I love Jellyfin too, but there are a bunch of rough edges I run into often, like:
Chromecast support is flaky. Most of the time when I cast from my Android phone, the app immediately "forgets" that there's something playing back on the Chromecast (even though it's still connected to it), so I can't control playback at all. It's also hit or miss if the Chromecast will successfully play the media if Jellyfin decides it needs to transcode it.
So I got a little NUC-like box (Intel N100), and installed Jellyfin on it (it was previously running on an old 2012 Mac Mini running Linux). I connected it directly to the TV and installed jellyfin-media-player on it, set to auto-login and start X on boot, with a minimal session that just runs JMP only in fullscreen mode. I use JMP on my laptop, or the Android app, to control it. JMP will randomly lose its connection to the Jellyfin server (even though it's running on the same machine), and won't try to reconnect, so nearly every time I go to use it, I have to ssh in and restart JMP so it reconnects.
On top of that, I get occasional audio dropouts when watching 4k content, and sometimes see 4k video stuttering (yes, hardware decoding is enabled for playback, and I've verified in the logs that it's being used). At those times, the box is around 40% idle, and intel_gpu_top shows that the decode and render bits have what I think should be more than enough headroom to avoid that sort of thing. I understand JMP uses libmpv for playback, so out of curiosity I tried playing video using mpv directly, and somehow JMP's player uses about 50% more CPU than mpv standalone does, and I don't hear any dropouts or see any stuttering on the same media. I get that a video player that's embedded in an application might have some overhead, but 50% is a bit much.
I get that Jellyfin is maintained by volunteers (I also maintain open source in my spare time, so I know how tough it can be to be responsive to user requests), but these issues are quite frustrating. I don't want to use something closed like Plex or Emby (which may or may not be better), so it's still the right trade off for me. And what it can do is truly amazing. I love that I can play things while I'm on the go, VPN'ing to my home network, and Jellyfin will transcode down to a crappy-enough bitrate to fit within the confines of my garbage Comcast upload speed.
> Chromecast support is flaky. Most of the time when I cast from my Android phone, the app immediately "forgets" that there's something playing back on the Chromecast (even though it's still connected to it), so I can't control playback at all. It's also hit or miss if the Chromecast will successfully play the media if Jellyfin decides it needs to transcode it.
This might be more the Chromecast's fault as I've had a similar experience with Plex.
You should check out jellyfin-mpv-shim, it basically hooks up mpv to Jellyfin's cast system, so you can control mpv from other Jellyfin apps. I have a setup similar to your NUC and it works really well.
Chromecast support is flaky. Most of the time when I cast from my Android phone, the app immediately "forgets" that there's something playing back on the Chromecast (even though it's still connected to it), so I can't control playback at all. It's also hit or miss if the Chromecast will successfully play the media if Jellyfin decides it needs to transcode it.
So I got a little NUC-like box (Intel N100), and installed Jellyfin on it (it was previously running on an old 2012 Mac Mini running Linux). I connected it directly to the TV and installed jellyfin-media-player on it, set to auto-login and start X on boot, with a minimal session that just runs JMP only in fullscreen mode. I use JMP on my laptop, or the Android app, to control it. JMP will randomly lose its connection to the Jellyfin server (even though it's running on the same machine), and won't try to reconnect, so nearly every time I go to use it, I have to ssh in and restart JMP so it reconnects.
On top of that, I get occasional audio dropouts when watching 4k content, and sometimes see 4k video stuttering (yes, hardware decoding is enabled for playback, and I've verified in the logs that it's being used). At those times, the box is around 40% idle, and intel_gpu_top shows that the decode and render bits have what I think should be more than enough headroom to avoid that sort of thing. I understand JMP uses libmpv for playback, so out of curiosity I tried playing video using mpv directly, and somehow JMP's player uses about 50% more CPU than mpv standalone does, and I don't hear any dropouts or see any stuttering on the same media. I get that a video player that's embedded in an application might have some overhead, but 50% is a bit much.
I get that Jellyfin is maintained by volunteers (I also maintain open source in my spare time, so I know how tough it can be to be responsive to user requests), but these issues are quite frustrating. I don't want to use something closed like Plex or Emby (which may or may not be better), so it's still the right trade off for me. And what it can do is truly amazing. I love that I can play things while I'm on the go, VPN'ing to my home network, and Jellyfin will transcode down to a crappy-enough bitrate to fit within the confines of my garbage Comcast upload speed.