Emby failing to play a single movie on Fire TV

[karambit27 1]

I have been having issues playing a particular movie I just got recently. It was refusing to play on my Amazon Fire Stick 4K and kept trying to transcode when it should have only been remuxing the audio. I could play other movies of the same video/audio codecs and similar bitrate fine. I was able to get around the issue by disallowing the user from transcoding video but still allowing conversion without re-encoding of video and audio transcoding. The movie in question then started playing fine just remuxing the audio like it should. I tried on multiple Fire Sticks. My Pixel 3 phone would just direct play it fine as does Emby Theater on a Win 10 PC. I am just not sure why it had issues with the Fire Stick 4K's. It takes forever but it eventually starts playing and it is transcoding video with the Transcode Reason Direct play error video codec not supported. The Stick 4K definitely supports HEVC and as stated above it plays fine when it disable video transcoding for the user.

 

 

Another thing I noticed is when transcoding in general for software it pegs only a single core on my server's CPU while loading. Once the video actually starts playing all cores are being utilized. Is this normal? I would think all cores would get it started faster.

embyserver.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-ef11e969-38c3-44ee-b2a9-594749f829b6_1.txt

Edited January 24, 2019 by karambit27

[Luke 37248]

Hi there @@karambit27, it looks like your server transcoding is just not fast enough for this file. It is burning in subtitles which is a very expensive process.

 

As a test, can you try turning off the subtitles prior to playback and see how that compares? Thanks.

[karambit27 1]

That makes it just do a remux so that is good. Any idea why other clients play it fine without any attempts to transcode? I would think all clients would be trying to burn in the subs. These subs are also forced and disabling them would impact the experience of the movie as I wouldn't know what is being said in certain parts.

Edited February 2, 2019 by karambit27

[Luke 37248]

The subtitles are not the reason why it's transcoding, they're just part of the reason why the transcoding is not going very fast. The reason for transcoding is the audio codec - your server dashboard and the video player can already tell you this information. You may have enabled the downmix setting in the Fire TV app.

 

Beyond that we'd have to go over an example in order for me to provide further insight. Thanks.