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Shield TV 2019 playback issues with 4K HDR


kaledi

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kaledi

Anyone experiencing issues with some 4K HDR files.  Specifically, the shield TV becomes unresponsive (or less responsive) and when you stop the video it goes back to the home screen and wont respond at all for a minute or two.  Seems to be a recent thing for me.

 

Whilst I'm here, a bug I can report is that when I switch tv to shield TV and try and fire up emby I often get  black screen and have to go back to home screen, open another app and then open emby again for it load, or else I have select emby twice before it will load.

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kaledi

Here is a log file and I recreated the stuttering and then the non-responiveness trying to stop the video.  It also went immediately back to the shield TV home screen rather than the EMBY library screen.

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Hi.  You are saying that the Shield is non-responsive even on its own home screen?

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kaledi

That is correct.  When I press the backup button on the remote to stop the video and go back to the landing page for the movie, it can take several presses for it to complete the task, the video will stutter several times  and rather than go back to the landing page, it very often will go directly back to the shield TV home page.  At which point the remote becomes unresponsive and this can last for 30 seconds to a minute (not timed it).  When I go to select emby again, it goes through the whole log in process ( I don't have to input credentials or anything, but you can see the app is loading and looking for the server).

To be clear, this only occurs with a few 4K HDR files

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Can you please send a log from the app right after this occurs?

 

If the device is unresponsive on its own home screen then I suspect a catastrophic failure at the device level here.  Are you sure your network connection is solid?

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kaledi

I sent the log as quickly as I could after this event.

I can conduct another one a little later

The shield TV is connected to a gigabit wired lan network so should be stable.

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I sent the log as quickly as I could after this event.

 

You sent the log directly from the app as instructed in the linked doc?  What user, what time?

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kaledi

Well this is odd.  My PR4100 was not responding through the web interface and the emby server was not reachable.  I've had to reboot the PR4100 a couple of times recently because it wasn't behaving normally, but this time I've had to hard power cycle it.  From what I could tell the RAM was maxed out.  I only use the PR4100 as an EMBY server and it has a legacy PLEX server on it and have had zero issues since I installed it about a year ago.

Not saying the issue I'm having with PR4100 is related, but thought I'd mention in case there is some sort of memory leak etc.

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kaledi

I've sent two logs

The first at 11.38 EST

I played the file, and when I stopped it it went to the landing screen but the remote was not responsive for about 30 seconds.

Second log I set at 11.42 EST,

I played the file and when I stopped it, it stuttered and went back to the shield home screen.  Remote was unresponsive.  I finally managed to get back into the app and send the log.

User name is Owen; Emaby server is Emby NAS

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There are no errors in either log which again suggests something at a system level.  If the remote isn't responding on the device home screen, that cannot be something within our app.

 

Is this the new "tube" Shield?  What is the bitrate of the content being played?  I've seen a couple of reports of this device just crapping out on very high bitrate content - possibly due to the fact it runs in 32bit instead of 64.

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kaledi

yes, it is the tube shield. Bit rate will peak greater than 60 mbps I'm sure.  Right didn't realise that the tube ran 32bit and not 64bit like the other shields!  That is quite an ommision from nVidia not to make it clear.  I suspect you might be right about this.  I do also have an older shield but it is only connected to a 1080p tv and obviously it isn't HDR, but I'll see what I get with that one.

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BradJMelb

My 2019 Shield TV (tube) was delivered today and I’m seeing the same issue. Some 4K HDR flies are playing fine while others make Emby unresponsive resulting in the app crashing and returning to the Android TV home screen. The first time I saw this I saw dropped frames, then audio dropped out for a sec (TrueHD Atmos bitstreaming to the amp). Trying to use the OSD is near impossible. Once I managed to get the stats for nerds showing and it was direct playing which was what I expected. It does seem to be working the device extra hard as using the volume buttons on the remote (via CEC) were barely working.

Other files showed none of this with very snappy performance using the OSD whilst watching and no dropped frames. 
I’m hoping it’s not that the device doesn’t have enough grunt as I had high hopes for it and bought it to be the saviour of my Emby playback experience with regards to 4K movies with lossless audio tracks. 
 

I can send through my app log if I can get back to the main Emby screen before it crashes to see if there is anything that might clarify what is going on. Does the log get cleared after each session?

 

Thanks,

Brad. 
 

EDIT: Bizarrely, I cannot reproduce this at the moment. It crashed on me twice before posting and now the two files that I saw issues with are fine and none of the symptoms are showing so I’m guessing it’s not the files. I also looked and the video bitrate of these two were just over 60mbit and 45. I have other files that are in the 70’s and also playing fine. I’ll keep playing around and if it happens again I’ll try to get the logs.  

Edited by BradJMelb
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FrostByte

My 2019 Shield TV (tube) was delivered today and I’m seeing the same issue. 

 

 

Unless something changes, you may want to consider returning it and getting the pro before it's too late

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kaledi

For info, I've raise the issue with nVidia support.  Of course their first response was to reference netflix and prime, but I've put the scenario clearly to them so I'll wait to see what further response they provide.   I've pointed out that this looks to be a 32bit issue and mentioned that my 2017 Shield TV does not show any issues!

May have to swap for a pro, but unfortunately they are completely out of stock at the moment where I am

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For info, I've raise the issue with nVidia support.  Of course their first response was to reference netflix and prime, but I've put the scenario clearly to them so I'll wait to see what further response they provide.   I've pointed out that this looks to be a 32bit issue and mentioned that my 2017 Shield TV does not show any issues!

