Chris wrote:
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Chris wrote:
Thanks for the details — that pattern (TV fine, movies freeze, worse with file size) typically points to one of two things: either Jellyfin is transcoding the movies while passing through the TV shows, or there's an I/O bottleneck on your older hardware during playback.\n\nHere's what will narrow it down:\n\n1. Check Jellyfin logs during a freeze:\nWhile a movie is playing and starts to freeze, SSH into your SparkBox and run: docker logs sb-jellyfin-media | tail -50\n\nReply with the last 10-15 lines from that log. Look for either "transcode" or "direct play" — that tells us if Jellyfin is trying to re-encode the movie or passing it through unchanged.\n\n2. Check your RAID health:\nRun: sudo btrfs filesystem show and sudo btrfs scrub start / (the scrub can take a while, but reply once it finishes)\n\nOld RAID 5 arrays sometimes degrade silently, and btrfs will throttle I/O if it detects errors. That would explain why smaller TV files work fine (less I/O stress) but large movies choke.\n\n3. System load during playback:\nDuring a movie freeze, open another terminal and run: top or iotop — reply with a screenshot or the output\n\nReply back with those three pieces of info, and we can pinpoint whether this is a hardware throttle, a transcoding loop, or something else entirely.