HEVC 10-bit / Dolby Vision transcode pipeline fails – “No Compatible Streams”

[Goatmaster 2]

Lately I’ve been running into a problem on my Emby server. For a long time everything worked fine most of my downloads were WEB-DL 1080p, either H.264 or regular HEVC, and my Intel HD 530 could handle those without issue. Direct play or a quick transcode to H.264 always worked. Since I started downloading WEB-DL 2160p releases, things have changed. These new files are HEVC Main10 with Dolby Vision profile 8.1 (HDR10 compatible). ffmpeg has no problem probing the streams, so the video and audio tracks are definitely there. But as soon as Emby tries to build a transcode pipeline, playback fails with “No Compatible Streams.”

Looking at the logs, I can see Emby first tries VAAPI on the HD 530. That immediately throws a line saying the color format

yuv420p10, p010 isn’t supported

Then it switches over to QuickSync, but the whole pipeline still collapses and the transcode never actually starts. Without a working transcode, Emby just reports no compatible streams to the client.

 

So what I think is happening is this: the Dolby Vision metadata inside the HEVC stream is enough to break hardware decoding on my GPU. Older 1080p files never had this problem because they were HDR10-only, but now DV has become the default for UHD WEB-DLs. The part that confuses me is that Emby doesn’t seem to fall back gracefully to software decode if it did, my CPU could easily handle the transcode. Instead it just errors out.

My question is: is this a known limitation with the Emby ffmpeg build on older iGPUs like the HD 530? Should I just disable HEVC hardware decode to force software fallback, or is there a better way to handle Dolby Vision content in Emby? And do newer ffmpeg builds improve this situation by treating DV Profile 8.1 as HDR10 fallback?

[Luke 42077]

 

Hi there, let's look at an example. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks!

 

[Goatmaster 2]

embyserver.txtffmpeg-transcode-fabc0f73-104b-4d84-8207-ebaddd44adb3_1.txt

 

I've added the logs in the comment

Edited October 1, 2025 by Goatmaster