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Emby on Nvidia Shield TV Pro client direct play intermittent freezes


tattler

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tattler
33 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Do you get the stuttering with SMB2.x ?

With smb2.1 and opslocks ON = stuttering yes, but the same setting with smb2.0 is stable, at least in my environment. I really have no idea why this should make any difference but my experience so far is good and stable with these settings. Maybe you should try on your end to verify if this is consistent?

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FrostByte

Just tried smb2, 2.1, and 3 with oplock off and couldn't tell any difference when playing LoTR 4K remuxes.  When I turned oplock on it started stuttering.  I'm on SE9 also so maybe that's it.  It's odd everyone has different experiences with those settings.

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tattler
29 minutes ago, FrostByte said:

Just tried smb2, 2.1, and 3 with oplock off and couldn't tell any difference when playing LoTR 4K remuxes.  When I turned oplock on it started stuttering.  I'm on SE9 also so maybe that's it.  It's odd everyone has different experiences with those settings.

It's odd indeed! Could it be due to different implementations of SMB by different vendors? So you have oplocks off now? Did you try oplocks ON with different smb versions? Tbh I hate SMB and wish NFS is available on the Shield!

I see you are running a new Emby server version (I currently have 4.6.7.0) 😉

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FrostByte

I only tried oplocks on in smb3 which caused stuttering.  I'll test smb2/2.1 also

Yes, I'm running Emby server beta also.  I guess that's two things different.  I know of a couple people who said they fell back to 4.6.7 because the beta caused stuttering.   It's all weird as I can't duplicate

 

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rbjtech

There seems to be a lot of variables here - I'm not sure we are all comparing apples to apples.

My setup will be totally different as I use Windows Shares (Direct Attached Storage) with SMB2 mounted to the Shield and Emby Stable - Client will be ATV using DFA. 

I could try the new Beta as it's available on my media LAN - I could try both HTTP and DFA/SMB - I'll look at that briefly this evening after work as the issue may be the Emby Beta release and have nothing to do with SMB/Oplocks ...

By 'stuttering' - do you mean micro stutters, or full blown 'start/stop' type behaviour ?

Edited by rbjtech
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FrostByte

For me it's micro stutters but throughout and very noticeable.  Not long pauses though like I see when transcoding.  But that's only with oplocks on

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tattler
28 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

There seem to be a lot of variables here - I'm not sure we are al comparing apples to apples.

My setup will be totally different as I use Windows Shares (Direct Attached Storage) with SMB2 mounted to the Shield and Emby Stable - Client will be ATV using DFA. 

I could try the new Beta as it's available on my media LAN - I could try both HTTP and DFA/SMB - I'll look at that briefly this evening after work as the issue may be the Emby Beta release and have nothing to do with SMB/Oplocks ...

By 'stuttering' - do you mean micro stutters, or full blown 'start/stop' type behaviour ?

I don't know how to differentiate between (micro) stuttering and start/stop type. The movie will pause (frozen frame) for a few seconds then will stream again and after a few minutes it repeats which renders it unwatchable.

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rbjtech
18 minutes ago, tattler said:

I don't know how to differentiate between (micro) stuttering and start/stop type. The movie will pause (frozen frame) for a few seconds then will stream again and after a few minutes it repeats which renders it unwatchable.

ok thanks - Micro stuttering is when it looks like the framerate is not smooth - but it never 'stops'.  You are explaining what looks to be the client emby buffer emptying and then waiting for it to be re-filled - and it then continues for a bit until empty again - ie classic network bandwidth issues. 

So even these terms can cause confusion on the symptoms 🤣 - Frostbyte has Micro stutters, but yours is full blown buffer issues ...  

Edited by rbjtech
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tattler
22 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

ok thanks - Micro stuttering is when it looks like the framerate is not smooth - but it never 'stops'.  You are explaining what looks to be the client emby buffer emptying and then waiting for it to be re-filled - and it then continues for a bit until empty again - ie classic network bandwidth issues. 

