay. It’s very odd, especially since I have no issues with anything else on the server.
In short: when the number of files in a series gets large, the media won’t start.
RE: Episodes won’t start when a series has many seasons/files - toytown - 2025-08-15
My nephew asked me to get this show and i have up to episode 1071 (all under season 1). Playback starts instantly though, so it doesn't appear like a bug in jellyfin with large shows. Can you paste the transcode log and normal log. It may help identify the issue.
RE: Episodes won’t start when a series has many seasons/files - thymon - 2025-08-15
(2025-08-15, 02:18 PM)toytown Wrote: My nephew asked me to get this show and i have up to episode 1071 (all under season 1). Playback starts instantly though, so it doesn't appear like a bug in jellyfin with large shows. Can you paste the transcode log and normal log. It may help identify the issue.
Thanks for taking this into consideration
I can’t provide the logs because during the infinite loading, absolutely nothing happens in them — not a single additional log line.
I found another user with the same issue here: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-web/issues/5779
It’s crazy that as soon as I delete some seasons, everything plays without any problem...
RE: Episodes won’t start when a series has many seasons/files - toytown - 2025-08-15
(2025-08-15, 02:42 PM)thymon Wrote: It’s crazy that as soon as I delete some seasons, everything plays without any problem...
It could be, as somebody points out in that github thread that it's simply timing out on slower hardware. You could turn on debug logging to see whats going on, it will generate massive files and its best to do so when nobody is using the server. Or you could wait for the next release, it's currently at RC5, so "hopefully" not to far away, maybe some of the code changes fix the issue.
RE: Episodes won’t start when a series has many seasons/files - thymon - 2025-08-15
(2025-08-15, 04:33 PM)toytown Wrote:(2025-08-15, 02:42 PM)thymon Wrote: It’s crazy that as soon as I delete some seasons, everything plays without any problem...
It could be, as somebody points out in that github thread that it's simply timing out on slower hardware. You could turn on debug logging to see whats going on, it will generate massive files and its best to do so when nobody is using the server. Or you could wait for the next release, it's currently at RC5, so "hopefully" not to far away, maybe some of the code changes fix the issue.
On the server side, it’s an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X + RTX 3060 Ti.
On the client side, I tested on a MacBook Pro (M1) and an iPhone 13 Pro Max.
I don’t think this is a hardware issue in this case.
We’ll wait for the new release
Thanks a lot. !!