VC1 Playback Broken?

[seniorm0ment]

Not sure if it's VC1 that's the problem, I don't have any other VC1 files to test with but I have the Matrix triliogy all VC1 and they all have the same issue. When clicking play, the video is all distorted and green and pixelated and literally unwatchable (The video is basically broken). I tested through Jellyfin on both my browser and my phone, both work perfectly fine. It's only when playing on the AndroidTV application that it has this issue.

[anthonylavado]

Have you tested with VLC turned on? Or if it’s already on, with VLC turned off?

[seniorm0ment]

Have you tested with VLC turned on? Or if it’s already on, with VLC turned off?

VLC? I don't know of an option for VLC (Besides "external media player")?
Are you asking me to enable the option to have Jellyfin send the video to an external media player and see if it works there?

[anthonylavado]

Ah sorry, there is VLC built in, but it's only for Live TV. I thought it worked across other media types as well. Perhaps that's an enhancement to make.

[seniorm0ment]

@anthonylavado Why not use Mpv instead of Vlc curiously?

[anthonylavado]

That's a @thornbill question to be sure, but I believe we already had code that we inherited which used VLC, so we updated it and kept that in

[seniorm0ment]

No clue if VLC is the cause of the VC1 issue, lmk if you want me to test anything else?

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On a side note: Don't quote me on this, I may be completely wrong. Don't know a whole lot, but I can't see a reason to use VLC over MPV. I believe MPV handles more than VLC, works a lot smoother and is more minimal. Would definitely be something to look into maybe (Idk how much of a PITA it'd even be to switch over now).

[thornbill]

I haven’t seen much information about building libmpv for Android. It would probably be a significant effort to add support for it. Currently we use libvlc or ExoPlayer depending on the media format being played.

[seniorm0ment]

Idk I don't really know too much about that. I know there was some stuff on mpv-android's git regarding building and I remember seeing some talk about it on Emby's forums at one point. Besides that idk.

Do we know anything about the issue with VC1 though?

[thornbill]

It doesn’t appear to be a supported format for direct playback on Android. Can you check in the Admin Dashboard while playing to see if it is being transcoded? Also if it is being transcoded for web or Android when it works.

[seniorm0ment]

It doesn’t appear to be a supported format for direct playback on Android. Can you check in the Admin Dashboard while playing to see if it is being transcoded? Also if it is being transcoded for web or Android when it works.

I can check tomorrow on Android TV to see if it's transcoding.
But I know for a fact it plays perfectly fine on android (mobile) as well as jellyfin on web client

[ddurdle]

Are you using a firestick? The firesick does not contain the hardware codec licensing for VC1 codec. Therefore, if you try to playback VC1 on a firestick, it will not work. Transcode does not work on Android TV JellyFin app. I opened an issue a while back and it was closed in favour of a voting poll to determine if transcoding support something the community wants.

I don't know why we can't have transcoding support in the Android TV app when the web and android mobile apps have it.

[thornbill]

👋 hey @ddurdle. I don’t recall anything being closed, but maybe I’m missing something. Looking through the backlog I found #112 and #43.

[ddurdle]

If the request is still alive, all the better. I just recall getting an email about "We are moving all feature and enhancement requests to our new Fider platform here. This new platform lets people vote on and better manage such requests." And since my issue #43 was tagged enhancement..... I assumed it was killed and moved to Fider as per the notice I received.

[anthonylavado]

@ddurdle The migration was run on the main repository, as we had ballooned to some 400+ issues. It really helped in the end.

[seniorm0ment]

Are you using a firestick?

No I'm not, I tried it both on a MiBox and Nvidia Shield TV. Same issue. It's definitely a software issue.