I use Jellyfin at home for serving up most of our media - movies and shows etc.
My dream is to have a GPU capable of transcoding any and all of our media for smooth playback on any device... Now, I thought I'd have that by now with my Nvidia Quadro P400 however I have issues left and right with 4k content.
What can I do to still use Jellyfin but get smooth playback?
THe first answer is figure out why I suck with GPUs, but pausing that there's shorter solutions -> namely, use a media player that's compatabile with the encoded content!
VLC
I'll keep this one short - VLC is great and if you don't need a netflix like experience, I'd recommend just using it to browse your network drives and play whatever you have
Jellyfin Web Player
This is the reason I'm writing this post... the web player is great but not everything is supported on all devices
Jellyfin MPV Shim
This cross-platform cast client is my answer now. You can find the project here
The installation instrauctions are super straightforward for Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.
I'm on Linux and so my install went like this:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mpv
pipx install jellyfin-mpv-shim
pipx inject jellyfin-mpv-shim pystray
#profit
I used pipx to install the player as I prefer it for stand alone utilities over pip installing anything globally.
Afer that I just start the player at the terminal with jellyfin-mpv-shim
Then in the web browser I can cast my content to the player and bypass the web player (and thus solve much of my transcoding issues) trivially!