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Stuttering/choppy playback lately on FireTV Stick


jluce50

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jluce50

For the last few weeks I've been getting consistent stuttering during playback. This occurs in both Kodi and the Emby app. When I turn on debugging in Kodi I can see that the CPU occasionally spikes and the framerate drops way down. I'm thinking maybe a recent software update may have introduced new background services or something. It was fine for months before this started happening. Has anyone else seen this behavior?

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ice pube

I saw this at my moms house yesterday, my server is remote so I thought maybe it was that. I was unable to check the CPU usage of the server. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi,

 

yes I have the same problems on both my fire-tv-sticks ... its a local wan-network ... with netflix or over the sony-tv i have no problems in playing the movies. Within emby it has major problems and sometimes even stops the movie. Also the grid for the films loads very slowly when moving the page.

 

On the server its no problem, but on the sticks its not usable or watchable.

 

Do you need more information?

 

BR

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I don't think this is an Emby problem.  As indicated in the OP, it affects other apps as well.

 

The Stick has very limited processing power so anything that requires processing power to decode could be an issue.  For this reason, we don't allow the use of direct stream with VLC on the stick for any HD content.

 

When you play an item with issues, what does the last gray block on the OSD say?

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jluce50

Hi,

 

yes I have the same problems on both my fire-tv-sticks ... its a local wan-network ... with netflix or over the sony-tv i have no problems in playing the movies. Within emby it has major problems and sometimes even stops the movie. Also the grid for the films loads very slowly when moving the page.

 

On the server its no problem, but on the sticks its not usable or watchable.

 

Do you need more information?

 

BR

No, I'm not a dev on the FireTV. I was just curious if it was just my setup or a bigger issue. Was it ever working well for you or has it always had this problem?

Edited by jluce50
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jluce50

I don't think this is an Emby problem.  As indicated in the OP, it affects other apps as well.

 

The Stick has very limited processing power so anything that requires processing power to decode could be an issue.  For this reason, we don't allow the use of direct stream with VLC on the stick for any HD content.

 

When you play an item with issues, what does the last gray block on the OSD say?

 

I'll have to test and get back to you.

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  • 2 weeks later...
justdrooit

Yeah, I figured this out myself last night setting up my FireTV Stick with Emby trying to watch the football game through my HDHomeRun on it last night. I kept trying to lower the bandwidth all the way down to 2Mbps and it would still show some choppiness. As soon as I removed the VLC processing, it was just about perfect. Now I suspect VLC works beautifully on the full FireTV, but not so much on the stick.

Just the same, I think I actually like Emby better on my FireTV stick than on my Roku...

Edited by justdrooit
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jluce50

Lately I've noticed this happening with Netflix as well, though not as much. Something in the latest update changed something for the worse...

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  • 2 weeks later...
paul777

I've noticed this on certain videos, particularly those that require anamorphic conversion e.g. DVD encodes where 720x565 stream is displayed at 1024x576. It seems to happen when using the VLC option and direct streaming. The buffering makes no difference, it will glitch every few seconds even with a 20sec buffer. If I disable VLC then it gets transcoded on the server and playback is smooth.

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I've noticed this on certain videos, particularly those that require anamorphic conversion e.g. DVD encodes where 720x565 stream is displayed at 1024x576. It seems to happen when using the VLC option and direct streaming. The buffering makes no difference, it will glitch every few seconds even with a 20sec buffer. If I disable VLC then it gets transcoded on the server and playback is smooth.

 

Yep because VLC is using the device's CPU to decode and the stick just isn't powerful enough.  I've disabled VLC on the stick for any HD content for this reason but I guess even SD stuff isn't always safe.

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