Slow playback on iPhone

[pnxl]

Hi there!

I own a small Jellyfin instance with a bunch of media. I recently swapped over to using an old phone with Linux to host it. Media playback has been way better and much smoother (coming from an old dual core pentium), and I've been enjoying it so far.

I tried to playback a movie from my phone (iOS 17.3.1), but playback takes forever to start, keeps buffering, and seeking is not smooth. This isn't the case on any other Jellyfin clients that I watch from (Windows+macOS PC, Laptop, Android Tablet), playback is flawless on those devices.

Any ideas? Any response is appreciated!

[TheDreadPirate]

Is the video being transcoded when you try to play a video on the iPhone?

[pnxl]

Nope, all devices are direct playing.

[TheDreadPirate]

What model iPhone? And what codecs for the video?

[pnxl]

I have an iPhone 14, and all the videos are in H.264 AAC.

[TheDreadPirate]

I don't know too much about how Jellyfin works on iOS. On the Android client there is a setting to switch in between the web player and integrated player (exo). Does the iOS client have a similar setting?

Also, have you tried Swiftfin?

[pnxl]

On the Android client there is a setting to switch in between the web player and integrated player (exo). Does the iOS client have a similar setting?

Yep, there is. This is what I see when I switch that setting on:


Swiftfin appears to be working fine.

[TheDreadPirate]

Swiftfin, IIRC, uses VLC as the playback engine and that is probably why it works fine. iOS/Apple devices has some audio codec compatibility quirks and I'm wondering if those are the cause of the playback issues. And since you aren't transcoding there is no way address that compatibility issue.

Are you ok with using Swiftfin?