ATV Not Loading

[trmentry 0]

So came home from work today and ran Emby.  It just gives me a white screen... never shows the Starting....  

 

Restarted ATV -- No joy.

Restarted Emby Server -- No joy.

 

Run VLC on ATV and it sees Emby server.. and plays videos fine.   

 

Deleted app on ATV.... restarted... reinstalled app... -- No Joy.

 

This started some time in the last 48-72 hours.  I upgraded to 6400 on server on 8/31 or so.   Things played fine before that.. but not tried since.  

 

 

Any ideas?

 

[Luke 37099]

Hi, we're very sorry about this. Our hosting provider has been having issues tonight. Hopefully the worst of it is over. We'll update you as we know more. Thanks.

[mellomade 140]

That begs the question - why does the Apple TV app require an internet connection when others do not?  I understand being part of the beta to push updates more efficiently - but should the release version really be dependent on your servers to function?

[Luke 37099]

We chose the hosted app model which allows for rapid development and ability to push updates without having to go through the store review process. That said we can certainly look into backup options to increase reslienc

[corey 312]

Most of the applications functionality is delivered via JavaScript and TVML which Apple loads via HTTP. The actual application bundle contains only enough tvOS code to bootstrap the JS app. As far as I know tvOS caches the JS and TVML templates and this would only effect users launching the app for the first time, or restarting the app.

 

Having worked with the app code over the last couple of months I honestly really like his approach. We can use the existing JS code without having to write a Swift one. We can also deliver updates without having to go through the Apple review process which can slow things down a bit and can be a bit confusing as @@Luke and @@ebr can attest to.

 

It's likely that we could bundle the TVML and JS templates within the native application bundle but it definitely would seem to be a nonstandard way of delivering the application when looking at Apple's suggested approaches.

 

I hope this provides a bit of context.

[mellomade 140]

@@corey - thanks for the details.

 

As I said I understand it for pushing updates and testing related activities.  But once it has passed to release version I would think that there should be a more robust framework for making this app independent of remotely hosted code.

 

It just sucks to have your ATV bricked when something happens to the internet connection or hosted code.  Clearly relying on cache data is not sufficient under those circumstances.

[Luke 37099]

It is technically possible to download once then serve the content locally from within the app, and then use the internet to update the downloaded resources. That's something we can look into in the future.

[trmentry 0]

<<-- not a programer.

 

But to me... having it depend on dial home before it starts kinda detracts from the usefulness of it when just watching local content.   I think a knob to have it start locally with out dialing back to the mother ship would be nice to have.   And allow for manual updates from the mother ship with user input.

[corey 312]

As I said I understand it for pushing updates and testing related activities. But once it has passed to release version I would think that there should be a more robust framework for making this app independent of remotely hosted code.

 

It just sucks to have your ATV bricked when something happens to the internet connection or hosted code. Clearly relying on cache data is not sufficient under those circumstances.

As a daily Emby user I agree with you completely. As @@Luke mentioned it's technically possible and something we can look into once it rises up in the priority list. I have a couple ideas of how we could do it but I'd want to see if we could still avoid the Apple review process for the TVML and JavaScript code as well as allowing an easy toggle between stable, dev, and beta releases.