2024-10-17, 03:27 PM
I'm experiencing a Jellyfin bug where a lot of my 4K titles will transcode, using Amazon Fire Stick TV when they should not. However, this question isn't to address that error (my first post had a member link me to an open bug about the issue). Due to the bug, though, with certain 4K titles I must drop the maximum bitrate within the Jellyfin client application. Its default is 100 Mbit/s, but I seemed to have found the sweet spot of 70 Mbit/s, where many problematic 4K titles will transcode to HEVC (even though that's what they originally were?).
Today, I found that my 4K Titanic wasn't happy with the 70 Mbit/s bitrate set by the client, so I dropped it to 60 Mbit/s and the movie started to transcode and play - no problem. Then I tried to watch the movie with director commentary, and once again, the open bug created problems - crashing the movie and/or client altogether. After dropping the bitrate to 20 Mbit/s (arbitrarily chosen...maybe it could have played at higher rates), the movie once again played, transcoded fine, and picture quality and commentary were very good.
In all of the aforementioned scenarios, Jellyfin is transcoding to HEVC for video and ACC for audio. I'm less concerned about audio at this time, since I don't have the best setup, nor do I fully understand all the nuances/differences between codecs. However, I have a nice 4K LG C2 Oled, so naturally I would love the best picture quality. In my opinion, whether the bitrate is 80, 70, or even 20, I'm not seeing a substantial drop in video quality. Should I? I imagine the higher the bitrate the better the quality, but is that not true? What even is the ideal bitrate for 4K streaming?
Today, I found that my 4K Titanic wasn't happy with the 70 Mbit/s bitrate set by the client, so I dropped it to 60 Mbit/s and the movie started to transcode and play - no problem. Then I tried to watch the movie with director commentary, and once again, the open bug created problems - crashing the movie and/or client altogether. After dropping the bitrate to 20 Mbit/s (arbitrarily chosen...maybe it could have played at higher rates), the movie once again played, transcoded fine, and picture quality and commentary were very good.
In all of the aforementioned scenarios, Jellyfin is transcoding to HEVC for video and ACC for audio. I'm less concerned about audio at this time, since I don't have the best setup, nor do I fully understand all the nuances/differences between codecs. However, I have a nice 4K LG C2 Oled, so naturally I would love the best picture quality. In my opinion, whether the bitrate is 80, 70, or even 20, I'm not seeing a substantial drop in video quality. Should I? I imagine the higher the bitrate the better the quality, but is that not true? What even is the ideal bitrate for 4K streaming?