Low Frames Issue on WebOS

[Plonker]

I've been having an issue with my LG G5 (OLED65G4PSA) since upgrading my server to Jellyfin 12. Have been using Jellyfin on this television for about 2 years without issue prior. Just putting it out here to see if anyone else has been experiencing the issue, or perhaps make some suggestions? 

For some reason, when playing video there's a regular occurrence where the frame rate of the video is absolutely terrible, like 2-3 frames per second. I could be happily watching a television series and there's like a 50/50 chance the frame rate of the next episode will absolutely tank - usually going back to the menu and launching the episode again resolves it. It happens immediately after loading a new episode, if it plays good from the start, it will continue to play good for remainder of the episode. If it loads and starting playing back with terrible framerate, it will continue like this until next episode. 

This seems to happen regardless of bitrate, I can stream 30 Mbps movies without issue, but then load up an episode of a television show at 5 Mbps and it will be very low frame rate. It's not buffering, or playback being interrupted or pausing, the audio playback is fine, video is just has an incredibly low frame rate. This is using directplay, there's no transcoding of video or audio involved. 

I've spent weeks troubleshooting this and cannot get to the bottom of it. I stream Jellyfin to a number of devices in my household, this is only happening on my WebOS device. I'm certain it's not related to bandwidth - I've tried on both Ethernet and wireless, both experience the same issue with speed tests around 90 Mbps. I've even got a third-party Gigabit USB Ethernet dongle (to avoid the crappy 100Mbit in-built Ethernet) which performs way better in speed tests (220 Mbits) on the television, but this hasn't help. I've enabled developer mode and side-loaded Litefin client and it has the exact same issue as the default Jellyfin client. 

I've captured logs, but I can't see any difference between an episode playing good, and episode exhibiting the problem.

Here's a debug log from Litefin of an episode playing "bad".

https://pastebin.com/xQDde0GY

Happy to hear from anyone who has suggestions, or is experiencing the same sort of issues.

Edit: Just for completion sake, I'm running the server off a modern Windows PC, with 32GB RAM, 2.5GB NIC, CPU and GPU is barely moving, so don't think it's a server resource either.

Thanks.

[TheDreadPirate]

The problem you described is almost certainly a client issue. Possibly just a coincidence with upgrading the server to v12. Their git says to make sure your litefin plugin is updated to v1.12+.

I don't see anything obvious in your Litefin log, but you should report this to the dev's github.

https://github.com/MoazSalem/litefin/issues

[Plonker]

Thanks. I agree it's something client related, as it's not happening on any of my other devices that are streaming from my server, but seems specific to this television/WebOS. That said, I only started using Litefin as a means of troubleshooting as this issue was happening on the official Jellyfin client on the LG App Store. I've now also tried Moonfin on this telelvision, and it is having the same issue as well. It's a real head scratcher. I don't really know enough about Jellyfin, do all these clients somehow use the same WebOS player?

[TheDreadPirate]

Yes. A glimpse at the Litefin code appears to indicate it is using the TV's built in HTML player, same as the official app. Since WebOS is a glorified web browser masquerading as an operating system.

Does this happen with ALL media? Does this happen only when subtitles are enabled?

[cash2nead]

One thing that might help narrow this down is the Playback Info screen in the Jellyfin LG app while the issue is occurring.
During playback, use the remote to navigate to the gear icon in the bottom-right corner and select Playback Info.
It doesn't provide a lot of detail, but it shows:


Direct Play / Direct Stream / Transcode
Video codec
Audio codec
Resolution
Bitrate

Hope it helps.