Seeking Advice on Optimizing Streaming Performance

[marlon98]

I’ve been a Jellyfin user for about a year now and I absolutely love the platform. However, I’ve recently encountered some issues with streaming performance that I’m hoping to get some advice on.

I have a fairly large media library, and I’ve noticed that when I try to stream high-definition content (1080p or higher), I sometimes experience buffering issues. This happens even when I’m streaming on my home network, and it’s becoming quite frustrating.

Here are some details about my setup:

• Server: Running Jellyfin on a Windows 10 machine with an Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB RAM.
  
• Network: Gigabit Ethernet connection.
  
• Client devices: Mostly streaming on a Roku TV and an iPad.
  

I’ve tried adjusting the transcoding settings, but I’m not sure I’m doing it right. I’ve also considered upgrading my server hardware, but I wanted to check in here first to see if there might be other optimizations I could make.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Has anyone else experienced similar issues? What kind of solutions have you found effective?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[TheDreadPirate]

What specific model Intel CPU?

[Cognicom]

1. Are the troublesome videos being transcoded during playback? If so, how badly is the server's CPU affected during transcoding?
    
   
2. You're on a gigabit network, but are the clients connected via ethernet or through WiFi (and in the case of the latter, how good is the wireless throughput to each client)?
    
   

[pcm]

First thing you need to understand is where the bottleneck is... is it the transcoding or the streaming ?

To try and figure this out,
* clear out the transcode and cache directories (You can clear them by going to your dashboard->scheduled task and running the 'clear cache directory' and 'clear transcode directory')
* and try to play the same movie that has buffering issue on the same machine as your server on your server's web-browser ...
* if you face the same buffering issue then you know it's a transcoding issue.
* If there's no buffering issue this time then you know it's a network/streaming issue.

If you find the issue to be a streaming issue then perhaps placing a streaming bandwidth limit would help. (you can set that up in dashboard->playback->streaming)

If you find the issue to be transcoding then here's a checklist for you to go thru ...
1. are you using any hardware acceleration ? If not, then you can follow this guide to enable it https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/admini...ion/intel/
2. if you're not doing hardware acceleration or are unable to then you can try playing with CRF values for H264/H265
3. Make sure your not throttling transcoding
4. Check your CPU usage during the transcoding process vs when your server is idle - if your CPUs are maxing out then make sure Windows power setting is set to 'high performance' (not balanced or low power mode)...
5. Kill an unnecessary processes that might be taking up CPU
6. Consider overclocking your CPUs using this guide -> https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/...guide.html
if all of these fail, then look into getting a GPU and transcode on the GPU.