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Watching Live TV on Kindle Fire HD 8 Ties Up HDHomerun Prime Tuner


Sam865

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I've been watching live TV using the Emby App on my Kindle Fire HD 8. I have an HDHomeRun Prime 3-tuner network tuner. (I was not knowingly trying to record live TV while watching a program on the tablet.) I cannot find a clean or obvious way to close the Emby App and automatically release the tuner on the fire tablet. When I finish watching a program on live TV, I exit the app, go to the main screen, then I show recent apps. Emby appears as a recent App and I close the App. However, this does not release the tuner.

 

I suspect that the tuner continues to send content to my Emby Server system disk until the disk is almost full, or until the Emby Server is stopped and restarted.

 

A few days ago I received a notification that the system disk on my Emby server machine was almost full.  Approximately 20 gigs of unwanted streaming video had apparently accumulated somewhere on the system disk. I rebooted the desktop computer (which automatically shutdown and restarted the Emby server). Ths released the HdHomerun Tuner that would not reset. The missing free space reappeared shortly after I rebooted.

 

I looked for help in the MediaBrowser Wiki (under Live TV) and read that the network tuner status could be viewed by opening the server Dashboard and navigating to Live TV. There is also supposed to be a button to "reset the tuner for troubleshooting." The tuners are present on my server Dashboard but the tuner reset button is not. (See attached MediaBrowser Wiki.JPG) My Live TV status looks like the second attached file (Tuner Status.JPG).

 

I know that log files are normally a prerequisite for troubleshooting a problem. However, I'm not sure there is a way to enable debugging on the Fire TV Emby App, and I'm not sure which log files on the Emby server would be helpful.

post-63971-0-68457400-1513134928_thumb.jpg

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Luke,

 

I was able to reproduce the problem this morning and have attached a server log file. Sam865 Server Log File.txt (You should be able to look near the end of the file (around 6:55 a.m., December 13)

 

When I reproduced the problem today, I was able to get a better picture of what is happening. As long as I just find a live TV station in the Channels or the Guide and select the channel, the Fire tablet displays the live TV content correctly. If I close the Emby App on the tablet, the HDHomerun Tuner is released as it should be. However, If I temporarily switch to another App (e.g. browser), or if I pause the TV show in the Emby App, the problem starts. After doing this, when I close the App the tuner is not released. In the last 15 minutes or so, I have watched the free space on my Windows 10 system drive decrease by almost 3 GB. (Emby server is running on this computer.) I also tried shutting down and restarting the Fire tablet and it has no effect on the HDHomerun tuner status.

 

This wouldn't be so annoying if it were happening on a different hard drive, such as the drive where my recorded media is normally stored. However, Emby apparently stores temporary files somewhere along this path: C:\Users\Sam\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\...

 

I just confirmed that restarting the Emby Server frees up the tuner and recovers the wasted disk space on my system drive.

 

Maybe a workaround solution would be to have the Emby server monitor the connection with the Fire tablet and stop/clear the Live TV cache on the Emby server when the connection goes away. (That may be easier said than done.)

 

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mastrmind11

fwiw, you can change the transcoding temp folder location to wherever you want under settings > transcoding

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Thanks. Is that the same as Dashboard > Settings > Advanced > Cache Path? I don't see anything regarding transcoding options in Settings.

 

I did change the cache path today from the default setting (blank) to a large-capacity drive that I use for media storage. My system drive is a solid state drive and it is relatively small.

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mastrmind11

Thanks. Is that the same as Dashboard > Settings > Advanced > Cache Path? I don't see anything regarding transcoding options in Settings.

 

I did change the cache path today from the default setting (blank) to a large-capacity drive that I use for media storage. My system drive is a solid state drive and it is relatively small.

No.  go to the admin page, left side, click Transcoding.  It's in there.

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Found the transcoding path option. Thanks again.

 

Hopefully, Luke can suggest a way to automatically release the HDHomerun network tuner when this situation occurs in Live TV.

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Thanks.

 

I downloaded  Emby Server updater 3.2.50.0. from the website and ran setup. Unfortunately, the update did not solve the problem of the network tuner failing to release after the Emby client app was closed. Previously, I was running Emby Server 3.2.36, which was set for automatic updates. It reported that the server was up to date. Don't know why it didn't update automatically unless the website version is a beta.

 

Now that I have changed the location of the Emby server cache and transcoding folders to get them off of my SSD system drive, I can live with the network tuner problem until there is a fix. I'll just have to remember to restart the Emby server to free up the tuner(s) when the tuners fail to release.

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Luke,

 

Here you go. I restarted Emby Server this morning around 5:47 a.m. and then opened a live TV channel on the Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet. I watched a few seconds and then closed the app on the tablet. (Apparently, The only way to close this app in Android — aka "Amazondroid" —  is to show all recent apps and close the Emby app from that screen.) That's what I did.

