22d88280800b096c38fc8efa0d3f959b84cabb23
The 12s first-byte grace was the wrong trade and a real play found it within the hour. A 2-hour upload took 3 minutes to start, played 6 seconds, and stalled. Jellyfin had run ffmpeg with -probesize 1G against the growing stream and then transcoded to HLS with libx264. The cause is the container. A fragmented MP4 with empty_moov has no duration in its header, so the only way to get one is to sum every fragment -- probing a growing file reads all of it. Jellyfin cannot establish duration, codec or bitrate, so it abandons direct play and transcodes a stream it also cannot seek. It was targeting 4.83 Mbps against a source measured at 3.29: re-encoding a stream that already fit, because it could not measure it. The same video once complete reports SupportsDirectPlay with the exact runtime and bitrate. So FIRST_BYTE_GRACE defaults to infinite again, with --wait-timeout raised to 600s for a 2-hour upload. A cold long video is slow to start, which is accepted: the fetch outlives the request so a retry is instant, and a retryable stall beats a transcode that wastes a gigabyte and cannot work. Both failure modes are recorded at the constant in the order measured so the 12s cap is not reintroduced. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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