LiveTV stop responding, related to ffprobe

[x-cimo 23]

On windows, with latest build (release): 8500

Using the embeded ffmpeg and ffprobe (the version that comes with emby)

 

Twice today live tv stopped working, showing on the client just a spinning circle.

 

Server logs were also pretty quiet.

 

Line indicating that a live stream start was requested were limited to:

2016-11-30 22:07:16.1180 Info App: Profile: Unknown Profile, Path: http://10.100.0.55:5004/auto/v34.1, isEligibleForDirectPlay: True, isEligibleForDirectStream: True
2016-11-30 22:07:16.1180 Info App: Profile: Unknown Profile, No direct play profiles found for Path: http://10.100.0.55:5004/auto/v34.1
2016-11-30 22:07:16.1180 Info HttpServer: HTTP Response 200 to 10.100.2.100. Time: 14ms. http://10.100.1.10:8096/emby/Items/d8d2d794f9780a7d4cf19507abf10317/PlaybackInfo?UserId=bdeeeaf836614055a40782404d8e2c4a&StartTimeTicks=0
2016-11-30 22:07:16.1180 Info HttpServer: HTTP POST http://10.100.1.10:8096/emby/LiveStreams/Open?UserId=bdeeeaf836614055a40782404d8e2c4a&StartTimeTicks=0&ItemId=d8d2d794f9780a7d4cf19507abf10317&PlaySessionId=b843c1e137ae40b69200af46f5485c06. UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/54.0.2840.99 Safari/537.36

Nothing else after.....

 

I had the great idea to fire up process explorer and saw there was a ffprobe under emby-server. It was stuck there for a long time. It was consuming the stream from one of my hdhomerun tuner.

 

This was the commandline to ffprobe:

"C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\ffmpeg\20160410\ffprobe.exe" -analyzeduration 2000000 -i "http://127.0.0.1:8096/LiveTv/LiveStreamFiles/c1b7393dcb3444da99afa95c49a27aaf/stream.ts" -threads 0 -v info -print_format json -show_streams -show_format

Movie streaming, and TV recording was going on, and confirmed working. It looks like ffprobe may hang, and that there is probably a single thread that if it get stuck would prevent transcoding from working...

 

I decided to kill ffprobe, and sure enough everything got unstuck, the server logs filled with tons of error, and live tv started working again.

 

I am not sure why ffprobe got stuck, I will try a newer version, however I think emby should watch for that; and allow for multiple concurrent call.  

 

I have included the server log before I killed ffprobe, and the one after.

 

Thanks

 

livetvhang.zip

[Luke 37096]

Thanks for the report. We actually already do watch for it. It looks like in this situation it failed in a way that caused ffprobe to hang and then the process kill commands also were unable to kill it for whatever reason. We'll have to look at how to recover from that. Thanks.

[x-cimo 23]

Turns out that the channel that's causing ffprobe to hang is having some problem at the source; it's broadcasting something but it's not a video stream, I used the hdhomerun software and I just get a black screen.

 

There is a -analyzeduration 2000000 flag to ffprobe, it dosen't look like it return after that amount of time.

 

If there is something in emby that should kill ffprobe after a little while, it's clearly not kicking in in this situation.

 

Thanks for looking into it

Edited December 1, 2016 by x-cimo

[Luke 37096]

Thanks for the info.