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+--- Thread: SOLVED: Transcoding got stuck turned on for some IP channels somehow (/t-solved-transcoding-got-stuck-turned-on-for-some-ip-channels-somehow)
Transcoding got stuck turned on for some IP channels somehow - macman2034 - 2025-03-17
TLDR, I'm running a Fedora Server 41 with Jellyfin 10.10.6 installed directly (was 10.10.5 till two days ago, but I updated midway through troubleshooting hoping that may help but alas it did not). About a week ago certain IP channels abruptly quit working. I am getting these via Cabernet and a .m3u url, so I tested the m3u url in VLC and no issues. So digging in further, the jellyfin logs pointed to failures around transcoding, but I wasnt trying to transcode these channels. I tried to disable transcoding via Dashboard > Playback > Transcoding but continued to get the same errors as if Jellyfin was choosing to override and transcode anyway. With some AI help from ChatGPT and Grok, it was suggested to try some various CLI commands that were supposed to use direct API calls and force Jellyfin to quit trying to transcode these IP channels, but none worked. Then I read somewhere that I could go to my User's Profile page and there I tried to disable the "Allow video playback that requires transcoding" option and like magic my broken channels worked. But this would mean I couldn't use transcoding if away from home or on less powerful devices, so not a real solution. Finally a suggestion from Grok led me to a fix. Going into the servers /var/cache/jellyfin/mediainfo directory, there are a number of .json files. Opening up a couple and I was able to recognize that each one represented one of the IPTV channels because amongst various settings, I saw familiar URL's I recognized as leading to individual IP channels. So I had to reference my m3u file as I wasnt sure which URL was for which channel, and from within Jellyfin I only knew which channels were affected by channel name. Once I determined with the help of the m3u file, what the URL's of the affected channels were, I was able to search through the .json files back in the /var/cache/jellyfin/mediainfo directory and delete the json files for each of the affected channels. Then I just had to restart JF, and now with my transcoding options in my User Profile and the Dashboard > Playback section both re-enabled, the channels are working once again perfectly.
I wish I could say the exact cause, but I can't for certain. I believe it began when I was away from home and allowed a young niece and nephews to use my phone to watch some shows in the car. I'm guessing there was a poor connection and the server tried to transode to a lower bitrate and somehow those settings got stuck.
Anyway, maybe someone can suggest if this is worthy of a bug report, or at the very least, hopefully this info can help someone else to a speedier fix than me lol
RE: Transcoding got stuck turned on for some IP channels somehow - TheDreadPirate - 2025-03-17
Can you share your jellyfin logs via privatebin.net?
RE: Transcoding got stuck turned on for some IP channels somehow - macman2034 - 2025-03-17
(2025-03-17, 02:28 AM)TheDreadPirate Wrote: Can you share your jellyfin logs via privatebin.net?
Sorry for the delay, its been a long day. Heres a copy of one of the logs I was getting https://privatebin.net/?1c9e33901ea34829#GXJEAzi7HakSxDoQTtFWcNPXqMrogNFdZKUF9w19nRiJ
I think the ultimate issue was around the item_id, I say this because removing and re-adding my normal m3u multiple times never generated a new item_id. I couldn't adjust the normal m3u because its manually generated by my Cabernet install on my server, so I manually created a new m3u containing the same stream URL http://192.168.12.185:5004/DaddyLive/watch/304 as in the automatically generated m3u. When I was able to play the Animal Planet I had just added with that m3u I'd manually generated, I sought out caches and came upon that /var/cache/jellyfin/mediainfo directory with the .json files and managed the fix from there I mentioned.
RE: Transcoding got stuck turned on for some IP channels somehow - TheDreadPirate - 2025-03-18
What CPU do you have? That error message in your ffmpeg log usually means you enabled low power encoding (which you did), but you didn't do the additional configuration needed to enable it in the operating system.
https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration/intel/#configure-and-verify-lp-mode-on-linux
It also looks like you are using VAAPI instead of QSV.