Playlist Videos Only Playing as Audio

[obsoleteBITW]

I am using the up to date Jellyfin app on Firestick 4K and have began making playlists. I can add the videos to the playlist and even update the playlist image via the web client, but the Firestick playback has major issues. I will click "play all" or "shuffle all" on the playlist and there begins a popup in the top of the screen with the episode title and thumbnail image. Sometimes I will get audio for the playback and sometimes I will not. From research I have done, it appears that it is thinking that the episode or movie is music file and is trying to play it like a song in the background. It appears that not all playlists will do this or it is very inconsistent. I have tried creating playlists via the iOS app and playback seems to be more consistent. Does anyone have any fixes?

[TheDreadPirate]

Mixed playlists are not supported at this time. I believe it will default to audio only if there are any audio tracks in the playlist. This is a known issue inherited from Emby and requires a lot of rework to fix, which is an ongoing effort.

[obsoleteBITW]

It doesn’t appear to be just mixed playlists. My issue had began to go away, but it has came back today. I do not add music to my library but only movies, tv shows, and music videos. I created multiple playlists today consisting of movies and tv shows and they are now playing in audio only mode. It refuses to allow me to see the video.

[TheDreadPirate]

Got around to a bit more experimentation. The first item in the playlist when you "play all" determines how it handles the rest of the queued items.

If the first time is a video it will treat the rest like videos. Including music. At least music plays with the cover art as the "video". If the first item is music it will treat the entire queue as music.

Regardless, the dev is aware of the limitations of how playlists work in the Android TV app.

[gnattu]

This should be submitted as a feature request: https://features.jellyfin.org/

We need an API endpoint to handle audio extraction playbacks so that the video files are streamed as audio which can be played on audio-only clients.

[kaitco]

I'd like to revive this topic because it seems to still be an issue.

I have used Jellyfin playlists as video-only playlists on the web, webOS, and Roku interfaces with no issue. I have a playlist, literally titled "TeeVee" that has only video items on the list. Some time in October-ish 2025, this seemed to work fine with the videos playing as videos. Just today, I used the same video-only playlist, and only the audio from the videos would play. I'm unsure what changed, but the function used to play like the other interfaces, but now will only play the audio. I can confirm that there are no titles on the playlist that are anything but video.