Emby randomly pausing, continues by itself several minutes later

[embylad892746 15]

First of all, the anonymized option for logs does not work on my current emby. I had to manually remove IPs and hostnames.....

 

Now to the real problem, one of my users started noticing that Emby will randomly pause sometimes then several minutes later continue again. Happens on different clients they said (android phone + android TV). They messaged me when it happened around 21:48 in the logs. I clipped the server logs to involve only the time period they reported it happening. Apparently it will do this pausing and continuing behavior several times. Never had any issues before, and I haven't changed anything. The only thing that changes is that the latest Emby Docker Images are automatically pulled by my server.

You can see at one point the Android TV client reports to the server that's stopped:

2023-03-05 21:48:16.752 Info SessionManager: Playback stopped reported by app AndroidTv 2.0.83g

i don't see anything helpful in the logs TBH, But hoping @Lukeor @softworkzmight have some educated guesses?

 

Emby Server: Version 4.7.10.0 (Docker). All clients latest versions.

thanks for any help!!!

 

embyserver.txt

Edited March 5, 2023 by embylad892746
added line from logs

[Luke 37259]

Quote

First of all, the anonymized option for logs does not work on my current emby. I had to manually remove IPs and hostnames.....

Hi, where exactly did you have to remove host names from? 

[Happy2Play 8356]

53 minutes ago, Luke said:

Hi, where exactly did you have to remove host names from? 

Known issue for X-Forwarded-Host= and Host= reported in previous topics and I believe a couple others in that same line depending on ones configuration.

[embylad892746 15]

14 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi, where exactly did you have to remove host names from? 

Hi Luke, you can search for "redacted" in my logs i attached. I replaced data with

<redacted hostname>

and

<redacted ip>

 

Can you help me to understand why some emby client's are pausing for no apparent reason?  This is the primary problem i'm looking to get guidance with. I'm not sure if you had a chance to look over the log extract i provided, but is there another place i should look to figure out why some clients are pausing themselves?

[embylad892746 15]

By the way, the issue i'm experiencing sounds identical to

 

for what it's worth: i also proxy my emby server via cloudflare, although just for troubleshooting purposes I've disabled it as a temporary measure to see if it fixes the problem for the user in question. However, i'm really not expecting it to. Furthermore, the logs should show at least something if it couldn't connect to the client properly. All i see are 204 / 206 http codes in the logs.

Thanks for any advice.

 

[embylad892746 15]

With cloudflare proxy-ing turned off, the problem still happens. So we can rule that one out....

Here are some more logs. The user reports is happening at 19:41, 20:02, 20:09. Again, i can see some "stopped" signals but i don't see any errors. Any advice appreciated.

 

 

embyserver2.txt

[Luke 37259]

On 3/6/2023 at 3:22 PM, embylad892746 said:

With cloudflare proxy-ing turned off, the problem still happens. So we can rule that one out....

Here are some more logs. The user reports is happening at 19:41, 20:02, 20:09. Again, i can see some "stopped" signals but i don't see any errors. Any advice appreciated.

 

 

embyserver2.txt 592.43 kB · 3 downloads

Hi.  Can you try sideloading our standard android app on the same device and see how that compares?

https://emby.media/emby-for-android.html

Thanks.

 

[embylad892746 15]

Hi @Lukesorry to pick this problem up again but after visiting my friend today the issue still persists for him. I don't think he'd feel comfortable side loading the apk so that's not a really a possible solution I'm sorry to say. We confirmed the issue happens on another android TV after installing the latest Emby app. He can play a show/movie and it will pause randomly (usually at about 70-80% completion mark, according to him). As aforementioned, server logs are not helpful for this and simply show that the Android Device stopped playback.

Other useful information: Clients up to date. Server up to date (latest non-beta). Client to Server connections are direct. Nginx is via the linuxserver-swag container. Internet speed is not an issue everyone is on gigabit. The playback is direct playback. Did not experiment with forcing trans-code because to me this is not a solution and wouldn't explain the issue. Media files are x264 mp4 AAC.

Any advice much appreciate.

 

Edit:

My current nginx config: https://github.com/linuxserver/reverse-proxy-confs/blob/0528b56e12655748834a9314e7b8cd413e6bf7da/emby.subdomain.conf.sample

Edited October 1, 2023 by embylad892746
add nginx conf

[Luke 37259]

20 hours ago, embylad892746 said:

Hi @Lukesorry to pick this problem up again but after visiting my friend today the issue still persists for him. I don't think he'd feel comfortable side loading the apk so that's not a really a possible solution I'm sorry to say. We confirmed the issue happens on another android TV after installing the latest Emby app. He can play a show/movie and it will pause randomly (usually at about 70-80% completion mark, according to him). As aforementioned, server logs are not helpful for this and simply show that the Android Device stopped playback.

Other useful information: Clients up to date. Server up to date (latest non-beta). Client to Server connections are direct. Nginx is via the linuxserver-swag container. Internet speed is not an issue everyone is on gigabit. The playback is direct playback. Did not experiment with forcing trans-code because to me this is not a solution and wouldn't explain the issue. Media files are x264 mp4 AAC.

Any advice much appreciate.

 

Edit:

My current nginx config: https://github.com/linuxserver/reverse-proxy-confs/blob/0528b56e12655748834a9314e7b8cd413e6bf7da/emby.subdomain.conf.sample

I would have him try lowering the in app quality setting to reduce the bitrate. That will usually resolve this type of issue.

[embylad892746 15]

Sure I’ll have him set the playback setting to 30Mbps instead of 1000 and see if it helps. I target 10Mbps for my library so everything should still direct play.

I hope this is the solution and thanks for your suggestion, but it doesn’t make any logical sense to me. Surely, if a video is 10 Mbps and the playback setting is 1000Mbps or 50 Mbps, it shouldn’t make a difference?

[Luke 37259]

On 10/2/2023 at 4:28 PM, embylad892746 said:

Sure I’ll have him set the playback setting to 30Mbps instead of 1000 and see if it helps. I target 10Mbps for my library so everything should still direct play.

I hope this is the solution and thanks for your suggestion, but it doesn’t make any logical sense to me. Surely, if a video is 10 Mbps and the playback setting is 1000Mbps or 50 Mbps, it shouldn’t make a difference?

Correct, but it could be that 10 is even too high.

[Luke 37259]

Hi, has this helped?

[embylad892746 15]

Hi Luke sorry for not updating. Let me ask my friends for confirmation and i'll update you shortly.