+- Jellyfin Forum (https://forum.jellyfin.org)
+-- Forum: Support (https://forum.jellyfin.org/f-support)
+--- Forum: Troubleshooting (https://forum.jellyfin.org/f-troubleshooting)
+---- Forum: Networking & Access (https://forum.jellyfin.org/f-networking-access)
+---- Thread: Jellyfin media won't play with hardware transcoding (/t-jellyfin-media-won-t-play-with-hardware-transcoding)
Jellyfin media won't play with hardware transcoding - riqsha - 2025-10-11
Basically title. I had hardware transcoding enabled for a few days now. My partner generally accesses jellyfin directly from the IP address on firefox on windows whereas I have the nameserver for my local dns (blocky) set up on my laptop (lenovo legion pro 7i 16irx8h running nixos 25.11.20250928.e9f00bd (Xantusia)) and access jellyfin on a domain (this is reverse proxied on caddy).
Last evening jellyfin videos just refused to play for her. She claims it's because she tried to enable subtitles on a new video she'd downloaded. At the time, files continued to play for me while accessing them both on the jellyfin app and the browser. But if I accessed the same files via the IP address they would play fine. This started working again when I disabled hardware transcoding. All of last night these errors were only via the IP address.
As of this morning while I was retesting these to create this post the videos don't play on the domain name version either - notably tho I'm currently connected to my 34 inch ultrawide monitor. One anime file was playing and I've attached logs for that as well.
Server details:
i5 9500t
nixos 25.11.20250928.e9f00bd (Xantusia)
jellyfin runs via systemd using the nixos service
Jellyfin hw transcoding setup:
QSV
All hw decoding enabled except AV1
Prefer OS native DXVA or VA-API hardware decoders - true
Enable hardware decoding - true
Allow encoding in HEVC format - true
Enable VPP Tone mapping - true
Allow subtitle extraction on the fly - true
Jellyfin log from this morning
ffmpeg log of a file that refused to work
ffmpeg log of a file that worked even with hw transcode enabled