mythos

Phase 3 starts: TV lands, plus HDR→SDR tonemapping

TV scanner, schema, episode playback, continue-watching, auto-play-next — and an explicit HDR→SDR tonemap pipeline in the transcoder.

· status

Two strands of work just landed in main. The first kicks Phase 3 off with TV; the second closes a gap that was always going to bite as soon as people pointed a 4K HDR file at the server.

TV — Phase 3a, 3c, 3d

Mythos now scans, identifies, enriches, and plays TV episodes.

  • Schema. Migration 0008_tv.sql adds series → seasons → episodes plus a per-user episode_progress table. Each episodes row FKs 1:1 to a media_files row, so the same byte-range streaming, HLS transcoder, subtitle pipeline, and ffprobe metadata that movies rely on work for episodes with no branch in the streaming code.
  • Scanner. The filesystem walker has a TV branch keyed on LibraryKind::Shows. The filename identifier recognises both S01E01 and 1x01 patterns, with a Season NN/ directory fallback for filenames that only carry an episode number.
  • TMDb enrichment. search_tv + tv/{id}/season/{n} resolve series, seasons, and per-episode titles, overviews, and stills. Series identity before enrichment is (library_id, sort_title), so a re-scan can’t duplicate a series even if its TMDb ID is still NULL.
  • Playback. /api/episodes/{id}/{stream,play,progress,hls/*,subtitles/.../vtt} mirrors the movie surface. A shared SessionKey { user_id, item_id, kind } keeps movie and episode transcode sessions from colliding. The /movie/[id] and /episodes/[id] pages both render a shared Player.svelte.
  • Stitching (Phase 3d). A GET /api/users/me/continue-watching endpoint aggregates progress across movies and episodes. At the end of an episode the player shows an auto-play-next countdown card and navigates to the next episode with state: { autoplay: true }, so consecutive episodes play seamlessly while “click thumbnail = paused” stays the default for manual navigation.

Music, photos, and books are the remaining Phase 3 sub-phases.

HDR → SDR tonemapping

A 4K HEVC HDR file pointed at a Firefox tab used to come out grey and washed-out — the transcoder was happily encoding HDR samples as SDR without telling anyone. The fix is an explicit tonemap stage in the filter graph, chosen by an admin-editable setting:

  • Pipelines. software, vaapi, opencl, cuda. The server probes ffmpeg at startup for which tonemap filters are actually compiled in (tonemap_vaapi / tonemap_opencl / tonemap_cuda); pipelines whose filter is missing silently fall back to software, so a stale DB value can’t break playback.
  • Algorithms. hable (default), mobius, reinhard, bt2390. Honoured by the software / OpenCL / CUDA pipelines; the VAAPI filter has no algorithm knob, so it ignores this setting.
  • HDR detection. Migration 0009_media_color_metadata.sql adds color_primaries / color_transfer / color_space columns on media_files. Libraries scanned before this migration have those columns NULL; rather than force a rescan, the first HDR play self-heals the row by ffprobing on demand.

Alongside this, the NVENC path stays on the GPU end-to-end now via NVDEC + scale_cuda — no system-RAM round-trip during a transcode. And there are two new env vars, MYTHOS_FFMPEG_BIN and MYTHOS_FFPROBE_BIN, so you can pin a custom ffmpeg build with the encoders and tonemap filters you actually want.

What’s next

The next Phase 3 sub-phases — music, then photos, then books. Phase 6, the Jellyfin-API compatibility shim, is still after that.

Source on GitLab .