Solution for stuttery playback x265 or file not even playing at all

[MrSpaniard 2]

Hi Guys,

 

I thought I'd make this topic to hopefully help a few people out that are running into the same issue as I was until an hour ago.

All of a sudden all HEVC/x265 (mostly 10bit) files started playing extremely stuttery, I mean 85 dropped frames in 15 seconds stuttery, unwatchable.

I also noticed problems when trying to view files over https (including valid SSL certificate) from outside my home, files would not start playing at all, and my emby server would completely lock up.

I've been digging for a few hours now and can't believe this was the solution.

 

The solutions for me was rather simple, luckily, all you have to do is disable hardware acceleration in your browser of choice that is experiencing the issue, relaunch your browser and voila.

I've been doing multiple tests, and all seems well.

 

Apparently, Google Chrome, and other browsers sharing the same or similar engines have updated something regarding how to handle hevc/x265 content.

Effectively, the browser tells Emby Server to serve them the original file via direct playback, even though they cannot handle it at all, chaos ensued.

 

I'm sure I'm not going to be the only one that will run into this, so if the above problems sound familiar to you and they just started recently, give this solution a try.

Hope this helps.

 

Love, your fellow Emby enthusiast.

Edited April 19, 2023 by MrSpaniard

[Luke 37071]

Quote

disable hardware acceleration in your browser

Hi, yes we've seen some reports of this from users, however we've also seen other reports with exactly the opposite advice.

So I think the answer is that it depends. It depends on your hardware, the browser, and what you're playing.

Thanks for sharing.

[MrSpaniard 2]

14 minutes ago, Luke said:

Hi, yes we've seen some reports of this from users, however we've also seen other reports with exactly the opposite advice.

So I think the answer is that it depends. It depends on your hardware, the browser, and what you're playing.

Thanks for sharing.

Fair point, but I just noticed this starting yesterday, never had a problem before.
I didn't have enough characters available for the topic title to make it more clear that this is specifically for when you suddenly start noticing this since 1 or 2 days ago when you hadn't had a problem before.
I didn't see any recent topics regarding this, so I thought I'd share and save people some time

I noticed the browsers affected where updated exactly at the time the problems started happening.
When I finally got files playing it noticed insane stutter, when accessing the files from an external location, nothing would even load at all.

Some of the behavior that occurred made me look into stuff that's not even related too, so if someone has this since 1 or 2 days, might be worth to test this setting out.
Before you go crazy looking into so many different weird things you get lost in your research.
Everything looked like this was network/https related, since the behavior was different when accessing from inside or outside my network.
It was really odd.

But I'm happy I found this, shared this with some of my users that experienced the same issue too, solved it for them as well, happy camper all around over here

Edited April 19, 2023 by MrSpaniard