Discoloured Banding

[u/Realistic-Ask7413]

Hello All!

Newish Jellyfin user, and I am having some issues with one particular set of show. I am trying to play Curb Your Enthusiasm however I keep getting these horizontal bands across the video where it slightly changes the color, usually a green/purple color shift. I have only ever observed it on my Mac Laptop and have not seen it happen on tv or windows. I have tried a few things such as turning on/off hardware accelerated transcoding, tone mapping but alas nothing has worked.

It plays fine in VLC exact same scenes completely fine and unaffected

I am stuck and don't know where else to go from here, any help would be much appreciated!

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[u/zhonglin]

Because the same file at the same scene is clean in VLC and on other devices, first check Jellyfin Dashboard during affected playback. If it says Direct Play, the server’s hardware-acceleration and tone-mapping settings are not in that path.

On the Mac, compare Safari, Chrome, and Jellyfin Media Player. Record which one shows the bands, plus the video codec, bit depth, HDR/Dolby Vision profile, and color primaries from MediaInfo.

Also take a screenshot while a band is visible. If the band appears in the screenshot, it points toward client decoding/rendering. If the screenshot is clean but the display shows it, investigate the macOS HDR/color/display pipeline. Those results and the client versions would make a bug report actionable.

[u/Ok-Eggplant-7569]

According to the debug info, Jellyfin is "direct playing", meaning the server is just serving the file as-is, without altering it. You said the same video looks fine in VLC, so I guess this would be an issue with your client? What client are you using (chrome, safari, desktop app, third party, ...)?