Jellyfin crashing on Fire Stick app

[notepro]

I am running Jellyfin server on Ubuntu.  I have a Fire Stick on my main tv where I have downloaded the Jellyfin app (0.16.6 version).  I have tried a few movies and they run fine.  I am using Exoplayer as my video player as the other one works but hitches and skips badly.  Two of my movies (the first two Hobbit movies) try to play for like a second and then quit with the "Too many errors, I gave up" message.  So when I checked the logs, here is what I found:

[2024-03-18 10:51:19.598 -04:00] [INF] User policy for "John". EnablePlaybackRemuxing: True EnableVideoPlaybackTranscoding: True EnableAudioPlaybackTranscoding: True

[2024-03-18 10:51:19.598 -04:00] [INF] StreamBuilder.BuildVideoItem( Profile="AndroidTV-ExoPlayer", Path="/media/library/Media/Movies/The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey (2012).mkv", AudioStreamIndex=null, SubtitleStreamIndex=null ) => ( PlayMethod=DirectPlay, TranscodeReason=0 ) "media: /videos/73b02627-3691-06b3-2ed5-5e10056a9350/stream.mkv?MediaSourceId=73b02627369106b32ed55e10056a9350&Static=true&VideoCodec=h264&AudioCodec=dts&AudioStreamIndex=1&api_key=<token>&Tag=d2cd8250e9101ec9b327b1462fa3d7d5"

[2024-03-18 10:51:21.160 -04:00] [INF] Playback stopped reported by app "Android TV" "0.16.6" playing "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey". Stopped at "0" ms

Any idea what this is telling me? Thank you for any help.

[TheDreadPirate]

On Firesticks, I generally recommend libVLC over exo. For some reason exo on FireOS doesn't properly detect when transcoding is needed. When you say it hitches when using libVLC, is it transcoding in those circumstances? What are your server hardware specs?

[notepro]

Server is an old Phenom II cpu so its dated. I only intend to Direct Play and not to transcode. I know on Plex it Direct Played all the movies no problem. The best way to describe the hitching is like every 2 seconds it pauses, then plays, then pauses, then plays and so on.

Can Plex direct play dts audio but jellyfin can't? I ask becuase it looks like both Hobbit movies contain a dts audio track.

[TheDreadPirate]

Jellyfin can, but its possible the client is trying to downmix or something and the audio is being transcoded. You can configure Jellyfin on Android TV to passthrough both Dolby and DTS audio.

Can you share your logs with us via https://sourceb.in/ ? If there are ffmpeg logs, share that too.

[notepro]

https://srcb.in/zEfIIcKEKn

This is the part of the log where it was throwing up the errors.

I scanned through the ffmpeg log but saw nothing mentioned of where the Hobbit movies played.

[TheDreadPirate]

Can you share the media info from the Jellyfin web UI of the problem movies? And the specific Firestick model.

[notepro]

Not sure what you mean by "the media info from the Jellyfin web UI". How would I find that info out? The movie is a Bluray rip in mkv format. The fire stick is Fire TV Stick 4K Max.

[TheDreadPirate]

In the web UI you click on "..." for the movie and one of the options is "Media Info". This will list out all the codecs and bit rates.

[notepro]

Looks like 2 different audio tracks:

Video

Video
Title: 1080p H264 SDR
Codec: H264
AVC: Yes
Profile: High
Level: 41
Resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Interlaced: No
Framerate: 23.976025
Bitrate: 27723 kbps
Bit depth: 8 bit
Video range: SDR
Video range type: SDR
Pixel format: yuv420p
Ref frames: 1
NAL: 4


Audio 1
Title: Surround 7.1 - English - DTS-HD MA - Default
Language: eng
Codec: DTS
Profile: DTS-HD MA
Layout: 7.1
Channels: 8 ch
Bitrate: 5333 kbps
Sample rate: 48000 Hz
Bit depth: 24 bit
Default: Yes
Forced: No
External: No


Audio 2

Audio
Title: Surround 5.1 - English - DTS
Language: eng
Codec: DTS
Profile: DTS
Layout: 5.1
Channels: 6 ch
Bitrate: 1536 kbps
Sample rate: 48000 Hz
Default: No
Forced: No
External: No

[TheDreadPirate]

Jellyfin should have no problem playing that.

1) Make sure your Firestick OS is fully up-to-date.
2) What are your audio settings in the Jellyfin client? Click on the gear in the top right > Playback, about halfway down will be some audio settings. Is it down mixing? Do you have Dolby/DTS audio passthrough enabled? Does your output device support playing those?
3) We can trying repackaging the files. Sometimes a poorly created MKV file can cause issues with the player.

Code:

/usr/lib/jellyfin-ffmpeg/ffmpeg -fflags genpts -i "/media/library/Media/Movies/The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey (2012).mkv" -map 0:v -map 0:a -map 0:s -map_chapters 0 -c:v copy -c:a copy -c:s copy outputFile.mkv

This command WILL NOT reencode the file. It is just taking the video/audio/subtitle streams and putting them in a new MKV container.