Any tips for roku playback?

[Artimus 0]

I having playback issues on Roku with some movies in my collection.  I'm fairly new to emby but it has generally worked our really well.
Out of the last 10 movies i've added,  ive had issues with maybe 6 of them (give or take).  Not attaching logs because the issue not specific to a particular video, or even emby.

Here's what's happening.   
Some videos play with no issues at all.
Some start to play, end then stop out of nowhere.  The time is always the same for each video.  Meaning video "a" will always fall at 2m:38s,   and video "b" will always fall at 10m15s, and one goes maybe 4s.   These times are just from my memory,  probably not exact.  the point is each video is consistently stopping at the same point.
Roku is the common component.  Only tested on one so far,  but i'll give it a try on another too.

What i've tried:
1. New containerized emby server - 4.7.14.0 (free version)
2. Non-containerized emby server on my laptop - same version.
3. Jellyfin - latest
4. Plex - latest
5. NFS storage,  and local storage.
6. Re-downloading the video, and comparing hash's. (they matched)
In all the scenarios above,  the same exact issue occurs.

I've also tried:
1. Playing the videos on the containerized emby server, in chrome rather then roku.  I this case the videos tend to hang or jump at the same timestamps, but the movie continues on after that.
2. In plex, I used the option to "optimize for tv".  The new video plays flawlessly, so i guess it corrected what ever issue there was in the video.  Unfortunately that process is a pain to have to go through,  and 1.5G video ends up being 6.5G.   But the biggest annoyance is that i don't know if i need to do this optimization until i start watching,  which kinda kills movie night.

Has anyone had these types of issues with Roku?  I know roku is a bit picky which is why i started using emby vs my home rolled roku app that made in the first place.
Any tips/tricks for identifying and repairing these issues in an automated fashion?

[Luke 37090]

Hi there, I think we'd really have to look at a specific example in order to offer advice on this, no?

[ebr 14918]

31 minutes ago, Luke said:

Hi there, I think we'd really have to look at a specific example in order to offer advice on this, no?

Yes, but it sure looks like bad media - which the Roku in particular is pretty unforgiving on.

[speechles 1920]

Roku has made it so that the device is harder to crash into a reboot. Part of this was updating their video player to be more strict about how far it reads ahead. Once it reaches the area with that corruption it might report end of playback to the application. Because if it were to continue to read past that corruption/bad-header it might end up crashing the device into a reboot. Roku does not want users experience these reboots during video playback. This change was introduced with firmware 12.

[RanmaCanada 345]

Are the movies transcoding or direct playing, when they crash?

[tedfroop21 38]

On 04/11/2023 at 11:39, speechles said:

Part of this was updating their video player to be more strict about how far it reads ahead. Once it reaches the area with that corruption it might report end of playback to the application.

As a Roku user, I can confirm this.   Even read ahead issues can cause the same problem.