Issue direct playing 4k HDR content

[empire_ian]

I'm having issues direct playing some 4k HDR content (on a user where transcoding is disabled).

Of 4 4k HDR files I have 2 of them play for a while then fail, one works, and one doesn't even play.

The error is "Player error encountered. Will retry..." and then it instantly fails the retry. There's no crash report sent to the server, the server doesn't usually log anything not even a normal FFmpeg.DirectStream log like you get if you successfully play something.

Looking through the logs from when I tried several hours ago I see one though so maybe it's just logging several hours behind? Here's a paste of a directstream log when it failed: https://pastebin.com/2XBg7wJa

It seems like the "no HDR when transcoding" thing is gone now so that's nice, with transcoding enabled it still crashes at the same exact point in the video it just recovers.

I tried disabling HEVC and AV1 in the transcoding settings that didn't seem to change much other than maybe my transcoding worked better, assuming it really is transcoding after it recovers the crash.

Here is a DirectPlay log from where I started it with transcoding enabled and it recovered the crash and seemed to play fine (seems to log fine in that situation): https://pastebin.com/M0Q5P2iC

A different video seems to transcode from the beginning and freezes a lot which is surprising since the server is a Xeon series E3-1225 v5 which has quicksync video. Here's a paste of that log: https://pastebin.com/DHUgCnNH

[TheDreadPirate]

Transcoding VIDEO still causes tone mapping. So you are still losing HDR when transcoding the video. But the first two logs you shared are only transcoding the audio. So that HDR limitation doesn't apply.

The first two logs you shared are both only transcoding the audio and appear to transcoding without issue. The third is CPU transcoding. And slower than real time (~15fps). So it looks like you did not enable hardware accelerated transcoding for that playback.

The CPU you have is a Skylake family CPU and the version of Quick Sync it has does not support decoding HEVC 10-bit. Meaning that even if you properly setup Quick Sync you would not be able to tone map HDR to SDR since that requires the video to be decoded on the iGPU.

As for the playback issues in the first two logs, are you running out of space on your C drive? Since transcodes are written to disk.

[empire_ian]

Oh right. Stuff on the CPU chip still counts as "hardware acceleration" I didn't have quick sync enabled. I don't want to tone map, I only intend to watch these versions of these videos on HDR displays, so that's fine as long as it works normally.

I'm confused what it means by install the latest driver from intel here: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/admini...ndows-host, but my guess is it just means the correct driver for a E3-1225 v5 as opposed to a specific QSV one, so I'm guessing the next step is to enable it in the bios. I'll report back once I get that to work.

I'm not running out of space in any of the drives on that system, C drive has 64 Gigabytes, so why the movie always crashes at exactly that moment seems like a mystery. It occurs to me though that I didn't have "Allow video playback that requires conversion without re-encoding" enabled for that user, so maybe it has nothing to do with transcoding but conversion of some part of the video that it doesn't anticipate? I'll report back once I test that variable too, but regardless, even on a user that can play the video, it crashes and recovers at that same moment.

I'm guessing its called HDR 10 because it's a 10 bit format?

[empire_ian]

The BIOS on this Dell server does not seem to support QuickSync or else it's not optional, there's nothing about it in the settings, but I don't see any sign of a GPU in windows. I might need to add a PCIe GPU like an A380 if I want good performance in this system.

So I think that performance doesn't bother me, what bothers me is why was the second video transcoding in the first place, and why does the first video always crash. Should I try debug logging or something?

[TheDreadPirate]

Intel's spec sheet indicates it does have a GPU on it and it has quick sync.

Not sure about what driver to install. Intel's driver page doesn't make clear if the consumer CPU drivers will work or not. The driver that is labeled as specifically for your CPU/iGPU is 9 years old.

Regardless, having the capability to transcode any kind of way as a back up is nice to have. Just in case.

An Arc A380 or even an A310, if you don't need a bunch of tone mapped streams, will be more than enough if you only have a few users.