SOLVED: Remote access, only video playback not working!

[jellyclip]

I just recently set-up a Jellyfin server on my Asustor NAS, opened the required ports and I'm able to access the portal and watch videos normally when I'm on my local network. However, when I try to access it remotely I can log-in and scroll through my library no problem but when I hit the play button, it endlessly loads (spinning circle).

Could it be a transcoding thing? I converted most of my media to H.,264 for maximum compatibility.

[TheDreadPirate]

Your logs will tell you if it is transcoding. And you can see it in your jellyfin dashboard the playback status of all your clients. It could be transcoding due to the video exceeding the configured maximum Internet bit rate.

What model Asustor? And did you configure hardware acceleration?

Can you upload your jellyfin and ffmpeg logs to https://sourceb.in/ and link them here?

[jellyclip]

I can see this on the dashboard for some videos I'm playing on my local network: "The media is in an incompatible file container (MKV, AVI, WMV, etc) but both the video stream and audio stream are compatible with the device. The media will be repackaged losslessly on the fly before being sent to the device." I can't get the video to play remotely so I don't know the status.

I haven't set a bit rate limit for the users.

Asustor AS3302T, I've set hardware acceleration to none.

I've added the logs on Pastebin because sourcebin kept giving me errors, had to trim the server log to keep it under the file limit.

ffmpeg: https://pastebin.com/ddceb2Cq

[TheDreadPirate]

Short answer. Your Asustor isn't going to cut it since it has an ARM based CPU.

The only logs that indicate you successfully watched a video were direct plays. All the videos that called for a transcode don't have subsequent logs indicating you successfully started video playback.

Your options are

1) Re-encode your entire library so it is more likely to direct play on your client devices
2) Use another device as the server and use your Asustor NAS as storage

[jellyclip]

Kinda figured that my NAS specs aren’t great, Option 1 is the one I would go with. Like I mentioned before, I did use Handbrake to convert a lot of my media to h.264.

The only issue here is, I still see errors like:
1. The media is in an incompatible file container
2. The video stream is compatible with the device but has an incompatible audio format or number of audio channels.

This makes me think that I haven’t been using the right Handbrake settings to encode my media. Is there a noob friendly guide / list of setting I should be using?

[TheDreadPirate]

Here is a good starting point.  See my screenshots below.  If you have an NVIDIA GPU, it will have a listing for "H.264 (NVENC)".

   
   

[jellyclip]

Hey, thanks for the screenshots. I have been using NVENC h.264. I think most of my media is now h.264 and those are the files I was attempting to play.

Update on the original issue, I am now able to play video outside my local network. Thank you for all the help, I just had to take a break from troubleshoot to figure it out.

I was using a VPN to simulate being outside the network but I guess that doesn’t work for reasons I do not understand lol. I switched to mobile data and it worked fine.

But it only works on iOS devices. Doesn’t work on the native android and android TV app, I’ve tried using an external player (MX, VLC). The only way I could get it to work was to install JellyCon on Kodi. Could you think of a reason why the native Jellyfin app wouldn’t work on Android devices but the Kodi app does?

[Deleted User]

Could you think of a reason why the native Jellyfin app wouldn’t work on Android devices but the Kodi app does?

because kodi does not use exoplayer most likely, it is able to support codecs that android does not support

this is true for me on my devices, kodi will play dolby vision profile 7 where android will not, kodi will play DTS where android will not

android is compiled with an ffmpeg library, support for things is determined by who compiles it usually on android they focus on support for streaming platforms
- streaming platforms do not serve DTS or TrueHD so support for them isn't required, those services lean on DD+ EAC3

kodi is also compiled with its own ffmpeg library but is compiled to support as many things as possible as well the video player core is designed this way


comparing what kodi will do to what the native android app will do would require more in depth client logs

the only way i am familiar with getting logs from the jellyfin androidtv app is by using adb logcat - perhaps someone can fill in a more user friendly method

[TheDreadPirate]

Make sure you are also re-encoding the audio. AC3, DD, and DTS may not play on a lot of devices. Transcoding audio isn't super demanding, but we are trying to avoid transcoding of any kind. Stereo AAC plays on everything.

[Deleted User]

there is a PR for the android tv app which i have tested which
- allows you to select which audio codecs your device can play
- allows you to select which audio codecs that the unsupported ones will transcode to

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-and.../pull/3110

it works great for me, i am able to ask the jellyfin server to transcode all DTS audio to EAC3

if it would be agreeable i would be able to provide a debug build from that branch for testing purposes
- compiled from https://github.com/t0mas/jellyfin-androi...references

i am not sure if this breaks any policies since i am not officially a developer with the project