Constant "spinning circle" trying to play any content

[sooty234 266]

Ha! Well, I was willing to help you fix this, but you want an 'actual' emby something or other. I wish you luck.

[dmasterp 2]

22 minutes ago, sooty234 said:

Ha! Well, I was willing to help you fix this, but you want an 'actual' emby something or other. I wish you luck.

Wow, after my lengthy post, that's all you took out of this?? It literally was just asking and with no insult or putdowns intended. Like seriously how old are you?? Thanks for the well wishes though

[sooty234 266]

Apologies. This was the information I was looking for:

Quote

Just setup VLC as external player and no issues. Does this not further indicate an Emby Theater issue? 

Where did you download Theater from?

[dmasterp 2]

My apologies as well. I'm sure it's no surprise I'm a tad frustrated and seriously do NOT mean to take it out on you or anyone here. I do appreciate any assistance provided and I'll try and be more respectful in my wording.

I downloaded Emby Theater from here: https://emby.media/emby-theater.html

[sooty234 266]

OK, that's good. That means you're using the desktop app, and I can help with that. The internal player is mpv (here's the manual). There's a lot to read, and most of it I already know. So, assuming you've never heard of it, that means no mpv.conf. 

Can you post screenshots of all of your audio and video settings, in the app?

[sooty234 266]

Also, what version are you using? 3.0.11?

[dmasterp 2]

Okay, I was aware that Emby used MPV as player, but nothing much beyond that. That link does have quite a bit to read. 

It's version 3.0.11

Attached screenshots below.

[sooty234 266]

Ok, so you've left everything unchanged, except the audio. Let's rule that out. Disable all audio passthrough and set the speaker layout to auto. Try to play something. If it plays, can you pull up the stats for nerds and screenshot it?

[Carlo 4332]

3 hours ago, dmasterp said:

@cayars I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Can you explain further?

Plex 100% has the same abilities to Emby with regards to cloud stream vs direct stream vs direct play. I do understand that this is an Emby forum and don't expect everyone here to have Plex expertise, but you should double check before making an assumption. I haven't used Plex in a bit, but paid for a lifetime pass a while back long before Emby, so decided to spin it back up and compare. I can tell you right now that step for step, setting by setting it matches Emby:

Don't want to detract from your issue which sooty234 is helping you with but did want to answer this.  I'm very familiar with Plex as I was a Plex Ninja so I'm not making an assumption.  Plex has 3 ways to serve up files while Emby have 4 methods.  The both can stream (1) transcoded files, both can (2) direct stream files and both can stream (3) direct play files.  However Emby has a 4th method and that is by NOT streaming the file through the server.  Instead for some clients on the network it can say, here play this files //NAS/Movies/Top Gun (1986)/Top Gun (1986).mp4.  The client then reads the data right from the disc system vs having it streamed from the server.  That is what the OPTIONAL network path is you fill out during library setup.

This will also now probably make sense what I referred to as permissions.  So if you have a share setup and fill in the option network path you want to make sure the user logged in on a client has proper permission to that share.  Typically the easy way to do this is to setup a guest share so it's available to anyone logged into the network.  Of course this might not be smart if you have young children or questionable material in your library that shouldn't be viewable to anyone.  But anyway, that explains the difference in Plex vs Emby with the extra method of playing back files and the permissions that would go along with that.  Hope that helped to clear up that question.

[sooty234 266]

And that is why I asked if it does eventually play. If direct access isn't achievable, the server will attempt to stream it. With Theater, this can take up to a minute (probably something that needs addressing, to make it quicker). And if it then plays, the stats for nerds in Theater will provide a lot of information as to what is happening. Far more than any other app, as most of the info comes directly from mpv, and not Emby. 

