How does the Android app detect what to play directly and what to request transcoded?

[fbartels 9]

Hi,

 

apologies if this has been asked already, I could not find the right words for the search.

 

Yesterday I tried to play a 1080p x265 HEVC video file on my first gen FireTV and mostly got video artefacts and stutter (the cpu of the first gen is not fast enough to encode the video, nor does the device has hardware support for this). After that I manually deactivated the vlc player in the settings and was able to play a transcoded version of the video.

 

This lead me to the question how each client decided what can be played and what not? I remember seeing ffprobe processes on my server shortly before playback starts so Emby does inspect the videofile for codec and maybe even resolution. Is this a dynamic choice or is there a per app whitelist of video codecs?

[ebr 16169]

It is quite an involved process where we try to discover what the device says it can support and decide based on that.  However, when using VLC, we allow pretty much everything.  I guess maybe we need to exclude hevc from the 1st gen Fire...