File Conversion Agony Part 2: Split Button causes ffmpeg explosion

[Netfool 18]

This is a follow on to the Transport Stream Conversions Fail thread earlier in this forum.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that attempting to use the convert function on the Shield version of Emby is downright dangerous.

Having converted a file and placed the converted file alongside the original, I opened the info circle on that program and scrolled down to the Media Info section which displays file format details.   I then made the fatal mistake of clicking on the "Split Versions Apart" link just under the Media Info label. 

This has disabled playing any video in any of the Emby libraries through the web interface or on the TV to which the Shield is connected.  Each attempt to play anything spawns about a dozen ffmpeg instances (all in about 1 second!).  Restarting the server has no effect on the problem! 

Attempting to play anything on the web interface of course fails by bringing up the (useless) dreaded green Got It! button which does nothing but attempt to replay the program and thus spawn another dozen ffmpeg instances.    Log file attached along with the list of log files generated by a play attempt.

Unless someone has a suggestion I suspect the only way forward is de-install the Emby server and reconfigure a new instance.  Since the media library is on a network drive and the Emby and Plex library formats are similar,  I torn between doing that and just switching to the Plex server.  (Thankfully I only did a month-to-month subscription to Emby Premiere until I was confident everything was working... which it obviously isn't). 

In any event, file conversion on the Shield version of the Emby server appears far too dangerous to use.  

 

embyserver.txt LogList.txt

Edited July 17, 2020 by Netfool

[Carlo 4330]

The Split Versions apart just make them each have a detail screen.  You can join them back together, split them apart and join them back as much as you want.

Your log is full of errors that Emby can't access the media folders.

You need to fix that.

[Netfool 18]

Well... it's certainly possible (even probable) that I've screwed something up. But the entire volume's ownership is set to emby:media (and yes, emby is a member of the media group), and permissions are set to 775.   I'll paw through the logs, but it would be really nice to have a separate log file for all the http traffic.  I'll have to sharpen my grep skills I guess and figure out how to look at the log without the 90%+ web traffic entries. 

I'll report back what I find.

 

[Netfool 18]

The problem was that the Ubuntu box with the media store was showing as "Unavailable" on the Shield storage screen.    It was accepting SMB connections from every other device on the network however.  It appears that there was a problem with nmbd.  Every machine on the LAN could connect, but not the Shield.

This raises the issue of why Library file scans showed progress dials and appeared to complete scans normally when Emby Server couldn't see the media library volume.  No error message of any sort was presented via the web user interface, things just got very strange very fast.

Every attempt at an ffmpeg process spawns it's own log file.  Is there some architectural reason we can't have an error log separate from the web traffic log?

...and where is the user interface to join split programs together again?

[Carlo 4330]

Library scan will progress as it checks for the presence of each file, doesn't find it and marks it missing in the DB.

Yes every time you use ffmpeg it is spawned.

Select multiple videos then use the 3 dot menu top right and select group versions.

[Luke 36997]

Has this helped?

[Netfool 18]

Thanks for following up!!

The UI feedback from the Shield Emby Server is too chaotic to trust.  Sometimes I start a conversion and in the Dashboard it shows it is converting, but in Conversions it shows it's transferring (at 0%).  Eventually it disappears from the dashboard and shows as failed in the Conversions page, but there is a new file next to the original in the media folder.  It turns out that file is broken and won't even start playing.

So, all in all, attempting to do conversions in the Shield is slow, painful, unpredictable and requires a lot of manual clean up of the failures.  The media folders are on an SMB share in a linux box so it's actually easier to just use ffmpeg on that machine.  It's a small headless box with an atom processor and no gpu.  Even without hardware codecs, conversions are faster than on the shield.  (But I can't imagine it could transcode fast enough to be useful if I were to just run the Emby Server there....  although it would be an interesting experiment.  I'm in the process of writing some shell scripts to do common conversions on whole folders (even whole libraries).  But to do that properly I need to know what the Shield's actual limits are so I can balance file size with video quality.  (See the "...unsafe at any bitrate" thread in this forum).

[Luke 36997]

Can we please look at an example? Thanks!

[Netfool 18]

Luke, sorry to take so long to reply.  

Examples are not easy to come by unless it's a screen shot of the "Failed message in Conversions". 

Lots of conversions fail faster than I can click from the Convert button on the media page to the Conversions page in the dashboard.

The most dire symptoms described in #1 above were actually caused by my ignorance of what makes the Shield Pro drop all it's network connections.  It would be nice to have some indication in the Emby Server dashboard that it can't actually see a network media store.  Having to dive in to the Shield's settings when something goes funny in Emby is a bit non-obvious.

I had misunderstood how the split/unsplit process worked, but @cayars cleared that up for me.   Most of my conversions issues are covered in gory detail in the "...unsafe at any bitrate" thread in this forum.   I think it's safe to mark this thread "closed" or "answered", or however that works in this forum system.

Many thanks for following up!

[Carlo 4330]

Glad you got it worked out.

You can mark the thread answered yourself and pick what might be the best answer to help the next person.  This could be even your message above.

[Luke 36997]

Quote

The most dire symptoms described in #1 above were actually caused by my ignorance of what makes the Shield Pro drop all it's network connections.  It would be nice to have some indication in the Emby Server dashboard that it can't actually see a network media store. 

Thanks for the feedback. Yes I agree we need to look at improving how we recover from this sort of situation.