SyncPlay

[douglasparker]

Hey,

I have a very large group of friends and family that have finally made the move to Jellyfin and abandoned Plex.

Everything has been great so far, and any gaps in client support has been filled by the mobile apps Cast and AirPlay functionality. Great job Jellyfin team!

A major pain point for us has been SyncPlay. I've seen users post on reddit that they do not have issues with it, but our experience with SyncPlay has been a nightmare.

Currently, even clicking the SyncPlay icon in the browser tries to throw us into the last movie we watched and Jellystat reports that it's started playing over 70 times...

I checked GitHub and it looks like there are a host of SyncPlay bugs that need addressed: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/iss...n+syncplay

This issue seems to be closely related to what we are experiencing, except we can't fix it at all and now SyncPlay is bugged completely: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/8140

This issue is another major concern of ours, since we use Cast / AirPlay to bridge the gap for client support and SyncPlay is extremely important to us: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5525

Everything else is running flawlessly from what I can see. SyncPlay just seems extremely bugged.

Will this be addressed soon or is SyncPlay abandoned? This is a very important feature for us.

Thank you!

[T.S. Vaidyanathan]

I am facing the First Version bug. It is infuriating.

[douglasparker]

So previously I had major, major issues with SyncPlay. However, it's working flawlessly now for some reason.

I'm not sure if it's because something was fixed or if I had maybe forgotten to set a Internet streaming bitrate limit (My ISP is still working on midsplit and highsplit for better upload speeds). That or I misread the setting and set the internet streaming bitrate limit to my maximum upload speed rather than what I want per client.

My recommendation for anyone having issues is to ensure your web socket is configured correctly if using a reverse proxy and that you set an internet streaming bitrate limit if you have limited upload speed or many clients trying to stream at once.

[douglasparker]

Just an update: I spoke too soon. It's still having major issues especially the more people that watch. Unfortunately, I can't recommend Jellyfin until SyncPlay is either fixed or rewritten.

[TheDreadPirate]

Just an update: I spoke too soon. It's still having major issues especially the more people that watch. Unfortunately, I can't recommend Jellyfin until SyncPlay is either fixed or rewritten.

Unlikely to happen any time soon.  The dev that add the feature is no where to be found.  There isn't a lot of documentation in the code for the remaining devs to try to figure it out.

[mudpoet]

This is basically the only thing keeping me from switching away from Plex. I use Plex's "Watch Together" feature every single day.

[douglasparker]

This is basically the only thing keeping me from switching away from Plex.  I use Plex's "Watch Together" feature every single day.

Yeah, same here. It’s extremely important to my friends and family.

I’m surprised this isn’t something that the majority use. Streaming over Discord is not exactly a quality experience.

I like to be able to be in a Discord call on my phone while watching something with friends, while also enjoying the home theater experience on the couch.

[niels]

Screaming "this is keeping me away from Jellyfin" doesn't help at all. We have tons of users without any SyncPlay issues, you gotta be a bit more specific in what is going wrong. We have a big team of contributors and if there is a clear issue description with reproducible steps the changes of it getting fixed are high.

[douglasparker]

Screaming "this is keeping me away from Jellyfin" doesn't help at all.

This isn't my intention. I linked to numerous bugs and have communicated about it quite a few times on Discord, including going into details about server specs, network conditions, web server configurations, etc.

We have tons of users without any SyncPlay issues, you gotta be a bit more specific in what is going wrong. We have a big team of contributors and if there is a clear issue description with reproducible steps the changes of it getting fixed are high.

This is simply not true, it is well known that there are major issues with SyncPlay. People have been discussing it for years, and nothing has been done to resolve it. I myself have dedicated time to debugging to try and assist in finding a solution, but I am told that nobody is taking ownership of the current SyncPlay code and it will likely NOT be fixed unless we do it ourselves.

That said, I know everyone here is a volunteer. I know there is a lot of work to be done, and nobody is being paid to do it. So I do not blame anyone, especially for a free offering such as Jellyfin-

That said, many people have tried assisting in debugging and nobody has seemed to want to fix it- So I highly disagree with what you said about the chances of getting it fixed being high.

If you personally want to take accountability for fixing SyncPlay- or someone else on the dev team, I would be more than willing to work with you all to fix SyncPlay. Please let me know where we can discuss the matter and I will make sure that I provide everything you need to debug.

EDIT:
Seems like you're aware of a lot of the issues people are having as well-



Once again, let me know if you want to take charge and help get this fixed for everyone. I personally would gladly pay money to have this addressed. If there is a way we can fund this, we can discuss that too.

I've just seen this discussed for years and it doesn't seem like the chances of getting it fixed are high, as you said.

EDIT:
For full transparency, I've been ignored as well as many others on those GitHub issues. Looking forward to the high likelihood of getting this fixed. If we can get communication from the dev team we can get them the info needed, but nobody responds and stalebot just marks the issues as stale.

[niels]

Look, I didn't say we're not aware of the issues. We know they are there. But they are not that significant as most users make it appear to be. SyncPlay works fine in a lot of cases. Only when it breaks, it breaks hard, we know that as well.

The unfortunate part is that we want to fix it but most of the server team members don't have the time to invest in it or don't care about the feature (which is fine). I'd love to fix all the SyncPlay issues myself but I also don't have that time (I'm primarily the maintainer for the Android apps, all other stuff I do are "extras").

My message from a month ago that you digged up was in a reply to someone trying to figure out how SyncPlay is implemented to potentially work on fixing it. I'm not sure what the status of that is now.

Regarding the stale issues, we have created a triage team a few months back that are actively helping out with the issues on the server and web client repositories. This team tries to make sure invalid reports are closed (e.g. configuration issues) and valid reports are reproducible/confirmed. If you think they wrongfully closed an issue please let them know (with as much detail as possible), if an issue was closed as stale earlier; please recreate, as our issue template has changed.

Regarding my previous comment in this thread, it wasn't directed at you but the other commenter.