Playing back recorded live TV (.ts files) client causes rapid screen flickering — the player starts and stops in a continuous loop.

[WizardOfYendor1]

This issue respects the following points:

• I have discussed this issue in the Jellyfin forum and/or troubleshooting chat before opening this issue.
• This issue is not already reported on GitHub (I've searched it).
• I agree to follow Jellyfin's Code of Conduct.
• This report addresses only a single issue; If you encounter multiple issues, kindly create separate reports for each one.

Describe the bug

On recorded live tv content, when you attempt to playback the show/content the playback is constantly starting/stopping in fast loop. The effect the user sees is endless flickering of the recording.

The recorded show plays back fine on an android client.

Initial Analysis

MPEG-TS containers use PID-based stream identifiers (e.g., video PID 0x91=145, audio PID 0x94=148) rather than sequential indices. The VideoManager track matching methods (getExoPlayerTrack and setExoPlayerTrack) rely on offsetStreamIndex to translate between
Jellyfin stream indices (sequential: 0, 1) and ExoPlayer track group IDs. This translation assumes group IDs are sequential, which fails for MPEG-TS PIDs:

• getExoPlayerTrack: Parses the selected audio group ID → 148, calls offsetStreamIndex(148, ...) → fails bounds check (148 > 2 streams) → returns -1
• setExoPlayerTrack: Converts Jellyfin index 1 → exoTrackID 1, tries to match against group ID 148 → no match → returns false

This triggers the following loop in PlaybackController:

1. onPrepared() calls switchAudioStream(1) (the server's default audio index)
2. getAudioStreamIndex() returns -1 (failed PID lookup), so -1 != 1, the early-return is skipped
3. setExoPlayerTrack(1, AUDIO, ...) returns false (PID mismatch)
4. The else branch calls stop() then playInternal() to rebuild the stream
5. stop() calls clearPlaybackSessionOptions() which resets mCurrentStreamInfo and mDefaultAudioIndex
6. playInternal() POSTs to /Sessions/Playing, restarts the player → back to step 1

Looking and searching through the code history, this MAY be related and introduced with this commit: 66573c3

Media info of the file

Media capabilities report

No response

Client logs

No response

FFmpeg logs

Application version

latest/Head

Where did you install the app from?

None

Device information

Fire Cube TV, Android Studio Emulator.

Android version

N/A

Jellyfin server version

10.10.2

Other sources

No response

[warmrigor]

is this what's been happening?! I just started using Jellyfin on my 2017 nVidia Shield, and when i tried to do playback from a DVR recording, it just kept flashing the same frame. whenever i try to do live tv, jellyfin always transcodes because something goes wrong in trying to do playback from the mpeg2 ts.

[WizardOfYendor1]

is this what's been happening?! I just started using Jellyfin on my 2017 nVidia Shield, and when i tried to do playback from a DVR recording, it just kept flashing the same frame. whenever i try to do live tv, jellyfin always transcodes because something goes wrong in trying to do playback from the mpeg2 ts.

Maybe/probably?? This issue is, for me anyways :-), is recording a live tv show (via TVHeadend) results in a mpeg-ts file on disk. If the the audio track ids in it are not 0,1,2,3,etc, then this issue will manifest itself when you attempt to play the recording.

For example, here's mediainfo on a .ts recording:
Video
ID : 65 (0x41)
Menu ID : 1 (0x1)
Format : MPEG Video

Audio
ID : 68 (0x44)
Menu ID : 1 (0x1)
Format : AC-3
Format/Info : Audio Coding 3

If the ID's look something like that, then you'll probably have this issue when you try to play them. The androidtv client gets into a restart loop, restarting the playback rapidly - thus looks like either flickering black screen or you might see a frame or 2 of video "flicker" (I did from time to time).

What I believe to be happening technically is Exoplayer has IDs of 65 and 68 (this example) and tries to match to the server's index values of 0,1 respectively. It can't. It finds nothing. Then tries to help by restarting playback.
That's what my PR attempts to address (plus the other "-1 index" server issue, which is rare in the real world).

Ideally, clients could get their hands on the PIDs via the API but that is much bigger effort :-).

As it is, I think most people "cope" with it by transcoding them. That is if you're lucky enough to live in a + UTC timezone to record them in the 1st place :-).

Also, regarding the "something always goes wrong" transcoding/remux, I looked into that as well, and have another PR out there to fix that (much "scarier" one, to me anyways :-) ). jellyfin/jellyfin#16286

That change solved THAT particular problem and my channels are now "direct play" -ing (the terminology of direct play/streaming confused the hell out of me) and thus FFMPEG doesn't touch them and tuning livetv channels is much quicker (like 2 seconds or so) on the device.

Those 2 PRs plus a another one regarding timezone issues fixed all of this for me locally on my devices. I also have a myriad of PRs for fixes and feature out there for review - I've been spending LONG hours crawling through fixing/enhancing stuff as I encountered it :-). I have a few more I'm sitting on still.

[nmcaullay]

I believe that I see this exact behaviour when attempting to watch back ts files recorded using TVHeadend (free-to-air in Australia). Some ts files start to play, but flicker and never appear to get past the first frame. Some ts files play ok. I've reprocessed all my ts files to mkv using fffmpeg, and that seems to have fixed most of the problems (there is a lot of "packet corrupt", "corrupt decoded frame", "packet size mismatch" going on in the ffmpeg logs when converting to mkv).

One thing I thought it was related to was teletext/subtitles. Seems by removing the subtitles (using -sn in ffmpeg) it generates a file that Jellyfin is happy to play.

There were some ts files that were possibly far too corrupted for this ffmpeg ts->mkv process to work, so i reencoded them using handbrake. They seem ok.

So, I'm not sure I'm helping, but I recorded a tv show tonight using tvheadend. There was a few "continuity errors" which is typical when starting a tvheadend recording...but the recording compelted fine. Trying to play that ts file back in Jellyfin does this funky stuttering at playback commencement.

So, I'm at a loss... Plex plays these files fine (I really want to avoid using Plex). Jellyfin web plays these files fine. Just the Jellyfin AndroidTV app seems to choke on them.

If anyone needs a file to test with let me know.