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Roku stick trouble with 7.1 content?


Marc_G
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Marc_G

Hi folks,

 

This is probably a silly question. I took my Roku streaming stick (3600R) with me on vacation. It worked fine with my rental apartment's wifi, but it couldn't play a specific movie title from my library. I would press the Play button, and just got the spinning circle; the movie never started. Eventually I noticed that the audio selected was the default 7.1 TrueHD/Atmos track. I changed it to a 5.1 AC3 track and the movie played fine. I didn't have any other problems with other titles, but most of what I was playing was stuff without HD audio.

 

Since the TV was just plain stereo I figured any tracks (HD audio or 5.1) would be transcoded; is this failure to handle a 7.1 track a limitation of the stick?

 

I can attempt to replicate the problem now that I'm home and would have access to logs and such, but if this is just a "don't do that" kind of thing, I can just make a mental note to make sure I'm not trying to play HD Audio with the stick and select a different audio track instead. All my movies have multiple tracks.

 

Just curious; thanks!  Let me know if I should attempt to replicate and post logs.  The server, by the way, is on an Intel i5-6600 so should have plenty of beef to transcode a single stream in any way needed.

Edited by Marc_G
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Perhaps it was transcoding it but was just taking a long time to get going...?

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Marc_G

Perhaps it was transcoding it but was just taking a long time to get going...?

Nah, left it 5 minutes...
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Nah, left it 5 minutes...

 

Still not completely out of the question.  For example, if subtitles were having to be extracted as well.

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Marc_G

Fair enough. I'll go ahead and restart the server later to start a nice clean log, and give a whirl at playing that file via the Roku.

 

Where are the transcode logs again?

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Marc_G

Hmmm. I restarted server, and started playing the same movie after selecting the 7.1 audio. I'm on my home network for the stick and the stick is listed as Direct Streaming the video. It started right up with no significant delay ("retrieving" for a second or two only).

 

I should probably retry this on a slower connection. Perhaps if I connect the stick to my phone tethering that might be a better simulation of the slower network while vacationing.

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  • Solution
Marc_G

Oh well. Even connected to my cell phone hotspot, which is super slow here at my house (6-8Mbps download, ~3 Mbps upload on my "LTE" service), the movie connected and plays just fine. It's transcoding now that I'm playing it "remotely" as shown here:

 

post-489-0-74382100-1564352278_thumb.jpg

 

Unless someone has another idea about how to reproduce what I saw while traveling, I will have to mark this down as a weird unreproducible glitch.

 

Thanks for the input along the way; it's good to know that it's not a systemic problem that the Roku stick / Emby server combo can't handle 7.1 audio. It's transcoding just fine.

 

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Marc_G

Hi there, let's look at an example. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. thanks !

 

Thanks Luke, as always your attention is most appreciated.

 

Since I was away on vacation at the time I didn't have a chance to grab the log before it was auto-deleted, and at the time I didn't know about the Roku debug logging. Is there some way to tell Emby to save logs for a longer time (my preference would be 2 weeks)?

 

At the moment I can't reproduce the problem so there's no further action indicated. I will maintain vigilant watch for this stuff and report back if I can reproduce it with the required info. The situation was an unusual one for me, in that I was away on vacation so connecting remotely versus in my own home on the local network, AND I was playing a movie with an HD audio track, where as my usual "Roku Emby" use case is playing bugs bunny cartoons for the kids while here at home; movies are usually played on a different TV via Emby Theater, while at home.

 

My takeaway so far is:

1. HD Audio shouldn't be a problem (I was thinking maybe it was a limitation, but clearly that's not so)

2. So, given what I experienced was a glitch, is it a common one or rare? Since I can't reproduce it despite multiple attempts, it's probably rare.

3. I can't reproduce it so I can't sick the Emby team on any logs

4. Even after 10 years of MB / Emby I'm always delighted by the responsiveness of this community.

 

Should I experience the problem again, I will post here with info to help debug it.

Thanks all!

Marc

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At the moment I can't reproduce the problem

 

Thanks for the feedback.

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