Missing / too low buffering for remote watching?

[jacotec 7]

Hi,

 

I'm a new member in the Emby universe. Ran Plex over the last 2 years for watching movies / shows. Some initial words about my setup:

 

Emby (and Plex) runs on one of my Dell R710's in my home in a ESXi VM. Outbound connection 50/10 Mbit. 12 vCores of my XEON L5640 assigned, 4GB of RAM. OS is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server. Emby and Plex are in independent VM's. Watching TV at home happens with TVHeadend server and RasPi2 as end points, running Kodi 17.4. In the living room I've got an Apple TV 4 as well.

 

All is well at home, but one of my applications is watching my stuff when traveling. This is mostly done with an Amazon Fire Stick (latest generation), therefore on-the-fly transcoding is important (hence the CPU power).

 

I discovered Emby last weekend and did set it up. Things what I really love over Plex:

 

- No mandatory "signing in" with some unclear data transmission to Plex, the Emby way of just checking the Premiere key on the server is what I want.

- Runs perfect behind my NGINX web proxy on standard SSL port 443 with a dedicated subdomain

- Not perfect, but proper integration of TVHEADEND for live TV (never got this really running with any Plex plugin). Useful in some hotel networks where all is blocked except web and mail

- Great KODI integration, with Plex I was more or less limited to my Apple TV for watching at home

 

But I ran into my first issue yesterday evening. Currently traveling, the hotel network was measured with 2.5 MBit down, 1.5 MBit up.

 

First I watched an episode on Netflix. As usual, plug and play - just running fine without any drops and with a good quality. That's the "Mercedes" in use and reliability.

 

Started to watch an episode afterwards in Emby from my home server. Stopped after 10 seconds for 5 seconds, then around every 30 seconds for 5-10 seconds. Checked the settings, it negotiated to 5MBit/s. OK, that's ways to much for the hotel network. Forced it down to 2 MBit/s. Still the same issue.

 

Forced it further down to 1.5 MBit/s, then to 1 MBit/s (Quality got really worse and was ways behind Netflix on the same connection). It was still stopping at least once per minute for a few seconds before it resumes.

 

I then changed to Plex, set it to 2 MBit and it ran perfectly. :-|

 

I also checked my transcoding log in Emby, xcode rate was around 90fps and in the server's dashboard I saw the xcoding was nearly at 75% after 5-10 minutes. So that's not the issue.

 

I think it might be insufficient buffering, but I did not see any settings for adjusting this - neither in the server nor in the app. Double checked with my IPad and the Emby app, same playback issue.

 

Tested on a 4G connection with the IPad and it was fine (but that would kill my mobile data cap ;-) ).

 

Maybe Netflix is a high barrier to take, although it's the same connection and bitrate limitation in that case ... but I'd love to see Emby at least at the same quality level as Plex with bandwith limited remote watching. I did cancel my Plex subscription which runs to end of October and I'd be happy if I'd be able to kick Plex from my server then  ;-)

[dcrdev 251]

Yeah I mentioned the buffering a while back -

 

For me it's lossless audio - when I hit 3g areas with my phone, playback breaks down.

[jacotec 7]

Yap, it seemed that switching from default audio (5.1) to stereo downmix in the FireStick app did improve the behavior. But: The IPad does not have this option and I guess for the IPad it's already downmixed to Stereo (??) as 5.1 would be useless for the IPad.

 

On the other side ... the 5.1 stream is 384 kBit/s. Should have easily worked, at least from the 1.5MBit setting downwards. Except there is a bug triggered by the 5.1 audio settings (maybe in the buffering?!?)

 

Seems we need to see if @@Luke has an idea ...

[Luke 37188]

Can we go over an example? Can you please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue? Thanks !

[jacotec 7]

Thank you, @@Luke. I've sent you a PM with a link to the logs, I could immediately repro here on my IPad app. Don't want to public disclose my server's URL and IP addresses, so I hope that way is OK.

 

I've included a small description and the time at which I've started the playback. Let my know if you need anything else.

 

VBR

Marco

[pir8radio 1292]

Hi,

 

I'm a new member in the Emby universe. Ran Plex over the last 2 years for watching movies / shows. Some initial words about my setup:

 

Emby (and Plex) runs on one of my Dell R710's in my home in a ESXi VM. Outbound connection 50/10 Mbit. 12 vCores of my XEON L5640 assigned, 4GB of RAM. OS is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS server. Emby and Plex are in independent VM's. Watching TV at home happens with TVHeadend server and RasPi2 as end points, running Kodi 17.4. In the living room I've got an Apple TV 4 as well.

 

All is well at home, but one of my applications is watching my stuff when traveling. This is mostly done with an Amazon Fire Stick (latest generation), therefore on-the-fly transcoding is important (hence the CPU power).

 

I discovered Emby last weekend and did set it up. Things what I really love over Plex:

 

- No mandatory "signing in" with some unclear data transmission to Plex, the Emby way of just checking the Premiere key on the server is what I want.

- Runs perfect behind my NGINX web proxy on standard SSL port 443 with a dedicated subdomain

- Not perfect, but proper integration of TVHEADEND for live TV (never got this really running with any Plex plugin). Useful in some hotel networks where all is blocked except web and mail

- Great KODI integration, with Plex I was more or less limited to my Apple TV for watching at home

 

But I ran into my first issue yesterday evening. Currently traveling, the hotel network was measured with 2.5 MBit down, 1.5 MBit up.

 

First I watched an episode on Netflix. As usual, plug and play - just running fine without any drops and with a good quality. That's the "Mercedes" in use and reliability.

 

Started to watch an episode afterwards in Emby from my home server. Stopped after 10 seconds for 5 seconds, then around every 30 seconds for 5-10 seconds. Checked the settings, it negotiated to 5MBit/s. OK, that's ways to much for the hotel network. Forced it down to 2 MBit/s. Still the same issue.

 

Forced it further down to 1.5 MBit/s, then to 1 MBit/s (Quality got really worse and was ways behind Netflix on the same connection). It was still stopping at least once per minute for a few seconds before it resumes.

 

I then changed to Plex, set it to 2 MBit and it ran perfectly. :-|

 

I also checked my transcoding log in Emby, xcode rate was around 90fps and in the server's dashboard I saw the xcoding was nearly at 75% after 5-10 minutes. So that's not the issue.

 

I think it might be insufficient buffering, but I did not see any settings for adjusting this - neither in the server nor in the app. Double checked with my IPad and the Emby app, same playback issue.

 

Tested on a 4G connection with the IPad and it was fine (but that would kill my mobile data cap ;-) ).

 

Maybe Netflix is a high barrier to take, although it's the same connection and bitrate limitation in that case ... but I'd love to see Emby at least at the same quality level as Plex with bandwith limited remote watching. I did cancel my Plex subscription which runs to end of October and I'd be happy if I'd be able to kick Plex from my server then  ;-)

 

Post your nginx config as well, leave out your domain name but include everything else.  If you are using a multi part config include the different files.

[jacotec 7]

@@pir8radio Will do later, I'm traveling ... but I've doubletested with a direct conn to the Emby server, bypassing the proxy. No change.

[pir8radio 1292]

@@pir8radio Will do later, I'm traveling ... but I've doubletested with a direct conn to the Emby server, bypassing the proxy. No change.

10-4. I missed that part.. Disregard then..

[Luke 37188]

As a test, what happens if you drop to 1mbps?

[jacotec 7]

I did test with a setting of 1MBit/s as a speed limit as mentioned in my initial post, still seeing buffering breaks.

[Luke 37188]

@@jacotec please try the latest release of emby server, thanks !