I put on an episode of a show I’m watching, and about ten minutes into it, I missed something on screen, so pressed the skip back button on my remote. The spinning loading circle came up, but stayed for a while, and the episode froze at the point where I’d pressed the button.
No problem I thought, I haven’t used Plex for a while, it might just need a little kick. I restarted my fire stick, and restarted the Plex server, just in case. A few minutes later, I didn’t catch what a character said, so I tried skipping back again. Plex crashed again. Another set of restarts and we’re watching again.
About 15 minutes later, the episode just freezes. No error message or warning, just a frozen screen. I gave it a minute and pressed play, and Plex crashed back to the episode selection screen. Pressing play worked again for a few minutes, until I got an error on screen telling me that my network is too slow for the video. It’s a less than 1080p video streaming at 10 Mbps over a gigabit connection. This time, reopening the video took me back to the point of the last issue.
So much for relaxing in front of the TV…
I haven’t had issues this bad, but Plex has been buffering a lot more lately. If moving to Jellyfin didn’t involve new hardware for me, I would have already jumped ship.
Why would Jellyfin need new hardware?
I run plex on a synology nas whose kernel is too out of date for hardware accelerated transcoding in Jellyfin.
I recently went from synology video to Jellyfin cause the last update on synology dont support the video hosting anymore. I run a syn 920. And its sweet only issue so far have been able to use jellyfin to cast to Chromecast.
It’s been about a year since I tried it, so it’s probably worth another. Back then it did OK if I was doing straight passthrough (though CPU load was noticeably higher) but I got a lot of buffering when I’d try to have it transcode anything.
I host quite a few things on it (via docker) so the 920 is starting to show its load. I suspect that and the lack of hardware acceleration are the source of my issues.
I should probably mention i did upgrade it past the supported kernel and doubled the ram, i only host pihole and bitwarden and jellyfin. But docker makes things so much easier and fun.
Can’t you just use a newer kernel?
Wouldn’t this also be a significant security issue?
No, diskstation runs a significantly modified 2.4 kernel. They say they backport CSM mitigations/fixes into their kernel, but community pressure is growing by the year for them to update.
Holy shit, I remember being excited for 2.4 because of iptables. That was over twenty years ago.
Can you elaborate on the Plex issues as of late? One of the guys I share my instance with has reported a lot of buffering that I haven’t been able to reproduce.