[Playback] Blank/Black screen when attempting to watch LiveTV stream (HLS)

[WizardOfYendor1]

Moonfin version

2.2.0

Platform

Windows

OS version

Windows 11

Device model

No response

Input method

Mouse / trackpad

Server type and version

Jellyfin 10.10

Content type

Live TV

Media details (as much as you know, check the info button at the bottom right of the player)

Container: MPEG-TS
Protocol: HLS

Playback path

Direct Play

Symptoms (check all that apply)

• Black screen / endless spinner
• Audio only (no video)
• Stuttering / frame drops
• A/V sync issues
• Seeking/scrubbing broken
• Subtitles missing or incorrect
• Unexpected forced transcode
• App crashes / exits

Steps to reproduce

In a browser on windows, Live TV Program Guide -> Pick show -> Watch -> get spinner for like 5 seconds then just a blank screen with no video/audio.

Frequency

Always

Logs / errors (optional)

No response

[WizardOfYendor1]

This is a bit of a complex issue so bear with me. This has been a crazy debugging safari (ADHD has it's benefits).

The simplest description is: when attempting to view a live tv channel, streamed via HLS with the Moonfin web client, you get a blank black screen with no audio or video.

The good news is, it appears to not be Moonfin's fault. The bad news is you can't watch content streamed via HLS with the Moonfin web client (at least not MPEG-TS segments in an HLS manifest - haven't confirmed anything else).

The root issue seems to be with chromium based browsers. Chromium 142 introduced native HLS support, thus Moonfin asks the browser can you support this via a new "canPlayType()" method? Browser says "sure I can". This was added as part of the recent commit to Moonfin: 89f8ffb

Sounds like a great idea, except the chromium based browser's new HLS support doesn't seem to work, at least on my machine. I've tested with Brave and Chrome thus far and can reproduce it at will. If I use the debug console and brute force to skip that line 142 if evaluation, the content streams fine because falls through to hls.js.

Before I even think about looking into why chromium is saying it can play HLS then doesn't, I thought I would stop and post this issue for feedback. I can't bring myself to PR in a hack in canNativePlayHls where it ignores the response from the browser if it's chromium :-).

P.S. If you wish to go down the rabbit hole on live tv (et al) "directplay" versus "directstream"; you can check out this PR I have out there for the jellyfin server which is what led me to investigate this particular Moonfin issue (which is unrelated). jellyfin/jellyfin#16286

[RadicalMuffinMan]

Fantastic detective skills, it really is gonna help and just in time as the release is almost here, let me see about adding this in so it goes with the plugin release

[WizardOfYendor1]

Awesome. I'm curious how you'll go about dealing with it :-). Like I said, I almost submitted a PR to skip it if the browser was chromium based - but thought it was too hackalicous :-) .

I can also confirm everything works fine with Firefox browser on Ubuntu (Gnome) desktop.

Do take note about what happens on the Jellyfin server when you have a TunerCount of zero (unlimited) versus some other number (limited). It changes the "SupportsDirectPlay" behavior. All those gorey details are in the PR I referenced.