Jellyfin Web does not buffer ahead for Direct Play

[Abhishek Ranjan]

Hi,
I'm trying to reach out to the community about this problem I've been facing for quite a while.

My Setup:
- jellyfin LXC running on proxmox
- Setup was done via helper-scripts
- Another VM exposes a shared folder via SMB to proxmox root which then mounts it as /media inside lxc

The Problem:
When I'm playing a video, and it's playing as "Direct Play" (as seen from playback info), the jellyfin web client will not buffer ahead. I don't see that little white progress bar which indicates that the video has been loaded until that point.
When a video is being transcoded, it does buffer ahead and I can easily move my video within the area of the white progress bar and play the video without any delay.
My direct streams will often stop, buffer and start playing again. I feel the reason for this is this "pre-loading" not happening as it happens for transcoded streams.

Is anyone else facing the issue, or can help me debug it ? I see no notable things in the log to indicate some sort of failure.

[Fate]

Well it it always buffering then a bigger buffer probably won't help because it would always underflow...

Can you describe which client you are using and how are you connect to your jellyfin instance?
Also what bit rate/filesize does the file have you trying to play?

posting jellyfin logs to pastebin could be helpful as well.

[Abhishek Ranjan]

Well it it always buffering then a bigger buffer probably won't help because it would always underflow...

Can you describe which client you are using and how are you connect to your jellyfin instance?
Also what bit rate/filesize does the file have you trying to play?

posting jellyfin logs to pastebin could be helpful as well.

I checked my link speed and found it to be much lower than expected. Found out that my pfsense had "hardfare offloading" enabled. That has atleast improved the speeds and made things better.
Can you tell me what is the way to increase buffer size ?

[TheDreadPirate]

What is the bit rate of the video and how fast is the network connection? Can you share your server logs so we can see what is going on server side?

[Abhishek Ranjan]

What is the bit rate of the video and how fast is the network connection?  Can you share your server logs so we can see what is going on server side?

Well, I think pfsense was causing much of a bottleneck. I think there are a few default configurations in pfsense which do not work well with all hardware, and that might have been causing the lags. I saw pfsense cpu usage shoot up significantly when more data was being streamed.

Maybe this helps someone somday who is facing the same issue.

[visualblind]

What is the bit rate of the video and how fast is the network connection?  Can you share your server logs so we can see what is going on server side?

Well, I think pfsense was causing much of a bottleneck. I think there are a few default configurations in pfsense which do not work well with all hardware, and that might have been causing the lags. I saw pfsense cpu usage shoot up significantly when more data was being streamed.

Maybe this helps someone somday who is facing the same issue.

Are you familiar with the pfsense open source alternative called OPNsense? If not it might be worth checking out.