Aspect Issues - Fire Stick 4K versus non 4K Firestick and Emby for LG

[davidb7170 7]

I have in the last month or so had issues with my 4K Firesticks displaying aspects incorrectly, These are files I rendered in HEVC 10 bit, but have upscaled from 1920x800 (widescreen) to 1920x1080 Anamorphic so it should display as 2592x1080 widescreen. It works in many that I have rendered as such, but have seen it stretch to full screen 1920x1080 for some. That's the weird part.... 

The 4K firesticks are all on Emby app version 2.0.77a and it happens on all of them. The same affected movies play in the proper aspect on an older plain Firestick that is on Emby App version 2.0.48a, and on my LG Web OS 4K tv with Emby for LG version 1.0.35. Thank you for finally getting that out, by the way. The presentation on the LG version is a bit different, and I had installed a 4K Firestick on that TV while waiting for your LG version. I tend to use the 4K Firestick on that LG TV, mainly out of habit I guess. 

The older Firestick always needs the server to transcode video & audio on the fly down to H.264 when playing HEVC 10 bit files, and does a good job, but was why on my main TV's, I went with the 4K Firesticks so they could direct play the HEVC 10 files....

It appears that some flag is not being interpreted properly on the latest 4K Firestick Emby App version, but not for all such files. I rendered them all with Handbrake using the same settings to achieve the out come. On the ones that have presented issues, I went back and re-rendered to 1920x800 to make them watchable, but still, if they play properly on 2 out of the 3 Emby App versions, I think something may be amiss on version 2.0.77a. The affected files also play in the correct aspect when I check them with VLC on my PC.

Please advise.

Thanks,

Dave

[ebr 14905]

Hi.  If you look at the "Zoom" setting during playback (cog menu) what is it set to?

[davidb7170 7]

I took a look at the zoom setting on an affected file, and it was at "normal". Tried the different modes. The only one that seemed to make a difference was horizontal stretch, but still was full screen top to bottom, not letterbox as it should be. I then set it back to normal. 

I then took a look at the data rate. It's normal rate is 80 mb/s. The first available reduction is 3 mbps. When I chose that, the picture snapped to the proper letterbox proportions, but the stats for nerds reported that it was being transcoded to a much lower resolution and I could see a loss of quality in the picture. When I restarted the file, it went back to full screen, but stats for nerds reported that it was playing in direct play. 

[ebr 14905]

Hi.  Something (like maybe the PAR) in the encoding must be incorrect for these items.  Can you interrogate one that works properly and one that doesn't with something like media info and spot anything different?

21 hours ago, davidb7170 said:

The first available reduction is 3 mbps.

When playing an item, instead of the quality menu showing you a bunch of options that will make no difference, it only shows you qualities that are relevant to the item being played.  If 3Mb was the highest you saw, that would be because of the bitrate of that item.

[davidb7170 7]

Oddly enough, the common thing amongst the problem files was that they were all initially rendered with EAC3 audio with  bitstreams at 768 kbps. I made conversion of DTS audio streams to EAC3 when I saw my Emby clients on my tv's were always being transcoded - not direct playing DTS audio. I chose 768 kbps as a compromise to half the DTS typical bitrate to save file size. My friend and I discussed this quite a bit and later settled on EAC3 at 640 kbps bit rate. NONE of the anamorphic upscaled files with 640 kbps EAC3 audio exhibit this loss of proper aspect when played on my 4K Firesticks, and they direct play the video & audio streams.

I looked at some I down rendered from anamorphic to 1920x800 range, and all of them when re-rendered passed through the EAC3 settings and are sitting at 768 kbps. All of them when played are transcoding the audio streams, with the reason for it given as "bit rate too high" in stats for nerds.

I did a test of re-rendering the 2 current problem files with anamorphic upscaling but set the audio to EAC3 640 kbps, and they play without issue in the proper aspect, and direct play for both video & audio. AGAIN the weird part is these used to play fine, and I did a search through my files and came up with 9 other files in this state, but none of them are displaying improperly. I am in the process of re-rendering these with EAC3 640 kbps audio streams.

I do not know how or why an audio stream parameter would mess with the video aspect presentation, nor how or why on some files but not others.... I still think this was new behavior with the Emby app version 2.0.77a... I have noticed a few posts of users with issues with EAC3 audio streams other than this, so don't know if it's a related issue.

Edited July 18, 2022 by davidb7170
typo

[Luke 37029]

 

Hi, can we please look at a specific example?. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks!

 

[davidb7170 7]

Unfortunately I have re-rendered the problem files to the same settings but the audio to eac3 at 640 kbps, so they now display in the proper aspect. I deleted the problem files before I backed up my Emby media drive, so they're gone. I re-rendered all the files that had been set originally to 768 kbps whether they were misbehaving or not just so they would direct play both video and audio on my fire tv 4k firesticks. 

One thing you could try would be to render a few 1920x800 and upscale to 1920x1080 anamorphic so it should display at 2592x1080 widescreen letterbox, settings on handbrake would be hevc 10 bit, variable frame rate, quality at 23, and transcode dts to eac3 768 kbps. I had 11 such files and a total of 4 or 5 out of those that had the incorrect aspect issues, so about 40 to 50 percent of the total such files that presented the issues. 

[Luke 37029]

OK thanks for the update.