AFTV Stick: Gray Screen Crash

[taylorbourne 19]

So I've seen this happen many times in a couple different situations while using Emby on my Fire Stick. The first – when the Fire goes to sleep with Emby running and you attempt to wake, I get a gray screen. I will say that this used to happen far more often, but it seems like since the last update it's down to like 50% repro rate.

 

A crash I see every time without fail is when I have the "Use External Player for Videos" option checked in the settings page. When I select a video to play, I always launch with VLC. When the video ends, I'm left with a gray screen. Attempting to exit to the AFTV dashboard and go back into Emby lands me on a gray screen. Only way to get back in is to force stop the application and relaunch. 

 

Have either of these issues been observed before? Logs are sent from inside the application, correct? Next time I see this I'll try to send in a log.

[ebr 14958]

Hi.  You won't be able to send a log once the app has crashed.

 

The first one is something we've been working on but, since I am unable to reproduce it, it has been tough to track down.  I do think some of the latest changes should have helped though.

 

The second one, no, I don't know of that one but could be unique to the Fire TV and that particular external player.  Why are you using an external version of VLC?

[taylorbourne 19]

Hi.  You won't be able to send a log once the app has crashed.

 

The first one is something we've been working on but, since I am unable to reproduce it, it has been tough to track down.  I do think some of the latest changes should have helped though.

 

The second one, no, I don't know of that one but could be unique to the Fire TV and that particular external player.  Why are you using an external version of VLC?

 

Ah gotcha, I was under the impression that relaunching the app didn't clear out the logs. Sometimes I'll run into a file that doesn't want to play the audio correctly. For example, movie plays, background music/certain sfx play, but we'll get no voices – so I load it up with the VLC app. Or even more weird, I'll run into files that simply don't want to play all the way through. I wish I still had the files on my server that most recently did this to me but since we watched them all I've since deleted them. What happens is I play episode one of a series, it will play for 5 minutes (sometimes less, sometimes more), then automatically skip to the next episode.

 

Anyway in those 2 circumstances I'll use VLC instead of the internal player, which currently is a pain because, like I said, I have to force kill the app and relaunch.

[ebr 14958]

For example, movie plays, background music/certain sfx play, but we'll get no voices – so I load it up with the VLC app. 

 

That sounds like a 5.1 track that you are feeding to stereo hardware.

 

Have you tried setting the Audio mode to "Downmix to stereo"?  There was a pop up the first time you ran the app that gave you the option to do this.

[taylorbourne 19]

I do remember the pop up, but I did not enable it at the time. Is that something that can be set any time in the settings or only when that pop up is shown? Apologies, I'm at my desk at work at the moment.

[ebr 14958]

Under "Playback" in the main settings screen there is an option for the Audio Mode.  You can change it at any time.