lyonbra 0 Posted July 22, 2017 Share Posted July 22, 2017 I've recently been having issues with certain files playing choppy or stuttering, the are playing as "Direct Playing" so I know its not a transcoding error. Other files play fine, but I can't see any similarities between the ones that play well and the ones that don't and all of them play well on regular computers. I've attached a log file also. Any ideas would be helpful, thanks Log.txt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14910 Posted July 22, 2017 Share Posted July 22, 2017 They may simply be too high of a bitrate for either the Roku or your network. Try lowering the in-app quality setting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lyonbra 0 Posted July 22, 2017 Author Share Posted July 22, 2017 If I lower it to 750kbps it plays but its awful quality, although other files can play at 5Mbps fine. I'm not sure why some files stutter and others are fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jdiesel 1114 Posted July 23, 2017 Share Posted July 23, 2017 I have noticed some similar behaviour on the Android TV app so it may be server and not app related. Some 20 Mbps files direct play fine and some 4 Mbps files buffer and skip when they direct play. I just noticed this happening in the last week or two. Files that previously played fine now skip and buffer. I've tested on the Android TV, Roku, and Emby for Kodi clients with the same results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lyonbra 0 Posted July 23, 2017 Author Share Posted July 23, 2017 I have noticed some similar behaviour on the Android TV app so it may be server and not app related. Some 20 Mbps files direct play fine and some 4 Mbps files buffer and skip when they direct play. I just noticed this happening in the last week or two. Files that previously played fine now skip and buffer. I've tested on the Android TV, Roku, and Emby for Kodi clients with the same results. I too have only noticed this is the past couple of weeks, I've been using emby on my roku for years now and this is the first time this has been happening Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14910 Posted July 23, 2017 Share Posted July 23, 2017 Sounds potentially network or hardware (disc) related... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jdiesel 1114 Posted July 23, 2017 Share Posted July 23, 2017 (edited) Sounds potentially network or hardware (disc) related... I don't mean to hijack the thread, can create another if you'd like, but when I download the file from Emby it takes 1m45s to download a 45m episode but yet when I play the files it skips and buffers. Pausing playback and starting it again fixes it temporary bit uses comes back with 3-5 minutes. I just tested the same file directly in Kodi, not through the Emby for Kodi plugin, over a ftp share and it worked fine. Edited July 23, 2017 by Jdiesel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14910 Posted July 24, 2017 Share Posted July 24, 2017 Could be a Roku firmware issue too. One user said they were having issues with 7.6 that went away with 7.7. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lyonbra 0 Posted July 24, 2017 Author Share Posted July 24, 2017 Could be a Roku firmware issue too. One user said they were having issues with 7.6 that went away with 7.7. Nope, just updated to the latest 7.7 and the same files that were choppy before and still choppy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeraburn 60 Posted July 25, 2017 Share Posted July 25, 2017 Just recently I too have been having issues at various times with various files while in DIRECT play. (Blue Neon, Roku Ultra) The files stops and gives a "Fatal Read Error" message. It disappears too fast for me to read all of the dialogue window, but the word Fatal grabbed my attention. It starts to re-play after a moment transcoding. I stop and restart the file in FORCE direct and it's fine The only common thing these files have are being on the same OLDER hard drive from my old machine. I moved the series files that were giving me "issues" over to the new hard drive that I bought with the DS216play, ordered a new hard drive, and will see if I get that error now. Hard Drives are man made so they are going to fail, eventually. Some sooner than others whether they are new or used. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
speechles 1917 Posted July 27, 2017 Share Posted July 27, 2017 (edited) Just recently I too have been having issues at various times with various files while in DIRECT play. (Blue Neon, Roku Ultra) The files stops and gives a "Fatal Read Error" message. It disappears too fast for me to read all of the dialogue window, but the word Fatal grabbed my attention. It starts to re-play after a moment transcoding. I stop and restart the file in FORCE direct and it's fine The only common thing these files have are being on the same OLDER hard drive from my old machine. I moved the series files that were giving me "issues" over to the new hard drive that I bought with the DS216play, ordered a new hard drive, and will see if I get that error now. Hard Drives are man made so they are going to fail, eventually. Some sooner than others whether they are new or used. I had this occur to me today with the blue neon app. Pretty much happened right after updating to 7.7 from 7.6. Played the new tosh.0 episode, the latest, using auto-detect which chose to use direct. After approx 9m58s the video player was forcefully closed, and the app gave the "Fatal VideoPlayer Error!" dialog. In this dialog was the text "An unexpected problem (but not server