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4K UHD MKV's failing to direct play (exit playback within 15 secs)


annisman

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annisman

Try lowering the in app quality setting to force it to fully transcode.

Ok but the whole point of this is to get direct play working, why are you asking me to make it transcode?

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And we're telling that you we're simply using the Roku video player. If the direct play isn't working there's not much we can do about it except submit a report to Roku and wait for them to resolve it.

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annisman

And we're telling that you we're simply using the Roku video player. If the direct play isn't working there's not much we can do about it except submit a report to Roku and wait for them to resolve it.

Forcing it to transcode does play the file properly, it also plays fine when remuxing like I said in the OP.

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If you try to direct play DTS-HD MA on some Roku models such as Roku ultra 4660 this will cause an eventual hang/dropout. It is not passing through the DTS core audio or passing DTS-HD MA. The Roku ultra 4660 is the only model Roku will eventually get DTS-HD MA pass-through working on. This is part of the process. Right now DTS audio is broken on Roku ultra 4660 with direct play. It is entirely because Roku ultra 4660 passes different capabilities than the other devices and right now it is lying to the Emby app showing support for 8 channels in DTS when clearly that isn't so.

 

 

You can disable DTS in your Roku homescreen settings. Under HDMI Audio change this from Auto to either Dolby or Dolby+. This should solve the problem until Roku fixes DTS on Roku ultra 4660.

 

 

This will only transcode your audio. Please keep your Quality/Resolution in the Emby app at Auto or where you have it set to direct play. We want the video stream copied. We just want to transcode/adjust the audio stream. This will be a small hit to the CPU to adjust the DTS into AAC so the Roku can ingest it.

Edited by speechles
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annisman

If you try to direct play DTS-HD MA on some Roku models such as Roku ultra 4660 this will cause an eventual hang/dropout. It is not passing through the DTS core audio or passing DTS-HD MA. The Roku ultra 4660 is the only model Roku will eventually get DTS-HD MA pass-through working on. This is part of the process. Right now DTS audio is broken on Roku ultra 4660 with direct play. It is entirely because Roku ultra 4660 passes different capabilities than the other devices and right now it is lying to the Emby app showing support for 8 channels in DTS when clearly that isn't so.

 

 

You can disable DTS in your Roku homescreen settings. Under HDMI Audio change this from Auto to either Dolby or Dolby+. This should solve the problem until Roku fixes DTS on Roku ultra 4660.

 

 

This will only transcode your audio. Please keep your Quality/Resolution in the Emby app at Auto or where you have it set to direct play. We want the video stream copied. We just want to transcode/adjust the audio stream. This will be a small hit to the CPU to adjust the DTS into AAC so the Roku can ingest it.

 

Hi, I did the audio setting fix already, I believe you mentioned it earlier in this thread, direct play still does not work.

 

I don't mind remuxing the audio but I still don't understand why direct play does not work when I am trying to pass audio that my TV supports and IS NOT DTS.

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Ok.. when you play an item press * when the video player is playing. On that left side menu look for Volume Mode. Make sure this is set to OFF. 

 

When it drops out without an error indicator it means the Roku video player told us we got to the end. It just changes to player state is stopped. We react to that state change. We can tell when it is a user invoked stop versus a stop not invoked by user. We could check if the video player closed and what the runtime is of the item and where we dropped out at. We could then restart the video player right where the drop out happened with recovery. But... the problem with all that is what happens when it just hangs and can't resume where it left off? We can't skip 10-15 seconds forward and then continue.. you miss part of the action. The Roku video player is supposed to throw errors at us to prevent us doing this. But what other remedy is there? How can you assume you can continue something which just ends? The runtime might be incorrect on the file and you just jumped into a corn maze. You never get out. Spooky things happen. You get stuck...

 

 

So this becomes a 'sticky situation' where it is like pooh bear with his head stuck in a honey jar.

 

Pooh woefully announces, "Ohh brother.. what to do what to do?".. Christopher Robin comes running up to take that jar off his head..

 

06329fc07be79daed7bcc3ce825427cd.gif

 

@@ebr what should we do in this case?

( yes, Eric is Christopher and I am Pooh in this scenario. )

Edited by speechles
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annisman

Again to confirm, lossy Dolby 5.1 and lossy Dolby stereo should be able to pass through via direct play correct ???

