SOLVED: Playback issue

[danishduckling]

I have an ultrawide monitor with a 3440x1440 resolution, and when I play any content it shows it like this photo with black bars all around it, even when it's a 4K video like the above example - why is it not scaling to the window when there's plenty of room?
I've tried the different options in the menu to stretch the video, but none seem to be very good, either the image looks weird, or it doesn't fit the window correctly - and with all of them, it seems to stop any HDR and just show SDR instead, except for when I allow it to play like in the photo above.

[Venson]

Hey @danishduckling

Thats not a feature jellyfin supports as far as i know.
You should have the same issue with other players like VLC. The player (any) cannot just "imagine" the missing pixels but would have to approximate what is missing and this is always not that good. As far as i know, this is a common issue with ultrawide monitors that content is either zoomed in or cropped like you experience.

[danishduckling]

Hi @Venson !
the problem is, the content is in fact not cropped, nor appears zoomed, there should be plenty of resolution in the source video to actually fill the display (the video resolution is 3840x2160 with the display being only 3440x1440) so there are no missing pixels to imagine, but for some reason, it's being played back at a smaller than necessary size.
I would have expected it to fill top to bottom, and just have bars on the side, or the other way around depending on the aspect ration - but not, to be played smaller in the center with bars all around it.
you are correct that VLC seems to behave similarly, I just don't see why this happens.

[Venson]

Hi @Venson !
the problem is, the content is in fact not cropped, nor appears zoomed, there should be plenty of resolution in the source video to actually fill the display (the video resolution is 3840x2160 with the display being only 3440x1440) so there are no missing pixels to imagine, but for some reason, it's being played back at a smaller than necessary size.
I would have expected it to fill top to bottom, and just have bars on the side, or the other way around depending on the aspect ration - but not, to be played smaller in the center with bars all around it.
you are correct that VLC seems to behave similarly, I just don't see why this happens.

Yea i would expect that aswell but i can only say that those issues i heard from a friend of mine how also has an ultrawide, are pretty common.
Maybe it would help if you post what the player reports as the display size aswell as the media size.
Start the video playback -> Cog to the lower right -> Playback Info
Please post the entire info stats like this:

[danishduckling]

Hi,
Yes of course:

Playback information
Player: Html Video Player
Playback Method: Transcoding
Protocol: http
Stream type: HLS
Video Information
Player dimensions: 3440x1343
Video resolution: 3840x2160
Dropped frames: 0
Corrupt frames: 0

Transcoding Information
Video Codec: H264
Sound Codec: AAC
Sound channels: 2
Bit rate: 55.8 Mbps
Transcoding process: 3.1%
Transcoding frame rate: 41 fps
Reason for recoding: The video codec is not supported
The audio codec is not supported
The subtitle codec is not supported
Original Media Information
Container: web
Size: 51.2 GiB
Bit rate: 64.2 Mbps
Video Codec: HEVC Main 10
Video Bitrate: 55.4 Mbps
Video range type: HDR10
Sound Codec: AC3
Audio Bitrate: 640 kbps
Sound channels: 6
Audio sampling frequency: 48000 Hz

I should note, this happens regardless of using the web player, or the desktop client, and I've seen it happen even with direct playback (noting that it is transcoding this one)

[Venson]

hmm going for a long shot here but do you have windows scaling setup? If so try set it to 100% and log off and on again.

[danishduckling]

hmm going for a long shot here but do you have windows scaling setup? If so try set it to 100% and log off and on again.

It's at 100%, I should also note - other aspect ratios play fine, filling the frame as much as they can (see https://i.postimg.cc/9M36YvD8/jellyfin2.png) even when they are at a lower resolution than the monitor.

[Venson]

again, just a guess at this point: Does the media maybe _have_ black bars in the video itself? I had a similar issue when transcoding stuff with handbreak as there is an option to add black bars to top/bottom when resizing the container. Did you check that?

[danishduckling]

I just took a screenshot using vlc, and it has black bars -.- That is irritating, but thanks, what a weird thing for them to do, I guess there's not much to do about that.

[Venson]

You could try loading it into handbreak as it also has an option to remove those black bars and transcode it without them