timeout or HTTP error) has been detected." I agree, the 3 seconds the app has the error flash onscreen before deciding to respawn the videoplayer with forced transcoding is pretty short. I didn't want users to see this and think something was wrong on their end, so I set the time the dialog shows very low so the videplayer respawn would occur quickly. In this way, users can still watch their content even though it was briefly interrupted. To have it show an error dialog they must dismiss to continue watching seemed unintuitive. In my testing and reading tonight this appears to be a problem in the roku firmwares. It is not something directly related to emby or the roku apps. Both the choppy playback issue (I see this happen on my roku3) and the interrupted playback issue (where emby has to fallback to transcoding I see this on my roku ultra) are both roku firmware bugs. There are others reporting these same kinds of issues for their respective devices right now on roku's own forums. We just need to give roku developers some time to get their sh*t together and fix it on their end. In the meantime the apps will fallback to transcoding when playback is interrupted by errors. Its the same sort of issue that the 4GB bug caused. The videoplayer prematurely closes before the app receives an isFullResult event and instead receives an isRequestFailed event. I also replayed the same tosh.0 episode a second time, and it played flawlessly using auto-detect which chose to play direct. There was no fallback to transcoding and it played to the end. So this also appears to be somewhat random and sporadic rather than fully reproducible all the time. I will do more digging tonight. I will also push the update to the blue neon app I now have ready.. Edited July 27, 2017 by speechles Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeraburn 60 Posted July 27, 2017 Share Posted July 27, 2017 NOW you return from the high seas and state this???? NOW!!??? Where were you $105.00 ago? I have a new hard drive on the way AND swapped the "offending" files over to the newer hard drive and have has no issues. I needed to replace that hard drive anyway. My synology monthly report said it was having a re read error, magnitude 1, whatever that means. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
speechles 1917 Posted July 27, 2017 Share Posted July 27, 2017 (edited) NOW you return from the high seas and state this???? NOW!!??? Where were you $105.00 ago? I have a new hard drive on the way AND swapped the "offending" files over to the newer hard drive and have has no issues. I needed to replace that hard drive anyway. My synology monthly report said it was having a re read error, magnitude 1, whatever that means. In your case, it may have been the hard drive. I can only speak of my own experience. And just so you, and others know, the blue neon app doesn't react differently to errors. When any error occurs the app will respawn the videoplayer using force transcoding. Then you can set the "fallback retry" amount higher in settings. By default it is set to 1. It will try to work through one error only. But you can set this so it will try to respawn the videoplayer as many times as you want. This can lead to situations where the screen is flashing when the videoplayer appears and disappears immediately, especially if you set this value to something ridiculously high, like 99. The only reason that 99 value is there is so people with very faulty hard drives can try to at least get some videos to play through their multiple read errors. You can create .par2 files for all your media, and say have it keep 10% parity blocks of every file. This would make it possible to check if the files are still "intact" and arent suffering from bit rot. It would also make it easier to copy damaged files over to a new drive, and then use the par2 to recover whatever bits were lost. All this is just hyperbole anyways. How are you sure the par2 arent also damaged? How can you be sure the files arent already damaged before you created the par2? Indeed.. But in the end, a hard drive gives you lots of warning before it just suddenly up and dies with enough time to recover almost everything in most cases. Glad you got it sorted before you ever had to deal with that scenario. Edited July 27, 2017 by speechles Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheCranium 2 Posted August 1, 2017 Share Posted August 1, 2017 Hi. I want to add that I've been having an issue with choppy video too. I've been using Emby on three different Roku 3 units in my house for quite some time. They're all using wired connections to the same switch as the server, and I've always been able to stream any 1080p video file without issues. So I don't think it's a network or disk issue. I am using the current Roku channel version 3.0.41. Upgrading the Roku firmware from 7.6 to 7.7 didn't help. The issue occurs on both versions. These problem files play fine in a web browser. Moving objects in the video kind of flutter back and forth. When a person moves their arm, it looks like the video jumps ahead and back then ahead and back again just a few frames over and over, yet, playback continues, and audio continues at normal speed without ever freezing, pausing or being interrupted. The video just has this hyper-jitter while playback continues on. The problem only seems to affect certain video files though. Other 1080p files play fine. I can work around it by reducing the playback video quality below 5 mbps. 4 mbps plays fine, but the jittery video still exists at 5 mbps. It looks like it changes from Direct Play to Transcoding when I reduce the quality to 4 mbps or below and that is what fixes it. It would be nice to play these files without having to resort to Transcoding, although my server PC can handle it without issues for at least one stream at a time. I'm not sure what will happen if my wife or kids play some other video also transcoding at the same time as me. