SOLVED: Movies dropping frames during direct playback

[Shirtninja]

I made the switch to Jellyfin about six months ago from emby and have run into an issue with dropped frames on random movies using the Roku app.  Some movies will play fine and others stutter so badly due to dropped frames that the movie is unwatchable. After doing some more digging when playing through Chrome or Vivaldi web browser (chrome based) on my PC or phone I have the same issue with dropped frames.  When playing through the Firefox I do not experience dropped frames.  In each instance the movie is direct playing and the movies that drop frames do so on my Roku's and Chrome based browsers.  So far the only fix I've found is to remux the movies using MKVToolNix which solves the issue.

Does anyone have any suggestions to correct this issue without remuxing all my movies?  It is a little maddening how random the issue seems to be when they played fine using emby.

I have Jellyfin running in a docker container with hardware encoding enabled through an Intel CPU and am happy to provide any details needed to troubleshoot this issue.

[TheDreadPirate]

Firefox does not play HEVC, period, AFAIK so it may have been transcoding. Your solution of remuxing tells me that the file was probably borked (not uncommon). Remuxing regenerates "packet time stamps" and various other non-video/audio components of the container that coordinate video/audio timing, which is often the cause of otherwise unexplained stuttering or dropped frames.

[Shirtninja]

Firefox does not play HEVC, period, AFAIK so it may have been transcoding.  Your solution of remuxing tells me that the file was probably borked (not uncommon).  Remuxing regenerates "packet time stamps" and various other non-video/audio components of the container that coordinate video/audio timing, which is often the cause of otherwise unexplained stuttering or dropped frames.

Thank you for your feedback and I was afraid you would say this.  It's why I held off posting for a few months to play with things on my own.... I will either remux all my rips or take the time to test them individually.

I really appreciate your detailed response!

[ThomasPGH]

There's a little trick if a film needs transcoding and the host machine is not powerful enough to do it in real-time.
Go to the Dashboard, then Playback, Transcoding. Almost at the bottom there's a setting Throttle Transcodes. Make sure it's not checked.

When you watch a film next time, start it, then take a break until it is transcoded far enough to be played without cutting out. You can see the transcode progress in the dashboard and assess how far you need to go, i.e. how long your break should be.

This is probably much easier than remuxing all your films. You may even get better hardware in the future, at which point all this conversion work would have been wasted.

[Shirtninja]

There's a little trick if a film needs transcoding and the host machine is not powerful enough to do it in real-time.
Go to the Dashboard, then Playback, Transcoding. Almost at the bottom there's a setting Throttle Transcodes. Make sure it's not checked.

When you watch a film next time, start it, then take a break until it is transcoded far enough to be played without cutting out. You can see the transcode progress in the dashboard and assess how far you need to go, i.e. how long your break should be.

This is probably much easier than remuxing all your films. You may even get better hardware in the future, at which point all this conversion work would have been wasted.

Thanks, I will test that too.

Currently I have an Intel i5-8500 with Quick Sync enabled in Jellyfin so I doubt it is a hardware issue.  I would assume it is more likely the video files or possibly something I setup wrong with the software.