New user quite confused

[Franco Dix]

Hello,
i've just moved my setup from a minidlna installed on a openwrt router to jellyfin under a VM in proxmox.
The use case is streaming my movies over dlna to (primarily) my Samsung TV (quite recent S95B)
With minidlna i had little-to-no problems (just expectable performance problems, given the hosting on a router)
With jellyfin i'm finding always new problems. The Samsung profile does not support for example HEVC (dunno why). Had to modify it manually. Lately, i'm fighting with SUBTITLES!! With minidlna never had a problem, but now every time the video has a "not plain" subtitle (for example ASS) there's no way to stream it, it decides they are not supported and tries to transcode it.
I'm confused because it is crystal clear that jellyfin is A LOT a better piece of software than minidlna, so i'm sure i'm just missing something, but it can't be that hard to get a dlna stream to work..
any hint? it seems it isn't even possible to set it to JUST STREAM THE DATA and let the client decide if it can decode it..
Thanks

[tmsrxzar]

the server usually just does what the client requests it to do; what client are you using?
i assume it's not jellyfin for tizen on the tv https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen

[Franco Dix]

it's not, it's the samsung tv client for dlna, the same i used with minidlna, i'm really not looking for something strange, but at least the same level of streaming i had with mini dlna.
i'm not sure about "the server does what the client requests"
For example, the samsung client DOES support HEVC video streaming, but i had to manually edit the samsung client profile to get it to be streamed and not transcoded. And i could see video with ASS subtitles with minidlna, just can't understand why i cannot with jellyfin..
thanks

[TheDreadPirate]

Does your Samsung TV run Tizen? If so, there is an actual Jellyfin client for that. Requires a bit of effort to install though.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-tizen

[Franco Dix]

i understand there is a samsung client, but i'm not looking for more problems
my point is: the standard client is not perfect, but is able to play movies with subtitles correctly (i did it with a minidlna server), if with jellyfin i cannot there is something wrong either in me not understanding how to setup jellyfin or in jellyfin not being a good dlna server (quite sure it's the first lol)
or maybe jellyfin does not want to be a good dlna server, this would be ok, but is this the case?

[TheDreadPirate]

FWIW, DLNA is not the "standard client" since Jellyfin does not maintain it. We just try to offer some sort of support for it. DLNA is obsolete and has been abandoned (2017).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DLNA#Histo..._companies

DLNA profiles for transcoding are jank and hard to get working correctly.

[Franco Dix]

DLNA is not the "standard client" since Jellyfin does not maintain it.  We just try to offer some sort of support for it.

Thanks for this, so probably Jellyfin was not the best choice looking for a dlna server and this is definitely my fault..
Since i could get videos with ASS subtitles to be played on Samsung TV (again, manually editing the profile..) just wondering if there is a way to enhance also the " VideoLevelNotSupported " error i'm getting for a video i viewed multiple times served by minidlna (a plain 720P h264 video)
thanks

not getting much more info from the log

Code:

[2024-01-14 15:46:15.889 +00:00] [INF] [81] Emby.Dlna.ContentDirectory.ContentDirectoryService: StreamBuilder.BuildVideoItem( Profile="Samsung Smart TV", Path="/mnt/Media/Video/Test.720p.mkv", AudioStreamIndex=null, SubtitleStreamIndex=null ) => ( PlayMethod=Transcode, TranscodeReason=VideoLevelNotSupported ) "media:/videos/3908483c-aa2e-8b61-4cb7-75eab9676d75/stream?MediaSourceId=3908483caa2e8b614cb775eab9676d75&AudioStreamIndex=1&api_key=<token>&RequireAvc=false&Tag=cd54db87dc71beb37b95efdeb51feab3&TranscodeReasons=VideoLevelNotSupported"

[TheDreadPirate]

Do you have transcoding setup?

[Franco Dix]

as far as i have understood there's no way to tell jellyfin to do not transcode, am i wrong?
so when it decides it is needed, it transcode.. the point is that it should not be needed in this case

[TheDreadPirate]

If you have the capacity to transcode, it should still be set up.