SOLVED: Playback gets stuck with high CPU usage

[robaj]

I'm experiencing an issue where playback gets stuck on my LG TV (using the webOS app). For certain videos, if I play beyond a particular time stamp (or seek immediately to the same time stamp), Jellyfin starts consuming lots of CPU and playback gets stuck. I don't think this is affecting all of the media that I'm attempting to play.

- Jellfin Version: 10.9.6
- OS: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
- Linux Kernel: 6.1.0-1016-rockchip
- Virtualization: Docker
- Clients: LG TV webOS app
- Browser: N/A
- FFmpeg Version: ffmpeg version 6.0.1-Jellyfin
- Playback Method: Transcode audio only, not video
- Hardware Acceleration: none
- GPU Model: none
- Plugins: none
- Reverse Proxy: haproxy
- Base URL: yes - http://server.example-network:8081/jellyfin/ (local network DNS name, with base path handled via haproxy)
- Networking: Bridge
- Storage: local

I've turned on debug logging. From what I can see, there is a regular amount of logging until the problem occurs, after which a very large amount of logs are generated. It looks like DynamicHlsController.GetHlsVideoSegment is called very rapidly for the same two video segments. At this point the playback is frozen on the TV, and this logging continues to come out until the app is closed.

Logs link: https://pastebin.com/45nMAyg2

I can provide more logs if that would help. I'm not sure if there are logs I can get from the webOS app.

Any ideas what the issue is, or what I can do to further investigate this?

[TheDreadPirate]

If its only happening on a particular video, try playing the same video on other clients. What happens?

[pcm]

I mean, you're using an Rockchip ARM based SoC CPU to serve your media that can only consume at most 10W of power at peak performance ...

You cannot be expecting to seek your audio around unless you pre-transcode all your media library and simply fetch and stream that at the bitrate that it was pre-cached.

You should seriously consider upgrading your hardware. Or at the very least install the jellyfin server natively onto ubuntu (no docker) so that you don't have docker take away what little resources you have.

And it may help if you should atleast switch over to a raspberry pi 5 or a rockchip model that has an integrated GPU, which will help with transcoding needs (both audio or video)

[34626]

Looks like Jellyfin is transcoding the media for the LG TV client, my best guess based on your log is that the server is not good enough for transcoding - Please try and install Jellyfin Media Player on your computer and play the same media there and see if the same issue happens, it should not since Jellyfin Media Player very often use direct playback

[TheDreadPirate]

Just realized this was a rockchip. Echoing PCM and 34626, since audio is transcoded on the CPU high CPU usage is expected on a low power chip.

[robaj]

Thanks for the replies, apologies I didn't see them. I think the issue was with the files themselves, they had similar issues on a more powerful machine. In this case I don't think the audio transcoding was the issue, as even the Rockchip was able to transcode the whole ~1.5hrs of audio in around 2 mins. Sorry for the confusion.

[theguymadmax]

Is it a DV/HDR file? Post your ffmpeg log.