I have a self-hosted Jellyfin instance on my home network that I have wanted to use with my Hisense 55U7QF with Vidaa OS.
The DLNA playback on the Hisense TV is unstable as some videos will not play at all and others play with stutters and glitches. Accessing the Jellyfin web interface in the TV browser is not a good experience when navigating with TV remote. The TV browser reports HEVC support, the playback of HEVC content is glitchy. x264 content plays just fine.
Then I discovered you can add web apps in Hisense using the debug options and it properly supports Jellyfin web’s TV mode where the navigation is far superior. The HEVC playback remains a problem because Jellyfin does not allow you to force transcoding HEVC to x264 unless the playback bitrate is lower than the video bitrate. This makes the videos unwatchable.
In this blog post I will show you how to:
1. Add Jellyfin web to your Hisense TV as an app for easy navigation
2. Patch Jellyfin Web to ignore Hisense browser’s HEVC support so it always transcodes to x264 while maintaining resolution/quality.