Kodi plays black video from Jellyfin

[Elvis Furtado]

Some of my videos, both Movies and TV Episodes show black video when playing in Kodi, and I can hear the audio. Please guide on what might be the reason.

[mcarlton00]

I suspect you're trying to play back content in a codec that your device can't handle. Is there any consistency between which files it fails to play cleanly? If you right click/long click on an item to open the context menu and select the "transcode" option, does it play cleanly?

[Elvis Furtado]

So if I click Jellyfin Transcode, I get an error in Kodi stating 'one or more items falied to play', but the video plays fine in JellyFin in a web browser.

I looked up one of the videos in MediaInfo - uploaded a screenshot here (https://ibb.co/kHkkLNW), is there anything else I can do to resolve this? as quite a few videos don't play in Kodi, just the audio.

[Elvis Furtado]

Also sharing the log while trying to transcode video in Kodi from JellyFin - https://pastebin.com/UHrRRb1U

[mcarlton00]

Can you try to get client side logs and share them as well? https://kodi.wiki/view/Log_file/Easy

[Elvis Furtado]

I turned on the debugging in Kodi and played one of the files that doesn't work, got the log. Sharing it here (had to split it, as it was larger than what Pastebin allows).

First part - https://pastebin.com/fGYVSHrH
Second part - https://pastebin.com/4dusKAuQ

The video name is Stepfather.2.Make.Room.for.Daddy.1989.SE.DVDRip.XviD-EBX.avi, I saw that it is present in the log file as well. Please do suggest what can be done, as many of my files play only in JellyFin in the browser but not in Kodi.

[Elvis Furtado]

Can you try to get client side logs and share them as well?  https://kodi.wiki/view/Log_file/Easy

I have shared the logs as expected, can you'll please look into this and help me figure what might be causing the black video in Kodi?

[mcarlton00]

I'm not an expert at reading Kodi's internal debug logging (as you've likely noticed, they're very noisy and it's hard to find stuff in them), but nothing looks out of place to me, which is making me again suspect that your device isn't capable of playing back this content because of missing codecs or something similar.  Have you tried to play this file on your Kodi install without going through the Jellyfin addon?

[Elvis Furtado]

I recently moved to JellyFin because I wanted to sync the videos from multiple devices, like watching from a tab or an android TV or in this case my PC. I used to directly load the content into Kodi (before JellyFin) and on just one instance and the videos worked fine.

I am out of ideas too at the moment, and was hoping you'd be able to find the cause of this issue. Nonetheless thanks for trying.

My only solution for now is to play these specific videos directly in Jellyfin (be it in a browser or the android app).

[mcarlton00]

It might be worth checking your hardware acceleration settings.

Settings -> Player

At the bottom of the screen, change the settings mode to Expert.

Go back up to Videos, and you should have a lot of options under the "Processing" heading. It could be trying to use hardware decoding for something that your device isn't capable of (in this case MPEG-4). Might be worth hitting a few toggles and seeing if anything resolves. I'd suggest keeping track of what you change so you can revert them if it makes the situation worse.