I’ve attached some photos, the playback error is when trying to play a 4k title on my laptop through the web browser on jellyfin. I’ve attatched photos of my settings in jellyfin - playback - Transcoding. Then the screen grab of a 4k movie which was played on my phone but has a weird color shift to it. Important to note on my nvidia shield through the jellyfin android app both 4k movies I attempted to play looked great and actually loaded, although it didn’t seem like the Quadro was doing anything when checking docker exec sb-jellyfin-media Nvidia smi.
5 replies
tomspark wrote:
Good news — that idle Quadro is the system working right, not a fault. When a movie plays on your phone and the card sits at 7W doing nothing, it means your phone is playing the file directly, as-is, with no conversion needed on the server's end. That's the most efficient outcome, so the card has nothing to do. The Quadro only kicks in when a player can't handle a file and the server has to convert it on the fly. To force that and watch the card light up: while a movie plays on your phone, tap the quality setting and pick something lower than the original (say 1080p, 8Mbps). Within a few seconds you'll see a process show up in nvidia-smi and the wattage jump. Your 4K HEVC test at home is a good next step too — just note it may direct-play as well if that device supports the codec.
tomspark wrote:
Those screenshots nailed it — and first off, your Jellyfin settings are actually spot-on: NVENC selected, HEVC decoding on, and tone-mapping already enabled. Nothing wrong there. Two things are going on: 1) These are Dolby Vision titles (I can see it on the error screen). DV is the single trickiest format to transcode, which is exactly why your Shield plays them perfectly (it does DV natively, no transcode) but the browser fails and the phone gets that green/pink tint. 2) The real fix: tone-mapping and NVENC encoding need the GPU's full 'GPGPU runtime' — and right now your Jellyfin container can SEE the card (nvidia-smi works) but wasn't given the full capabilities it needs. That's a gap on our end. Grant them with a per-app override — put this in /opt/sparkbox/state/overrides/media.yml (if the file exists, just make sure these lines are in it): services: jellyfin-media: runtime: nvidia environment: - NVIDIAVISIBLEDEVICES=all - NVIDIADRIVERCAPABILITIES=all Then: sudo sparkbox restart media Retry the laptop movie and re-check the phone color. Run nvidia-smi DURING playback — you should now see a transcode process appear and the wattage jump (right now it sits idle at 7W because nothing's using it). Honest heads-up: even with all that right, Dolby Vision can still be hit-or-miss to a browser — the override should fix the color and most playback, but for stubborn DV titles the Shield is your bulletproof option. Tell me how it goes after the override.
currentlylive wrote:
We had already created this file and added this over ride, but I double checked it and restarted regardless. Still a color issue on the phone with one of the movie titles. Assuming this is due to the Dolby vision difficulty. I’m going to go ahead and find a non Dolby vision title to try out.
tomspark wrote:
Your override is exactly right — runtime: nvidia plus both caps set to all, nothing missing there. So with that already in place, you've landed on the real culprit yourself: it's the Dolby Vision, not your setup. Trying a non-DV title is the perfect test — grab a regular 4K HDR10 (or even a 1080p) title and it should transcode and tone-map cleanly to both the phone and the browser. Dolby Vision is genuinely the one format that stays painful even with a flawless GPU setup, because the DV metadata doesn't survive transcoding well — that's exactly why your Shield (which plays DV natively, no transcode) is perfect while anything that has to convert it struggles. So the rule of thumb going forward: DV titles → watch on the Shield; everything else → should be golden now that your GPU's fully wired. Let me know how the non-DV title looks.
currentlylive wrote:
So far here is what I’ve got, two different titles both playing from my phone but neither are showing any Quadro transcoding use. I just grabbed a 4K HEVC HDR title that I will try out later on when I’m home and I can upload the results here as well but figured we could try and diagnose a bit with what I’ve got so far.