What is emby writing during streaming? (with and without transcoding)

[Gaba90 4]

Hi Emby Team,

i noticed that during streaming, no matter if transcoding is running or not, the "emby server" process is writing something to my hdd the whole time. During transcoding i get a separate "ffmpeg" process which writes the transcode files, which is okay i guess. 

But I'm wondering what does emby need to write when streaming? 

Thank you in advance

[GrimReaper 4159]

Logs? Activity? DB changes? Some scheduled task running? 

[gillmacca01 180]

Could also be resume points being written

[Gaba90 4]

No scheduled tasks are running, also no db changes are currently ongoing. 

If its the logs why is it logging so much and how can I set the logs to a minimum? The ffmpeg logs are only written during transcoding but I can see the embyserver.txt log is constantly being written. But there is so much going on its pretty hard to read. 

If its the resume points shouldnt that only be written if pausing / stopping the stream? There are some things going on according to the embyserver log though which are accessing the folder /sessions/playing/progress... 

 

[GrimReaper 4159]

1 hour ago, Gaba90 said:

also no db changes are currently ongoing. 

There are always db changes ongoing, shm/wal files getting updated constantly (watched progress/resume points being one of those). 

1 hour ago, Gaba90 said:

If its the logs why is it logging so much and how can I set the logs to a minimum?

If you don't have Debug enabled - you're already at minimum, don't think you can reduce that any more. 

1 hour ago, Gaba90 said:

If its the resume points shouldnt that only be written if pausing / stopping the stream?

AFAIK server-client communication is not limited to start-stop events only but is being regularly updated, but Dev will have to comment on that. 

[Gaba90 4]

Thank you for the information! 

I'm just starting to get into emby since 1 or 2 weeks. I have been running synologys own video station for over 2 years on my nas and didn't run into this phenomenon until now. I probably wouldn't have noticed or wouldn't be bothered by the writings, but my nas is in my living room and can be heard when the hdd is writing.

That's why I was wondering what and why emby needs to write so much during streaming and if I can do something about that. 

[FrostByte 5258]

If it's direct streaming then you are still transcoding the audio portion.  Direct Play is what you're aiming for which will cause minimal writing during playback.

[Luke 40116]

Hi, can we please see an emby server log example? Thanks.

[Gaba90 4]

@FrostByte of course i meant direct play, just used the wrong word. 

 

@Luke i attached a part of the embyserver log file here during playback

embyserver.txt

[Carlo 4552]

There are a few playbacks in that log file and some of these appear to be DirectStream which will use the transcode folder.

If you go to the Logs menu and see anything starting with ffmpeg that corresponds with the playback time then you know just by the file being written Emby Server is having to manipulate the file/stream in some fashion and will be using the transcode folder to do so.  Not everything manipulated is always a transcode as sometimes the file/stream just needs a format change (ie TS to HLS) while still using the same codecs present originally.

Hope this helps,
Carlo

[Gaba90 4]

I checked again, but there are no ffmpeg logs when directplaying. The statistics tab also shows "direct play" for audio and video. Weird

[Luke 40116]

11 hours ago, Gaba90 said:

@FrostByte of course i meant direct play, just used the wrong word. 

 

@Luke i attached a part of the embyserver log file here during playback

embyserver.txt 275.48 kB · 4 downloads

@Gaba90

Can you please attach the complete emby server log? This appears to be just a snippet. Thanks.

[Gaba90 4]

Yes this is just part of it. My public server adress is inside the whole log, that's why I didn't want to put it here. I will try to edit those parts later and put the log here when I'm home again.

[FrostByte 5258]

9 minutes ago, Gaba90 said:

Yes this is just part of it. My public server adress is inside the whole log, that's why I didn't want to put it here. I will try to edit those parts later and put the log here when I'm home again.

You could also PM the log to Luke 

[Gaba90 4]

2 hours ago, FrostByte said:

You could also PM the log to Luke 

Just did that, thanks !

[Luke 40116]

OK so I reviewed the log over PM. There is some library scanning and other playback with transcoding happening at different times.

But yes, for those 10 minutes that you provided the log snippet for earlier, the writes to the hard drive are going to be the server log file, and then also the clients report their playback position to the server every several seconds, and this gets written into the database.

[Gaba90 4]

Alright thanks for reviewing! Guess I have to try to make my hard drive more silent