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vaise 304 Posted August 6, 2017 Share Posted August 6, 2017 i have some random choppy files also. I assumed it was something to do with the file. As they play on the PC and laptop fine, I just re-encoded them for the playback on roku. This one I have now - this is the file info - if that helps ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37060 Posted August 7, 2017 Share Posted August 7, 2017 @@vaise we'll have to see what @@ebr thinks. Can you provide one of those files for testing? Also is your roku firmware up to date? thanks ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skidmarks 188 Posted August 8, 2017 Share Posted August 8, 2017 Just a note here... The other media solution i have also has the same choppy / lag as described here using rokus and have experienced it on both solutions. Dropping the stream rate down cures the issue but obviously at the cost of quality. I think its roku firmware. Just a guess. Started a few weeks ago. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jdiesel 1114 Posted August 8, 2017 Share Posted August 8, 2017 I don't believe this has anything to do with the Roku firmware as I experience it on both the Roku and my Shield TV. The issue appears to be intermittent and does not affect any one type of file specifically. My media is spread across 4 drives and it occurs on files from all drives. I only noticed it starting about 2-3 weeks ago (running beta server). Looking at the logs the http response time is generally normal (10-20ms) then it will struggle and shoot up to (+1000ms). A network test between the client network and the server doesn't indicate any issues. I am going to try installing Plex tonight as I can think of no other way to test if it is an Emby issue or a network issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37060 Posted August 8, 2017 Share Posted August 8, 2017 I don't believe this has anything to do with the Roku firmware. In the last couple years there has been a fairly decent number of Roku firmware updates causing playback issues. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skidmarks 188 Posted August 8, 2017 Share Posted August 8, 2017 (edited) I don't believe this has anything to do with the Roku firmware as I experience it on both the Roku and my Shield TV. The issue appears to be intermittent and does not affect any one type of file specifically. My media is spread across 4 drives and it occurs on files from all drives. I only noticed it starting about 2-3 weeks ago (running beta server). Looking at the logs the http response time is generally normal (10-20ms) then it will struggle and shoot up to (+1000ms). A network test between the client network and the server doesn't indicate any issues. I am going to try installing Plex tonight as I can think of no other way to test if it is an Emby issue or a network issue. PLEX is my other source and it has the same issues for me... (and a very active thread there also) Edited August 8, 2017 by skidmarks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jdiesel 1114 Posted August 8, 2017 Share Posted August 8, 2017 PLEX is my other source and it has the same issues for me... (and a very active thread there also) Thanks. Question for those with this issue, is your server on your local network or hosted outside your network? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeraburn 60 Posted August 8, 2017 Share Posted August 8, 2017 I got another media error failure today for the first time in a while. Local network. Definitely a Roku firmware issue for this error. This is not huge deal as when I restart playback in Force Direct Play it works fine. Sent from my SM-T560NU using Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14910 Posted August 8, 2017 Share Posted August 8, 2017 I don't believe this has anything to do with the Roku firmware as I experience it on both the Roku and my Shield TV. The issue appears to be intermittent and does not affect any one type of file specifically. My media is spread across 4 drives and it occurs on files from all drives. I only noticed it starting about 2-3 weeks ago (running beta server). Looking at the logs the http response time is generally normal (10-20ms) then it will struggle and shoot up to (+1000ms). A network test between the client network and the server doesn't indicate any issues. I am going to try installing Plex tonight as I can think of no other way to test if it is an Emby issue or a network issue. You very well could be dealing with something different than what others are reporting here. Perhaps something on your server is causing congestion such that the delivery of the content is interrupted momentarily. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jdiesel 1114 Posted August 8, 2017 Share Posted August 8, 2017 You very well could be dealing with something different than what others are reporting here. Perhaps something on your server is causing congestion such that the delivery of the content is interrupted momentarily. I think you are right as I am experiencing this on multiple clients. I will do some more testing and open a new thread if necessary. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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