Why is Jellyfin transcoding to AV1 in web client and h264 in native app on Linux?

[jdoxen]

I have noticed that when I play media in the native Jellyfin Media Player, it always chooses to transcode to h264 no matter what settings I use. But when I use the web client, it will use AV1 which I have set as my preferred codec. I have fairly poor upload speed at home so I want to be using whatever offers the best quality relative to bitrate, and AV1 seems to be the current state of the art. Both devices have recent Intel hardware that can encode and decode AV1 with QSV. If I look at intel_gpu_top, the native app is still using the GPU to decode video, but most of the usage is under "Render/3D" (30-50%) as opposed to "Video" (around 1%). Perhaps it isn't taking advantage of QSV and is falling back to some generic GPU driver? Anyone know why this might be happening?

I've attached the complete log and a screenshot of the playback info from a "typical" session. I started JMP, started playing the 4K HDR version of Dune 2021, which had to be transcoded due to my bitrate limit of 4Mbps.

Server:

• Jellyfin official app for TrueNAS provided by iX Systems
  

• OS: TrueNAS Community Edition 25.04.1
  
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 4600G
  
• GPU: Intel Arc A380
  
• 64GB Memory
  

Client:

• Jellyfin Media Player 1.12.0 Flatpak
  
• Laptop: ThinkPad X1 Yoga 8th Gen
  
• OS: Kubuntu 25.04 (Plasma 6.3.4; Wayland)
  
• CPU: Intel i7-1365U
  
• GPU: Intel Iris Xe (integrated)
  
• 32GB Memory
  

[nyanmisaka]

JMP has not been updated recently due to dev shortages, so it may lack the requested profile for transcoding to AV1. You can check the source code to see where to add it, or even submit a pull request to the repository.

As for 3D occupancy, this is a technical detail that users don't need to worry about. HDR-to-SDR tone-mapping shader is performed on the GPU renderer, not the video engine.