SOLVED: Feedback -Movie Quality

[Calm-Greg]

I have added Jellyfin to our home network to provide media to our smart android tv's etc. The media had many years of history of family images, home movies etc. of the growing family, weddings trips and the like. I had a problem where some movies were heavily buffering in playback on the smart tv's but running okay on a desktop machine. Corrective suggestions online did not help in resolving the buffering. I also tried re-editing the movies to a lower quality format but was uncomfortable on the lower movie quality.

Comparing movies that were working and others buffering I noticed a common element.  Larger MPEG4 codec files were buffering. MP4 files of H264 codec were all working okay. After re-editing the buffering movies to H264 mp4 movies all is working okay.
Result: Lot's of family movies (and laughs) now running on the smart tv's

[TheDreadPirate]

Can you share the codec info for the problem videos? And can you reproduce the problem and then share your jellyfin logs via privatebin.net?

And what are your server specs?

[Calm-Greg]

Found an old "offending" video on my Onedrive, loaded back into Jellyfin with similar results to previous. Video size 2053 MB Codec: MPEG4 mp4v mp4a AAC
Log loaded onto privatebin with access details as below

https://privatebin.net/?8c2984edee9f8db0...nPJ5rtMKFe
Password: Jelly250324

My server running on
Jellyfin 10.10.6 with Linux Mint 22 Cinnamon
Intel i5-4380U
Storage - QNAS NAS TS451D2 Intel Celeron J4025 CPU with 3 x 4TB Seagate ST4000(2DR166) in Raid 5

[Calm-Greg]

Please contact me for anything I missed that can help

[TheDreadPirate]

The files are transcoding to HEVC. Which is very computationally intensive. Especially for your older CPU. You can try disabling "Allow encoding in HEVC format" and it will transcode to H264 instead. Which should transcode much faster on your older CPU.

But it doesn't say WHY it is transcoding. Not sure where you got the codec info from, that that isn't quite what I need. In the Jellyfin UI, if you click on the "..." context menu there is a "media info" option. Click on it and then click on the "copy" icon at the top of the window that pops up. Share that.

[Calm-Greg]

southern nsw beaches 2019
Container: mp4
Path: /Media/SHARE/All_Movies/2019/southern nsw beaches 2019.mp4
Size: 2053 MB

Video
Title: 1080p MPEG4 SDR
Codec: MPEG4
Codec tag: mp4v
AVC: No
Profile: Advanced Simple Profile
Level: 5
Resolution: 1920x1080
Aspect ratio: 16:9
Anamorphic: No
Interlaced: No
Framerate: 25
Bitrate: 32592 kbps
Bit depth: 8 bit
Video range: SDR
Video range type: SDR
Pixel format: yuv420p
Ref frames: 1

Audio
Title: AVID Audio Handler - English - AAC - Stereo - Default
Language: eng
Codec: AAC
Codec tag: mp4a
AVC: No
Profile: LC
Layout: stereo
Channels: 2 ch
Bitrate: 192 kbps
Sample rate: 48000 Hz
Default: Yes
Forced: No
External: No


Trust this helps.
Greg

[Calm-Greg]

Also checked "Allow encoding in HEVC format" is enabled. As well as "Allow encoding in AV1 format"
Greg

[TheDreadPirate]

UNcheck both "Allow encoding in HEVC format" and "Allow encoding in AV1 format".

The older "Advanced simple profile" codec is probably trigger the transcode. Most modern devices do not support accelerated decoding and more devices won't attempt to software decode them.

[Calm-Greg]

Disabled both "Allow encoding in HEVC format" and "Allow encoding in AV1 format". Interesting result with the movie detailed above working fine. Another movie which I loaded to "reproduce this problem" (not detailed above) came back with the original buffering problem however that was a 4k MPEG container which we are pushing hard with. You've also highlighted the slower CPU's as a problem. Our initial intent was to run Jellyfin from within a NAS container which was quite cumbersome with problems. One being the buffering. We then moved to an old Macbook Pro which runs a faster CPU. Believe we have corrected the best we can with our hardware. Now a satisfactory working solution.

Thanks, Pirate, for your help