[sgc]

I have a problem that it constantly tries to re-encode video that could be played perfectly fine in their player or the mpv shim. I wound up just mounting my remote drives and playing in my local mpv. I don't really use it because of that. Unfortunate because otherwise I love a lot of things about it.

[andwur]

I too have run into this problem on a number of devices. The client's supported codec/media format detection logic appears to be extremely pessimistic. To the point that the mere existence of certain audio track formats and subtitles can trigger transcoding, even when said tracks/subtitles aren't actively used. The same files played via MPV on a file share, i.e. no transcoding possible, play without issue.

I've tried tweaking both the clients and server to be less pessimistic, i.e. see if the active media elements are supported, but even then it really fights it. I think the best approach would be rewrite the clients to adopt a (try || transcode) strategy rather than (guess || transcode), but that looked to be a major piece of work.

[port11]

You can check why it’s re-encoding, there’s some guides out there. In my case it was the subtitles! Turns out Safari can’t handle all types of subtitles. Might be worth looking into it.

[sgc]

Of course I have been down the rabbit hole. The software is wrong. Give me an option to bypass re-encoding, and instead of failing based on diagnostics like it does, just play the darn file the best you can. I only have so much patience and I prefer living with a samba share to play it in the exact same mpv player without problems rather than fighting software over something that is so simple and fundamental to a video player.

[port11]

Yeah, I can 100% understand your frustration. It’s also a bit opaque as to why it’s re-encoding.

That said, we are a family so I can’t get everyone else to stream to mpv, so Jellyfin works better for everyone. mpv is also a great piece of software, plays everything!