Files
jellytau/CHANGELOG.md
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dtourolle acddcdd6fa fix(playback): force a transcode when the webview cannot decode the audio (DR-149, 0.4.8)
Advertising a webview-shaped profile (DR-148) was necessary but not
sufficient. Probing the server directly showed Jellyfin 10.11.5 enforces a
DirectPlayProfile's Container and VideoCodec — excluding either returns
SupportsDirectPlay:false with TranscodeReasons=ContainerNotSupported /
VideoCodecNotSupported — but ignores its AudioCodec entirely: an E-AC-3
track is still offered for direct play against a profile listing only
aac,flac,mp3,opus,vorbis. Neither a VideoAudio CodecProfile forbidding the
codec nor MaxAudioChannels:2 against a 6-channel track changes the answer,
so no profile the client can send fixes this and the picture plays silent.

The client therefore stops delegating a question it can answer itself. The
negotiated source's audio is checked against what the webview decodes, and
an undecodable track forces the existing h264/aac HLS transcode regardless
of the server calling direct play fine; direct_play and needs_transcoding
are corrected to match so the frontend and the reporting path agree with
the URL actually used. The track judged is the one that would be served —
the default, else the first — since a supported track further down is not
the one that plays. A source with no audio, or a codec the server did not
name, is left alone rather than transcoded on a guess.

Test-first: the new tests failed against the old behaviour before the
decision existed. Verified on a motorola edge 30 by the audio HAL, not by
ear — the same E-AC-3 episode logged isMusicActive=true once and 58
ACDB-LOADER lines under this build, against 0 and 0 on 0.4.6, where an AAC
file in the same session produced 16 and 116. No FATAL EXCEPTION, so R8 on
the signed release build is unaffected.

Also carries in-flight subtitle-track work authored in a parallel session
(subtitleTracks, VideoPlayer, player/media, bindings) at the user's
request, so the tag matches the APK verified on device.
2026-08-11 20:07:11 +02:00

11 KiB
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Changelog

All notable changes to JellyTau are documented here.

Entries are grouped by the capability they change, not by commit. Requirement IDs in parentheses point at docs/requirements.md; the generated trace matrix lives in docs/traceability.md.

v0.4.8

🐛 Fixes

  • Video with an undecodable soundtrack now transcodes instead of playing silent. Advertising a webview-shaped profile (v0.4.7) turned out not to be enough: Jellyfin 10.11.5 enforces a direct-play profile's container and video codec but ignores its audio codec, offering an E-AC-3 track for direct play against a profile listing only AAC — and no CodecProfile or channel limit changes that. The client now checks the track it would actually be served against what its renderer can decode and forces the h264/AAC HLS transcode when it cannot, rather than trusting the negotiation. (UR-004 → DR-149)

v0.4.7

🐛 Fixes

  • Video plays with sound on devices that ship a Dolby decoder. The audio codec list sent to Jellyfin came from MediaCodecList, which describes ExoPlayer — but video does not play through ExoPlayer: it renders in the webview <video> element, which decodes far less. A phone whose vendor licenses Dolby therefore advertised ac3/eac3, got a direct play, and showed full picture with no audio, while a leaner device claimed neither codec, received an AAC transcode, and played the same file correctly. The video direct-play profile is now narrowed to what the webview can decode; audio-only playback is genuinely the native player's and keeps the full list, so music is not transcoded needlessly. (UR-004 → DR-148)

v0.4.1

🐛 Fixes

  • The lockscreen pause works while a video's audio plays in the background. The handoff starts native audio and only then tears the WebView <video> down — and that teardown fires a DOM pause the frontend reports like any other, which left the controller believing webview media was still the player. Transport stayed aimed at it: pressing pause on the lockscreen sent a control command to a <video> that no longer existed while the native player carried on, and the element's parting position report dragged the displayed time backwards. A handoff is now tracked explicitly, so it hands transport to the native backend and ignores what the dying element still reports. A pause made from the lockscreen also survives the return to the app, instead of being undone by the play state captured when the handoff began. (UR-040, UR-005 → DR-052, DR-097)

v0.4.0

Features

  • Favourites, across libraries. A /library/favorites page renders favourites from every library with All / Movies / Shows / Music scope tabs, reusing the standard grid so card shape still follows the media — a mixed All tab reads as posters, squares and thumbnails side by side. Home carries favourite rows below Recently Added, and a row with no items does not render at all, so a fresh install shows no empty rows. Server favourite state is mirrored into the local database as results are cached, so offline browsing sees the same favourites as the server; a toggle made offline is never overwritten by a stale server value before it has been pushed. (UR-067, UR-069 → DR-113, DR-114, DR-115, DR-117, DR-118)

  • Search answers from the local index. The instant leg read only downloaded items, so with no downloads it returned nothing and every keystroke fell through to a full Recursive=true server query. It now reads the whole synced catalog through the same availability CTE get_items uses, gated on the same include_catalog_browse flag, so search and browse cannot diverge. The index also gained MusicArtist, Playlist and People — the very groups search sorts results into. Re-indexing moved from a frontend startup call to a Rust background task with a 6h TTL, so a long session no longer searches a stale catalog. (UR-065 → DR-108, DR-110, DR-111)

