Only DirectPlay hardware-accelerated video codecs for ExoPlayer

[levogevo]

Changes

• When using ExoPlayer as the playback client option, only direct play videos that have hardware-supported decoders. As I was making this PR, I noticed the older one ExoPlayer: Only allow hardware-accelerated video codecs in DirectPlay #1135 and I relate to exactly the problem they encountered (and proposed fix).

Issues
AV1 playback can range from great to unplayable depending on the bitrate/encode settings of the video and device playing it back. Android Jellyfin users already have options to attempt directplay, by either using the web client/external players or alternative clients like Findroid. We do not have an option for playing back videos that need transcoding help. The trick of lowering the internet bandwidth doesn't work if the av1 encode is already pretty low bitrate (10-15) but due to things like film-grain synthesis and low(er) preset encoding, are still very resource intensive to decode, causing many many dropped frames.

I am not an android developer at all, nor believe this is the best option. I am hoping if it is (at least) not a passable option, it can still highlight a need for change. Ideally, a dialog/dropdown to allow the client to select the encoder on server-side but that was more complicated than to get this at least working as intended. Thank you for reading.

[satmandu]

Would this still be a good thing?

Obviously direct play by default with exoplayer doesn't make sense if the client hardware can't support hardware decoding?

[nielsvanvelzen]

I don't think this is a good idea. Whenever the device reports it can play a certain codec we should be able to trust that. There's a lot of video codecs that decode perfectly fine on CPU.

[levogevo]

Av1 on older devices does not.

[nielsvanvelzen]

Closing this as unwanted. As mentioned before, a lot of devices can efficiently playback with software decoders. Additionally, hardcoding various codec names is not maintainable in the long-term.