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Again to confirm, lossy Dolby 5.1 and lossy Dolby stereo should be able to pass through via direct play correct ???

 

Yes. only Dolby is required to pass-through stereo or surround. You can choose PCM/Stereo and that will always use AAC as the audio codec. That is the Emby app defacto codec when the device is seen as only having stereo. We would use Dolby+ as the surround codec of choice when that is found but every model of Roku will downsample Dolby+ to stereo. So never use that it should only be Dolby you choose. But sounds like you are already doing all of this so I am really at an quandry..

 

The sound not being supported should just produce silence. It shouldn't prevent the video stream from being thrown on screen. Roku changed how their video player works and this is causing us head scratches, head aches, and users to become frustrated enough to bring issues such as this up. Those frustrations eat away at what could be spent doing something else but let me see if I can tell anything is up on the Roku ultra 4460 and dig into this some. It is important we know if an audio codec not being supported can cause the video player to just hang on that model. Very important. That is the top Roku device. It should just work and if it doesn't Roku has some serious explaining to do. I have invested heavily in their platform and these problems make it look like we produce bad software. That is far from the truth and we are doing the very best we can to alleviate all these problems as Roku creates them for us. The Roku is not just a challenge because its programming language is oddball and strange. The company itself also produces clumsy firmware updates with poor developer relations and contacts which makes communication with them about errors and problems and firmware issues next to impossible. We are screaming into space basically.

 

I wish I were a liar and just smiled and said.. please bear with us.. that we are working on it..

 

But I am honest.. I want and expect the best. Emby is doing nothing wrong and Roku is breaking our things. They keep breaking our things. It is disheartening and hopefully they straighten up their act soon as quite honestly I have invested over $2000 in Roku devices to test on. This means I need them to be "ON POINT". But sadly I need to find a new Roku Co contact that understands this. So far I am on the hunt. This is full 100% transparency. Our vendor (AKA The Roku platform) is failing us. Our software is on point.

Edited by speechles
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annisman

Hey man I totally believe you and appreciate you being honest with me. I want you to know that if you decide not to investigate this particular issue further that I'm okay with it because my video and audio play perfectly fine using remux. Which is what I will continue to use in the future. Because this seems to be an issue that you guys did not know about until I brought it up I'm guessing that not many people actually need direct play from their Roku so who knows of fixing this problem will even really matter but I'll leave that up to you.

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Hey man I totally believe you and appreciate you being honest with me. I want you to know that if you decide not to investigate this particular issue further that I'm okay with it because my video and audio play perfectly fine using remux. Which is what I will continue to use in the future. Because this seems to be an issue that you guys did not know about until I brought it up I'm guessing that not many people actually need direct play from their Roku so who knows of fixing this problem will even really matter but I'll leave that up to you.

 

No no I am very curious why that item will not play for you. But when you say when you change audio codecs suddenly it decides to play. Theoretically that should not be possible. The Roku should always put the video stream up and just play no audio (silence) in that case. But if what you say is what happens and we do not judge here. What you say happens so we take that serious it happens. So when that happens it must be something new that Roku broke.

 

Because this is during Direct Play we seriously just tell the Roku like a dog, here is the url, here is the scent boy.. GO GET EM!..

m.videoplayer.control = "start"

 

After that it is out of our control and we get simply events handed to us. We set observers on fields we want to watch for changes and then watch the event handler for events through the handler. Any fields change alerts those observers which then can do other things. But the main video player happens "outside" our sandbox the app runs in. We do not get the full video player object as it exists in reality. We merely get a subset of what that reality is. A pseudo reality if you will of what the video player is doing. So some of these things must be abstracted away what really happened. it likely is an error but we just arent being passed it as an error or exception. It gets caught and silently fails. That is likely what is happen and Roku just needs to add these "new" error types to "float through" to us as events. I am knowing that much. So until then the best we can do is allow you to use playback correction as we don't want to allow a button that always allows transcoding because that will be forgotten it is left on. People will go all my stuff transcodes and come here. We will chase our tail and forget that maybe that is enabled? OMG.. it is.. and it will cause us trouble down the road to go there. Rather than risk it we haven't gone there. Hope you understand. Playback correction is a close cousin to the always force transcoding. I've seen them kiss. :)

Edited by speechles
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