🐛 Fixes

  • Playback no longer restarts an episode at random on a flaky connection. Background audio-only playback of a video streams a progressive mp3 transcode over plain HTTP, which is chunked and so declares no length: when the connection dropped mid-episode, ExoPlayer saw end-of-input and reported STATE_ENDED, indistinguishable from the real end. The app ran its end-of-episode logic mid-episode and playback parked in STATE_ENDED, where the next play intent from the lockscreen, notification or a Bluetooth reconnect seeks an ended player to position 0 — surfacing as "the episode randomly restarted". The item's runtime is now what decides: an end reported well short of it re-opens the stream where it stopped. (UR-040 → DR-129)

  • A network hiccup no longer kills playback outright. Music and video declare a length, so a cut connection reaches them as an error rather than a phantom end — and every error stopped the player. A recoverable error now gets one bounded attempt at re-opening the stream where it stopped, with a growing backoff, leaving the rest of the queue intact. On Linux, MPV additionally reconnects inside the demuxer so ordinary blips never surface at all, and EndFile(ERROR) — previously a bare log line that left playback halted while the UI still showed "playing" — is now reported and recovered. (UR-004, UR-040 → DR-129, DR-130)

  • The player no longer reads 0:00 as a track ends on Linux. MPV exposes time-pos and duration as properties of the loaded file, so at EOF it unloads and both stop resolving — reporting zero at exactly the moment end-of-file handling asks where playback reached. The last reading seen while media was loaded is now kept and used as the fallback. (UR-005 → DR-130)

  • Server-side deletions propagate to the local catalog. DELETE FROM items existed nowhere, so items removed on the server lingered locally forever. A post-crawl mark-and-sweep now removes them, scoped to crawled types, skipping downloaded items, and refusing to run after a partial crawl. Separately, items_fts grew a full duplicate index on every catalog pass; it is now a real upsert, with a migration rebuilding existing indexes. (DR-110)

  • Android system bars and display cutout are handled correctly. (UR-066)

v0.2.0

Features

  • Audio settings now work on Android. The equalizer, volume normalization and gapless playback controls in Settings Audio previously rendered on Android and did nothing — ExoPlayerBackend was the only backend that never implemented set_audio_settings, and the trait's default silently reported success while applying nothing. All three now take effect:

    • Equalizer — the canonical 10-band ISO curve is resampled onto whatever bands the device's equalizer actually exposes (commonly 5), by nearest centre frequency.
    • Volume normalization — via LoudnessEnhancer. Note this is a gain stage, not a true EBU R128 normalizer like the Linux dynaudnorm path, so it approximates rather than matches Linux behaviour.
    • Gapless playback — honours the setting via pauseAtEndOfMediaItems (ExoPlayer is gapless by default, so this disables it when you turn it off).

    The effects re-attach automatically when ExoPlayer rebuilds its audio sink on a format change, so the equalizer no longer stops applying part-way through a queue. (UR-027, UR-032, UR-033 → DR-030, DR-035, DR-036, IR-004)

    ⚠️ Not yet verified on a physical device. AudioEffect availability and band layouts vary by device and OEM ROM; where an effect is unavailable it is logged and skipped rather than crashing playback.

📋 Documentation

  • Playback backend unification investigation. Six new specs in docs/specs/ record why the playback backends cannot be unified onto a single engine: every candidate (mpv, GStreamer, libVLC) fails the same webview-compositing constraint, because WebKitGTK/WebView2/Android WebView each own their compositor surface and native video cannot interleave with HTML. Audio can unify; video cannot. Also specifies the Android native-video spike, a Windows native audio backend, and the libmpv2 migration.

🐛 Corrected requirement statuses

These were documented as working and were not. No behaviour changed — the docs were wrong.

  • Crossfade (UR-031, DR-034) was marked "Done (Linux only)". It is implemented nowhere, and is architecturally blocked on mpv: its audio chain is single-stream, and FFmpeg's acrossfade requires two inputs. Real crossfade would need two libmpv instances.
  • The platform parity matrix listed crossfade as a Linux/Android gap (it is neither) and omitted the equalizer (which was a genuine gap, now closed).
  • nativeAdapter.ts cited tauri#10152 as blocking native Android video. That issue is a stale feature request; the capability shipped in September 2024. What remains unproven is SurfaceView-behind-WebView compositing, now tracked by a spec rather than asserted as an upstream blocker.

v0.1.2

Features

  • Search results are ordered by how well they match. A name that starts with the query now outranks one matching mid-word — typing "parks" finds "Parks and Recreation" before "Sparks of Love" — and at equal match quality a container outranks its contents, so a series lands above its own episodes. Ranking is applied to the instant cached results and to the merged cache+server list alike, so the list no longer reshuffles when server results arrive. (UR-060, DR-090)
  • Separate Shows, Episodes and People result groups. The combined "TV Shows" group splits into Shows and Episodes so a show never competes with its own episodes for a slot, and a new People group means searching an actor's name reaches their bio page. Default order is Shows → Episodes → Movies → Songs → Albums → Artists → People; a group order saved before the split keeps the position it was dragged to. (UR-060, DR-091)

🐛 Bug Fixes

  • The library header search bar works on every library page. It previously searched in place and depended on /library rendering results inline, so on any other /library/** route the results were fetched and never shown. /search is now the single surface that renders results, and the header bar hands its query and scope over via the URL. (UR-049, DR-063)
  • Video smaller than the window is scaled up to fit. Sizing only ever shrank oversized media, so a 480p source on a 1080p display played as a small picture in the middle of a black frame. The picture now fits whichever axis constrains it, in both directions, preserving aspect ratio. (UR-005)

📋 Requirements

Linux: 64-bit, GLIBC 2.29+ Android: 8.0+

v0.1.1 and earlier

Released before this file existed — see the git history and the release notes on each tag.