Rasbperry pi 4 performance issues

[StarfoxHUN]

Hi all! I have my Jellyfin server installed on a Raspberry pi 4. It works great, but it can buffer a lot when certain videos start or even during playback. I assume its because of transcoding, as playing the exact same video trough UPNP or SMB they work fine. So i know that currently hardware transcoding is not meant to work on Raspberry devices, so i wonder if there is anything i can do to make things work smoother. I tired to set every setting on that meant to help avoid transcoding, but it seems i still cannot avoid it in some cases. Is there anything i can do to make thinks work smoother without causing instability? (The server is used by family members too, so i cannot resort to unstable solutions sadly.) Or i have to accept it as a limit of the raspberry devices and have to endure it till i get something beefier?
Thanks for the help!

[TheDreadPirate]

Ideally, you would get a beefier server. The only workaround is to pre-transcode your media on a separate, beefier, machine to the following codecs.

Video: 1080P H264 main profile. High profile, but not 10-bit, is usually ok as well.
Audio: Stereo AAC
Subtitles: SRT

[StarfoxHUN]

Ideally, you would get a beefier server.  The only workaround is to pre-transcode your media on a separate, beefier, machine to the following codecs.

Video: 1080P H264 main profile.  High profile, but not 10-bit, is usually ok as well.
Audio: Stereo AAC
Subtitles: SRT

Thanks for the answer. Sadly I need the original files in the pi too, so this is not really possible, unless there is some script that can automatically do it directly on the pi too (scheduling is not a problem, I have 3rd party program for that). Pre-transcode being slow is not an issue at all, if this works locally. But sadly creating such script is outside of my knowledge, so unless I can maybe ask help with that or ask for directions to where to look, sadly I cannot do this myself. Thanks so much anyway!

[TheDreadPirate]

Tdarr can do automated pre-transcoding.

[StarfoxHUN]

Tdarr can do automated pre-transcoding.

Thanks for the tip, will check it out!
If i may ask, there is no direct Jellyfin integration with Tdarr, i have to run it separately right? And also you mentioned i should transcode to 1080p, do i really have to do it for even 4k videos, if transcode time does not matter to me? I'd like to have the videos kept as close to the original quality as possible.

[TheDreadPirate]

Yes, Tdarr is a standalone app. No, Jellyfin cannot integrate with it automatically, AFAIK.

The point of pre-transcoding is so that the server doesn't have to do real-time transcoding. Keeping the videos at 1080P ensures client compatibility. Some older devices cannot decode higher resolution files.

If you want to keep 4K versions of your movies, what you could do is create separate libraries. One with your original 4K files for playback on clients you KNOW can direct play them. And then a 1080P library with your pre-transcoded versions.

[StarfoxHUN]

Th

Yes, Tdarr is a standalone app.  No, Jellyfin cannot integrate with it automatically, AFAIK.

The point of pre-transcoding is so that the server doesn't have to do real-time transcoding.  Keeping the videos at 1080P ensures client compatibility.  Some older devices cannot decode higher resolution files.

If you want to keep 4K versions of your movies, what you could do is create separate libraries.  One with your original 4K files for playback on clients you KNOW can direct play them.  And then a 1080P library with your pre-transcoded versions.

Thanks for the clarification! In that case, then since the server is the weakest link of my setup, i think i should be fine, or at least will deal with this problem if i ever run into it, which hopefully might not happen. And worst case i can still run the og files trough samba share with VLC. On that point tough, i also enabled UPNP in Jellyfin, shoudnt that also solve this issue too if it ever arises by the client side video player?

Also so srry, but one more thing i'd like to ask related this if you don't mind. Do you maybe know how well pre-transcoding works with the automatic Opensubtitles subtitle downloader plugin Jellyfin has? What i mean is, if i have the plugin turned on meanwhile Jellyfin only has access to the already transcoded files, will the downloaded subs force Jellyfin to re-transcode the video with the subtitles, or that shouldn't be an issue? Its not a big deal, its very very rare i fall back to that plugin, but would be great if i could also make this work too automatically with the right server configuration. Thanks again for the help!

[TheDreadPirate]

The subtitles you get from OpenSubtitles are stored separately from to the video and are, AFAIK, always SRT subtitles. And SRT subtitles should direct play on pretty much every client.