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Roku and old recordings


pwhodges

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pwhodges

I have a good number of recordings made over the past year.  I can play the most recent.  But when I try to play older ones, the "retrieving" progress bar on the Roku keeps restarting just before it reaches the end, and after a while it stalls.  At this point Emby on the Roku is hung; pressing the back button does nothing until after several presses it offers to exit Emby.

 

Should I expect to be able to play old recordings through Emby in general, IOW is this a server backward compatibility issue or an Emby for Roku issue?  Well, the hang is an Emby for Roku issue whatever, I guess.

  

I can produce a server log later tonight if you need one.

 

Paul

 

 

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pwhodges

OK, here goes.  Age might not be the issue after all, as going backwards by date I found some that played and some that hung mixed together.  Also some that made several false starts before continuing to play.  The ones which hung the Roku were the same as when I tested before, so it's probably associated with the files, not just random.

 

I restarted the server for this test, to make the logs easier to handle.  Many restart attempts generated a new ffmpeg log, so I've included for comparison just one which played on the second attempt (no extra log), and a set of three which hung on the third (I also have cases which played or hung on the third or fourth attempt). 

 

The first ffmpeg log is for a case which started playing, but then hiccoughed before finally playing stably (I've been aware of this sometimes happening with ordinary videos, but haven't been concerned about it before).

 

The other three are for a case which never started playing but just retried the buffering several times before hanging Emby on the Roku.

 

Paul

embyserver.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-9a563495-8bf1-4b81-8184-ea3899ba10df_1.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-1bd6aa45-cdba-4a42-8f70-681724902de0_1.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-3022002a-48c2-430d-8804-0c2fc1c9f99e_1.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-bf280814-4a9f-4310-87c7-8ae32b2d88f7_1.txt

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pwhodges

Yes, they are - and what he said (I'm in the UK).

 

They're all off-air, using HDHomeRun Quatro or for older ones Hauppauge QuadHD - there's no correlation between tuner and problem, though.

 

Paul

Edited by pwhodges
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pwhodges

Yes - and iOS and Android.  So it seems to be an issue specific to the Roku for that reason, but also because the Roku app itself appears to hang as a result - though from counting the clicks to get out, it might be better to say that it doesn't hang, but becomes unable to display the screens any more as you navigate through them.

 

Paul

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... though from counting the clicks to get out, it might be better to say that it doesn't hang, but becomes unable to display the screens any more as you navigate through them.

 

So, if you hit back a few times, you eventually get the prompt to exit and can get back to the device home screen?

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pwhodges

Yes - so saying it's hung is wrong, but it stops displaying anything new (until the exit prompt).

 

Paul

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17:59:29.426 Stream mapping:

17:59:29.426   Stream #0:0 (mpeg2video) -> overlay:main

17:59:29.426   Stream #0:3 (dvbsub) -> scale

17:59:29.426   yadif -> Stream #0:0 (h264_nvenc)

17:59:29.426   Stream #0:1 -> #0:1 (copy)

17:59:29.426 Press [q] to stop, [?] for help

17:59:29.426 [mpegts @ 00000180e3ef1700] sub2video: using 704x576 canvas

17:59:29.879 [h264_nvenc @ 00000180e4358880] OpenEncodeSessionEx failed: out of memory (10): (no details)

17:59:29.926 [h264_nvenc @ 00000180e4358880] No capable devices found

17:59:29.926 Error initializing output stream 0:0 -- Error while opening encoder for output stream #0:0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

17:59:29.926 Conversion failed!

 

It is the subtitles burning in. It runs out of memory. It is ffmpeg bail.

The Roku video player is stuck waiting for a reply from it. The connection closes. The video player closes.

The video player recovery attempts to recover playback. Ffmpeg has already left the building. The video player hangs.

 

The Roku video player is quite poor at handling errors gracefully when the stream never connects.

The video player will just hang. It is unrecoverable unless you back out of the app.

We can probably do something about this eventually with a timer to pull it out of that stuck state.

Edited by speechles
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pwhodges

Hmm.  I have no trouble with burnt-in subtitles elsewhere, so why would the process run out of memory in this instance? Something wrong with the setting up of the NVENC session, perhaps?

 

Anyway, the Roku response would not be an issue if the server didn't have this problem.

 

Paul

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pwhodges

As it happens, someone has just revived a thread in the beta server area on exactly this subject (the NVENC memory issue, that is).  So I have linked that to here to reinforce the need for this to be looked at.

 

Paul

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pwhodges

I'd have to check; my server is set to extract subs, but the (beta) Roku app is now set to request burn-in if necessary and I don't know if that would apply in this case.

 

Paul

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pwhodges

Strange. 

 

Firstly, when I turn off subtitles before playing, it's OK.  So yes, the subtitles are involved; but apart from content they are presumably the same in my other recordings.

 

Secondly, the problem is the same with the release Roku app (which can't request burn-in), and the Server Dashboard shows "Direct Playing" - but it also shows "H264/Software -> H264/Software", and the usage of the transcoding buffer, and generates transcoding logs (multiple) which imply hardware transcoding, so I really have no idea what's going on. 

 

My linking it with the NVENC memory thing relied on the above quote from the transcoding logs (post #11).

 

Paul

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My linking it with the NVENC memory thing relied on the above quote from the transcoding logs (post #11).

 

I'm not sure if that's really the same problem. In your case it happens only with specific files and these are always failing.

In the other case, things are actually working and the memory problem occurs after a while but not tied to a specific file.

 

With how many of your files does the problem occur actually?

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pwhodges

In my initial test of eight recordings, 2/8 hung, 3/8 restarted one or more times before playing normally, 3/8 played normally.  The hanging ones were consistent over many tries, and the behaviour of the others was consistent over a couple of tries.

 

Paul

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I'd have to check; my server is set to extract subs, but the (beta) Roku app is now set to request burn-in if necessary and I don't know if that would apply in this case.

 

Paul

 

That setting only applies to SSA/ASS subs.  Yours are not in that format so that is having no impact.

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pwhodges

That's what I thought.  But then, why (as I report above) does the dashboard report "direct play" while also reporting the state of the transcoding buffer and generating a transcoding log (as linked in the OP)?

 

Paul

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That's what I thought.  But then, why (as I report above) does the dashboard report "direct play" while also reporting the state of the transcoding buffer and generating a transcoding log (as linked in the OP)?

 

Paul

 

If you wait 10-20 seconds, does the display change?

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If it's only with these specific files then you may just want to try running them through our convert media feature.

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pwhodges

Heh - I just tried that for one, and the convert failed immediately; I have yet to work out why (the error message says something like "Object reference not set to an instance of an object.".  In any case the conversion would omit the subtitles, and I can already play it with subtitles turned off.  

 

And blaming the file doesn't help find the problem, as the file was created by Emby...

 

Paul

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