So even these terms can cause confusion on the symptoms 🤣 - Frostbyte has Micro stutters, but yours is full blown buffer issues ...  

Thanks for the explanation! It certainly looks like a network bandwidth issue. Odd because the Formuler Z8 Pro is wired and so is my Shield, with gigabit network. I use port trunking combining 2 gigabit ports on the NAS which gives me 2Gb of bandwidth! It baffled me because I never had this behaviour before (I used primarily Kodi before Plex and Emby comes along).

To compare I ran VLC on my laptop (Wifi!) to stream the movie directly from mounted samba share on my laptop. In network monitoring (I run Ubuntu) I saw the throughput was constant (it went higher than 4MB/s when playing high bitrate movie of 38 Mbps) and could keep up with the streaming. When I started the same movie in Emby web client the network throughput never went higher than 4 MB/s and the freezes started to appear. So weird! It got me thinking maybe the samba implementation on the Shield (running Emby server) is not 'optimal' so I played around with it. Discovered that smbv2 with opslocks on works for me!

I will try to play around with smb3 with opslocks on to see if the same behaviour will manifest.

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rbjtech
14 minutes ago, tattler said:

Thanks for the explanation! It certainly looks like a network bandwidth issue. Odd because the Formuler Z8 Pro is wired and so is my Shield, with gigabit network. I use port trunking combining 2 gigabit ports on the NAS which gives me 2Gb of bandwidth! It baffled me because I never had this behaviour before (I used primarily Kodi before Plex and Emby comes along).

To compare I ran VLC on my laptop (Wifi!) to stream the movie directly from mounted samba share on my laptop. In network monitoring (I run Ubuntu) I saw the throughput was constant (it went higher than 4MB/s when playing high bitrate movie of 38 Mbps) and could keep up with the streaming. When I started the same movie in Emby web client the network throughput never went higher than 4 MB/s and the freezes started to appear. So weird! It got me thinking maybe the samba implementation on the Shield (running Emby server) is not 'optimal' so I played around with it. Discovered that smbv2 with opslocks on works for me!

I will try to play around with smb3 with opslocks on to see if the same behaviour will manifest.

Yep - with the amount of people with this issue (you are by no means the first..) I agree with you and think there are some serious issues using the Shield as an Emby Server with data stored on a NAS via SMB.   If your NAS has the cpu/gpu hardware, then it appears to be much more successful running Emby on that instead.

It would be useful to try a couple of high bitrate (4K remux) files using the Shield local USB storage as a comparison - I would hazard a guess that there would be zero issues with playback on those.   

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tattler
5 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Yep - with the amount of people with this issue (you are by no means the first..) I agree with you and think there are some serious issues using the Shield as an Emby Server with data stored on a NAS via SMB.   If your NAS has the cpu/gpu hardware, then it appears to be much more successful running Emby on that instead.

It would be useful to try a couple of high bitrate (4K remux) files using the Shield local USB storage as a comparison - I would hazard a guess that there would be zero issues with playback on those.   

I am in the process to replace my old QNAP TS-259 PRO+! So atm I cannot use my NAS as Emby server. I do not have a 4K TV so I don't have any 4K remuxed movies to test! 1080p movies are the highest bitrate movies I have (mostly Blu-Ray remuxed).

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rbjtech
1 minute ago, tattler said:

I am in the process to replace my old QNAP TS-259 PRO+! So atm I cannot use my NAS as Emby server. I do not have a 4K TV so I don't have any 4K remuxed movies to test! 1080p movies are the highest bitrate movies I have (mostly Blu-Ray remuxed).

Blu-Ray Remux's can still be ~45Mbit/sec - it's just for a comparison anyway - ie if Shield cannot play file X via your NAS, but the same file works perfectly well via USB2 - then that suggests the issue is the SMB source mount - not the Shield > HTTP > Network > Emby Client engine.

 

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tattler
10 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Blu-Ray Remux's can still be ~45Mbit/sec - it's just for a comparison anyway - ie if Shield cannot play file X via your NAS, but the same file works perfectly well via USB2 - then that suggests the issue is the SMB source mount - not the Shield > HTTP > Network > Emby Client engine.