May have to swap for a pro, but unfortunately they are completely out of stock at the moment where I am

 

Very interested in what they say.  They do not publish bitrates in their specs but "normal" streaming media would never be more than 25Mb/s so I'm sure that is their target.  The lower-priced model just may not be able to reliably handle content twice that or more.

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kaledi

Completely agree with you.

My objection is that they have not made this clear - assuming it is related to operating in 32bit mode - in the marketing and differences to the pro, or indeed the previous generation models.

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FrostByte

It was very sneaky if nothing else of them to leave off the bit about the tube being only 32-bit when using the comparison tool on their website.  I almost bought one myself until I started reading the reviews on Amazon which prompted me go over to the nVidia forums to read some more and confirm.

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BradJMelb

It's a bit weird what I'm seeing.

After updating my post to say that the file I was having trouble with was now fine it's been good ever since. I've been playing around with some sample files tonight and came across an issue with m2ts files with TrueHD and DTSMA remuxing to DD5.1 (see https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/85596-2019-shield-tv-tube-m2ts-files-remuxing-audio/ if you're interested). At some stage I closed Emby by continuing to hit the back button until it asked me if I wanted to exit. I answered yes and next time tried to play one of these samples it started dropping frames again and then the app crashed and took me to the AndroidTV homescreen. If I tried to open emby again I get a blank screen. I'd then return home and try again and then I'd see the app loading. I tried the file again and the same thing happened. On next sucessful launch of the client I submitted the debug logs from within the app (around 22:20 Australian Eastern Standard Time 26/04, emby username Lounge) so maybe they'll show something. I submitted on two occasions.

I had to go back and try playing that file one more time for the other thread so I could see stats for nerds. Playback started off poorly again but I managed to hit Pause before the app crashed and tried to navigate to the gear icon to get to what I wanted. If was very sluggish and I thought it was going to crash but it held on. On one of my delayed button presses it must have activated resume and the playback was then seemingly fine. I was able to get to the gear with no problems, turn on the stats for nerds and hit the back button to return to my library with no issue.

It did crash on me again and then I tried playing the file I had troubles with yesterday (The Lion King) and it struggled and crashed again. Next time after opening I went through and played snippets of other files that had never shown issues and they were fine. Then if I tried The Lion King again it was also fine.

Attached is the server log from the last little while of playing around. The Shield is 192.168.0.26 and the server is .40.

 

Thanks,

Brad.

 

 

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It's a bit weird what I'm seeing.

After updating my post to say that the file I was having trouble with was now fine it's been good ever since. I've been playing around with some sample files tonight and came across an issue with m2ts files with TrueHD and DTSMA remuxing to DD5.1 (see https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/85596-2019-shield-tv-tube-m2ts-files-remuxing-audio/ if you're interested). At some stage I closed Emby by continuing to hit the back button until it asked me if I wanted to exit. I answered yes and next time tried to play one of these samples it started dropping frames again and then the app crashed and took me to the AndroidTV homescreen. If I tried to open emby again I get a blank screen. I'd then return home and try again and then I'd see the app loading. I tried the file again and the same thing happened. On next sucessful launch of the client I submitted the debug logs from within the app (around 22:20 Australian Eastern Standard Time 26/04, emby username Lounge) so maybe they'll show something. I submitted on two occasions.

I had to go back and try playing that file one more time for the other thread so I could see stats for nerds. Playback started off poorly again but I managed to hit Pause before the app crashed and tried to navigate to the gear icon to get to what I wanted. If was very sluggish and I thought it was going to crash but it held on. On one of my delayed button presses it must have activated resume and the playback was then seemingly fine. I was able to get to the gear with no problems, turn on the stats for nerds and hit the back button to return to my library with no issue.

It did crash on me again and then I tried playing the file I had troubles with yesterday (The Lion King) and it struggled and crashed again. Next time after opening I went through and played snippets of other files that had never shown issues and they were fine. Then if I tried The Lion King again it was also fine.

Attached is the server log from the last little while of playing around. The Shield is 192.168.0.26 and the server is .40.

 

Thanks,

Brad.

 

Hi.  As I noted in your other topic, direct play of m2ts files is not supported.  I suggest using mkv instead.

 

Thanks.

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BradJMelb

Hi.  As I noted in your other topic, direct play of m2ts files is not supported.  I suggest using mkv instead.

 

Thanks.

 

Thanks ebr,

I've commented on the m2ts files in the other thread but this was more about why is this crashing behaviour happening with MKV files. It's like there's not enough resources being allocated to the app if I open it and try to play this file straight away. If I go and play other 4K 10bit HEVC files with TrueHD audio before it they are all fine. Some of them have higher video bitrates than the one that's the problem. After all that successful playback then it's OK. All of these files I'm playing are MKV's.

FrostByte did comment that maybe the ShieldTV tube isn't up for it but if that was the case I would have thought it would have stumbled on the higher bitrate files too and it would be consistently failing.

 

Is there other info that I could provide from the device itself that might help troubleshoot this? Maybe (hopefully) it's a bug with the Nvidia Experience but I don't know if I should send it back and get a Pro once our $AUD bounces back a little and hope that it doesn't show this behaviour.

 

Thanks.

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The thing about video bitrates in most content is that it is actually variable so the numbers you see are not entirely accurate.  Different types of scenes may have bursts of higher bitrates than others and some of these may simply be too much for the device to handle.

 

I think we're going to have to find a way to discover this particular type of Shield and adapt our auto settings for it.

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