Do not upscale or unnecessarily increase bitrate

[xxzandy]

Describe The Bug

Live tv in Webclient autodetects 120MBs bitrate, and UPSCALES the original h.264 1080i to 4k with Edge (Chromium). It never makes sense to upscale (especially on server side).

This unnecessary step creates a huge load for transcoding.

Of course this can be mitigated by the end user by selecting a lower bitrate and resolution, but Jellyfin should:

• NEVER UPSCALE on server side unless native resolution is not acceptable
• NEVER increase bitrate, when the input code is the same as the output codec (considering the frame rate if Dinterlace is somehow mandatory *

Steps To Reproduce Open live TV on Webclient on Edge.

Expected Behavior

See maximum of native stream or downwards (bitrate) encode stream. Not upscaled stream

Logs

Screenshots

System (please complete the following information): Edge

• Browser: [e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Safari]
• Jellyfin Version: [e.g. 10.6.0]

Additional Context

[thornbill]

Please fill out the version information and we are going to need ffmpeg logs for this because Jellyfin doesn't have any upscaling capabilities.

[xxzandy]

Yellow tint on the screenshots is the "night light" setting on Windows, so that can be disregarded but otherwise the picture quality on auto is messed up. The insane bitrate isn't close to the ~7mbs that comes from the tvheadend server. When manually selecting 720p, the video shows right. I agree (now) that it is not upscaling, but transcoding to a higher bitrate than the original.

• Jellyfin 10.9.3 Docker w. DOCKER_MODS=linuxserver/mods:jellyfin-opencl-intel.
• Host: Intel Ubuntu 24.04 noble with Huc enabled kernel on KBL i3
• HW transcoding enabled with no checkmark in "prefer OS native..."
• Low power encoder enabled
• Client: Edge on Windows 11

Screenshots:

ffmpeg log: f.log

[xxzandy]

Edit: "Jellyfin Media Player" (mpv) gets it right, and starts "direct streaming" immediately. Same client computer W11. However, the subtitle streams are missing but that is another issue.