 

I then verified in Emby Server that HDHomerun Prime Tuner #1 shows a status of "watching" and Tuner #2 and #3 show a status of "available." I confirmed this by looking at the lights on the HDHomerun Prime box. server-63648827240.txt should give you an idea what happened during that session.

 

Finally, I /shutdown/restarted Emby Server. I assume that the shutdown will show up in the first log file. After the restart, I verified that all three tuners showed a status of "available." Here's the log file server-63648827542.txt that was generated after this restart.

 

I hope this helps you to determine what's going on. Although I haven't confirmed this, I suspect that any Emby client that is running on an Android tablet would have this same issue. (As far as I can see, Android file management doesn't provide a clean way to shut down an app; it just leaves everything in memory until the device is turned off. That could make it hard for the app to release resources when they are no longer needed.) 

 

BTW, after the Emby server update, the Live TV program guide is still not updating and populating correctly. It is scheduled to update every 12 hours. I have performed manual updates, which don't appear to fully populate the guide. A few programs show up, but about 95% are still missing from the guide. I use Schedules Direct and have a current, paid-up subscription. The Emby server is communicating with schedules direct when I do a manual update and the update task completes normally. (The guide was working fine with the previous version of Emby Server.)

 

Thanks for your help!

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Luke,

 

You can disregard the last part of my post on this topic at 7:31 a.m. today regarding the Live TV Guide not populating. In the Live TV Tuner setup options, "Restrict to channels marked as favorites" was checked. I unchecked this and refreshed the schedule. This time it was populated successfully and my favorite channels are listed at the top of the guide.

 

I think this setting was also checked in the previous server version, but I can't be certain. I do have a number of favorite channels marked with the heart icon, so I assume that the guide should have at least updated for those channels. It did not. Anyway, that part of the problem is solved.

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Did you close the app with video playing? if yes, then it will take a few minutes for the server to realize that the app has disconnected. that's what happens when you terminate the app abruptly during playback. It will take a little time.

 

On the other hand, if you stop video playback inside the app, then close the app, then this will not occur. Please let us know if this helps. thanks !

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Your suggestion works and I now have a better understanding of what is happening. I consider it a satisfactory solution to the problem.

 

HOWEVER... I can confirm that the "reduced free space issue" still occurs after updating to the latest verion of Emby Server. The server does not stop transcoding "after a few minutes." I'm attaching a server log server-63648827542..txt (sorry it's so long) and a transcoding log record-transcode-1f8bd0cb-b1a3-4826-8a04-e9808f2aaf4e.txt that will hopefully provide useful information. I started watching live TV on the Fire HD Tablet somewhere around 18:00 (~6:00 p.m.) today. I deliberately left the Live TV player running. After a minute or so, I swiped down from the top of the screen and pressed the middle button at the bottom of the tablet to return to the tablet Home screen. I then powered down the tablet (without shutting down the player). Next, I went to the Emby server computer and watched the size of the temporary transcoding file continue to grow for at least 90 minutes. The HDHomerun Tuner #1 remained unavailable the entire time. When the transcoding file had grown to more than 6 gigabytes, I stopped the experiment and restarted the Emby Server. This freed up Tuner #1 and deleted the temporary transcoding file. The paths to my cache and transcoding files should show up in the log files as K:\EmbyCache\cache and K:\EmbyCache\transcoding-temp respectively.

 

(This is probably such an obscure problem that it's not worth solving, but Android users need to be aware that failing to exit from Live TV properly can generate a huge temporary transcoding file that does not go away until the server is restarted.)

 

For the possible benefit of other Android tablet users: Make sure you pause the Live TV player and return to the home screen of the Emby App to prevent the network tuner from being tied up.

 

The Live TV player controls in the Emby Fire TV App (and probably other Android devices) have play, fast forward, rewind, etc. buttons, but not a "stop" button, which is traditionally a solid square button. The "play" button toggles between "play" and "pause." To free up the network tuner and make it available after watching a Live TV channel, it is important to touch the playback screen and expose the Emby App's "home" button and the "back" button in the top left corner of the screen. Pressing either of these two buttons will move the focus out of the Live TV player screen and stop playback, but will keep the Emby App open. At that point, it's OK to return to the tablet's home screen by pressing the tablet's Android "home screen" button (not the Emby "home" button but the middle button at the bottom of the tablet's screen that shows available Apps). The network tuner should become available immediately. 

 

If you close the the Emby App while it is still on the Live TV screen in play mode, EVEN IF THE PAUSE BUTTON HAS BEEN PRESSED, the action can prevent the network tuner from being released. When I didn't follow the procedure described in the previous paragraph, the Emby Server continued to stream the Live TV channel (creating a temporary transcoding file). Even powering down the client tablet did not stop the streaming. My hard drive free space decreased by over 20 gigabytes overnight, and the only way I could find to free up the tuner was to restart the Emby Server. (Restarting the server also deleted the temporary transcoding file and freed up the hard drive space.)

 

 

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