Live TV no longer works on AndroidTV client without transcoding

[SabinVI]

Hello,

I have been using Android TV for years, both on my Sony TV as well as an NVIDIA Shield.

I bought an HDHomeRun earlier this year so I could get my local channels in Jellyfin on AndroidTV. Everything worked great for months. And suddenly a few weeks ago it stopped working. Now whenever I try to play a show through the antenna, I get a black screen and I can only hear sound.

I have transcoding turned off for all users. 99.9% of everything always played fine on Android TV or the Shield. I never needing transcoding.

I'm not 100% sure what caused this new problem, but it does seem to coincide with the updated AndroidTV app and LibVLC being removed. I did use LibVLC on my Sony TV with Jellyfin to watch shows. Once it was removed and forced to use ExoPlayer, it seems I can no longer stream TV from my antenna.

As soon as I enabled transcoding to test, it suddenly worked again. I can now see video and audio.

I really don't want to have to use transcoding to view my antenna. I shouldn't need to. Even the Roku client works without transcoding. I'm really surprised AndroidTV and Exoplayer seem to be the problem. I swear by AndroidTV and it beats the Roku in alomst everything... except this.

Please consider brining back LibVLC or maybe there will be another fix for this in the future. If anyone else is experiencing this problem, please post here. I couldn't find much about it when searching. Although I think this is a relatively new issue.

[TheDreadPirate]

TV tuners usually output to MPEG2. Most modern streaming devices do not support accelerated MPEG2 decoding. libVLC will attempt to CPU decode video while exoplayer does not.

The reasoning for the libVLC removal is documented in this PR.

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-and.../pull/3639

TLDR; VLC hadn't updated libVLC in 2 years, there were numerous open and unpatched security vulnerabilities, even if you used exoplayer libVLC would cause memory leaks, and the code to support both players was unsustainable for the handful of people maintaining our Android TV app.