Choppy playback/dropped frames.

[Learning_Curve 9]

Hi,

This is a new problem for me. I updated my Linux back around Thanksgiving (end Nov. 2025), and ever since, I've been having problems with playback from my Emby server. If movies or shows will play at all, playback is very choppy with lots of dropped frames. From what I can tell, .mkv files seem to cause the most problems, but it's not limited to those kinds of files.

I get a lot of the "no compatible streams found" messages that I see here in the forums, particularly with movies. Strangely, streaming to my Raspberry Pis running Kodi still works flawlessly in all regards. It's only when playing from my 'daily driver' desktop in Firefox that I have problems. Stranger than that, I can manually navigate to the shared library folders and manually play them using e.g., mplayer, and it all plays perfectly.

I'll admit right out of the gate that the PC I use as my storage/server is old - really, really old - but it was working just fine up until that update in November, and all these same movies/shows played just fine.

I mention that update, because quite a few things changed on both machines:

1. Gnome update;
2. Driver updates;
3. X11 support dropped in favor of Wayland.

I'm more likely to think one of those is problem than anything. I've heard bad things about the new video drivers, but it seems to work fine otherwise.

Attached:

• embyserver log after a restart and a minute or two of playback
• hwdetect log
• lshw for both PCs (zero=server; one=client)
• quick screengrab of stats for nerds during playback showing speed, fps, dropped frames, etc.

I'll just also note that both PCs are hardwired on gigabit LAN - no wifi involved.

If I can provide any other info, just say the word.

embyserver.txt hardware_detection-63904007822.txt lshw-one.txt lshw-zero.txt

[Luke 42077]

Hi, given that this is all direct play it looks like a problem in the browser video player. Can you try chrome and see how that compares?

[Learning_Curve 9]

I had to install Chromium, but yeah, it played flawlessly. Maybe I'll try a new browser profile for that firefox instance. Or even just switch to chromium for using emby..

[brothom 177]

@Learning_Curveconsidering your screenshot shows Direct Play (no transcoding / remuxing is happening), it shouldn't be a timing issue if the server was transcoding. Normally these dropped frames come from network issues ór when the video has specs the player doesn't like (high bitrate, high resolution, etc).

If you had this issue in Firefox, I wouldn't be suprised as Firefox has been iffy lately, CEOs moving out, development being backward and a whole host of ancient bugs re-appearing.
I'd suggest sticking to a Chromium-engine browser for now, i.e. Edge, Google Chrome, Chromium, Brave, etc.

Personally I like Brave because it comes with an integrated TOR Incognito feature, which is nice.

[Shiroyama 1]

What if it was transcoding video, what would then be the main culprits?

[Luke 42077]

On 1/22/2026 at 4:02 AM, Shiroyama said:

What if it was transcoding video, what would then be the main culprits?

For dropped frames? All of the same ones as direct play:

Quote

Normally these dropped frames come from network issues ór when the video has specs the player doesn't like (high bitrate, high resolution, etc).

Ideally the server should be producing something that is compatible but there's always a chance that the h264 profile being used is a little too high. We'd have to go over an example.