 

I was playing the movie with VLC using the same SMB mount as the Shield. That's enough for me to think the culprit is in Shield.

Edited by tattler
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tattler
On 10/04/2022 at 01:05, FrostByte said:

Was the movie transcoding?  If there are any remux or transcode logs on the server it may help to post those also.

ebr will need to know the time and user logged on for the app log.

@FrostBytesorry I forgot to give you the info. The movie was not transcoding but direct playing. I had issues when started playing so I stopped the player, turned on debug and played the movie at 00:04 until it froze for a few seconds then I sent the log from the player and stoppped the movie. The log I sent was only during this time.

Thank you!

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tattler

I did another test today with smb2.1 and opslocks on. The movie stuttered again (no pauses) and right after a few minutes the spinning wheel appeared and play back changed from direct play to direct stream! This is very odd because after changing to use smb2 the streaming is smooth as butter and no more stuttering! This seems to be consistent and I must say Shield works best with max protocol smbv2 in my environment.

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rbjtech
27 minutes ago, tattler said:

I did another test today with smb2.1 and opslocks on. The movie stuttered again (no pauses) and right after a few minutes the spinning wheel appeared and play back changed from direct play to direct stream! This is very odd because after changing to use smb2 the streaming is smooth as butter and no more stuttering! This seems to be consistent and I must say Shield works best with max protocol smbv2 in my environment.

Hmm - Could you try again and disable one of your bonded connections ?  I have a feeling that smb 2.1 will try and utilise these bonds and this is what's causing the issue. 

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tattler
1 hour ago, rbjtech said:

Hmm - Could you try again and disable one of your bonded connections ?  I have a feeling that smb 2.1 will try and utilise these bonds and this is what's causing the issue. 

Hi @rbjtechI don't know what you mean by bonded connections? After changing smb to version 2 I rebooted the Shield to make sure the new settings are being applied. I logged in via adb and saw that Shield indeed mounted the shares with ver=2.0 in the output of mount command.

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rbjtech
1 hour ago, tattler said:

Hi @rbjtechI don't know what you mean by bonded connections? After changing smb to version 2 I rebooted the Shield to make sure the new settings are being applied. I logged in via adb and saw that Shield indeed mounted the shares with ver=2.0 in the output of mount command.

Sorry, I may be confusing this issue with another one - do you have any connectivity involving TWO (or more) 1 Gig ethernet connections from the NAS to the Switch to 'increase' overall bandwidth ?   While SMB 3.0 does allow full SMB multi-channel for real bandwidth increase, SMB 2.1 does have some limited enhancements to allow the use of multiple channels - this may be what the issue is if emby is not playing nice with the enhancements. SMB 2.0 does not have these features - so I'm trying to work out why 2.0 is ok for you but 2.1 isn't - thus relating it to the multi-ethernet question ... 🤪

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tattler
7 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Sorry, I may be confusing this issue with another one - do you have any connectivity involving TWO (or more) 1 Gig ethernet connections from the NAS to the Switch to 'increase' overall bandwidth ?   While SMB 3.0 does allow full SMB multi-channel for real bandwidth increase, SMB 2.1 does have some limited enhancements to allow the use of multiple channels - this may be what the issue is if emby is not playing nice with the enhancements. SMB 2.0 does not have these features - so I'm trying to work out why 2.0 is ok for you but 2.1 isn't - thus relating it to the multi-ethernet question ... 🤪

Ah I see 😉 Yes I use port trunking to connect 2 Ethernet ports from the NAS to Unifi EdgeSwitch 8-port (2 ports configured as LAG) --> Unifi Switch 8-port (using 2 ports as port trunking). Perhaps I have connectivity issues with the port trunking? I don't know that smb3 allows full SMB mult-channel to use the increased bandwidth! Interesting! I will try later to use smb3 with opslocks ON to see if the freezes will occur. Thanks for this info!

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