Jellyfin: Can I disable HEVC playback on ONE device?

iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 19 points –

So, the issue at hand is, I have a Chromecast 4K with Jellyfin Android TV on it. And most of my library is x265/HEVC. But, whenever playing from this specific device, it will natively take HEVC, but with exoplayer library it plays kinda like a slideshow, at about 5-10FPS. Choosing VLC should be ok, and forcing a transcode will result in a perfectly playable x264 at 24-30-60FPS or whatever is needed. But x265 with the default exoplayer seems to be a struggle. Is there a way either in Jellyfin Android TV or in the server, to specifically disable x265 playback, but only on this device?

9

You can try to make an additional "user" that the TV uses, and set user specific transcode options.

Thanks...I was looking onto that, but I don't think I've seen the option to always transcode x265 back to x264...Unless the device truly can't. But if it can decode, it's preferred, and I'm not sure there's an option to change that.

I am not sure about this and cannot check myself because my server died last night :( but... I know that you can restrict certain functions for different users (log in as admin and go to Settings/Users). You could check if it's possible to disable x265 playback for a user, then create a new user that you use exclusively to log in on that device.

I didn't see an option to disable x265, sadly. There's a bunch of transcoding options, but seems this wasn't considered, unless the device didn't support it.

If you set the bitrate in the player below the bitrate of the video, it'll force Jellyfin to transcode. You can set Jellyfin to only ever transcode to h264, so that should work.

Thanks...but I don't want to block all other users/devices from using x265 just because that one single device :(

It won't block them. It just won't transcode to h265. It'll still direct play h265 wherever appropriate