[dmasterp 2]

@cayars That's good to know. I definitely was not aware of all that. Just the basic direct stream. I guess I had thought that it would direct stream through the server with Plex, but thought Emby did much the same. That may have been why I was so confused about the permission related questions. I can say that The drive that contains all of my videos/media is shared off of the same host for Emby Server. It's a 16TB RAID volume allocated as "Z:" on that computer, then shared out. I used to restrict permissions, but now have  the default group "Everyone" set to "Full Control" for ease. 

@sooty234 When I do play content on the computer I'm having issues with, and it's with Emby Theater, I have left it a bit of time. When testing it over and over I don't wait very long, but there were times I was curious and left it for 5 minutes at a time a few times. One time I left it and went to do something else in my house, came back a good 20 minutes later and it was still spinning.

That being said, I followed your earlier comment/suggestion about turning off audio passthrough. I set to auto and unchecked all audio format options. That seems to have done something as I have launched a bunch of different files and not had a single delay yet. However, earlier I did get too excited when I thought I had fixed it before, so do not want to jump to a conclusion that the issue is resolved. For now I can just test more to see if it stays or comes back. I should know soon as I use this pretty much daily. Attached is a stat for nerd for  one show/episode I started playing.

[sooty234 266]

Well, that's progress. What audio device is the computer connected to, is it the default Windows audio device, and with what cable? Also, how do you have windows audio configured?

[dmasterp 2]

The computer I'm using Emby Theater on, to view content, is a Desktop I built myself. It has onboard Realtek SPDIF connection and then I add in graphics card (gaming rig as well). I connect a HDMI cable from the GPU, which is an nVidia RTX 2080Ti, to a Onkyo Receiver HDMI in. Then there is HDMI out from A/V Receiver to my HD TV. Major/relevant settings look like this:

[sooty234 266]

Ok, next step, make an mpv log.

Create this directory:

C:\users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\mpv

Make a text file call mpv.conf, and put it in the mpv folder.

Add this line to the mpv.conf:

log-file=

and add the path the text file you're making. So it will look something like this: log-file="C:\Users\USERNAME\Desktop\log.txt" 

Attach the log

[dmasterp 2]

Okay, I'm not sure I've done this correct though. When I play videos (which they seem to be playing fine still), I'm not seeing any log created. This is what I made based on your instructions, what am I doing wrong here?

(FYI - Have work tomorrow and going to sleep soon, I may not reply until tomorrow. thanks again for the help!)

[sooty234 266]

You made your mpv.conf with the wrong extension. You've made it mpv.conf.txt not mpv.conf

Edited August 31, 2020 by sooty234

[dmasterp 2]

Oh, right. Well, you did say to do that:

Make a text file call mpv.conf

(File names can have a period in them and also know some log files can be .txt based.)

Just a misunderstanding. Just changed it to .conf file and attached

log.txt

[sooty234 266]

Ok, do a test for me. Enable audio pasthrough again, and play a video that has EAC3 but has NO Atmos metadata.

[dmasterp 2]

Okay, I'm guessing leaving speaker layout as "Auto". I did and just checked off "EAC3" and played an 2 different episodes which only contained a EAC3 track. Log attached, they played fine with no spinning circle.

log.txt

[sooty234 266]

And they didn't have object based metadata? No Atmos?

[dmasterp 2]

I'm not sure what "object based metadata" means? But there is only a single audio track in this .mkv file and it is EAC3. Here is MediaInfo dump from one of the files.

MediaInfo.txt

[sooty234 266]

Ok that's good. No Atmos. So here's what's happening. Your receiver doesn't support Atmos, correct? And the files that fail to play have object based metadata, so when bitstreamed, it just gets stuck because the receiver doesn't know what to do with it. But standard EAC3 will play, without issue. And as you're only setup for 5.1, my suggestion would be to disable EAC3 and TrueHD, and just enable DTS and AC3. Let the software decode the audio instead of your receiver. The quality will be exactly the same, but the software will automatically mix down to 5.1, when needed. TrueHD is most commonly 7.1 these days, anyway.

[sooty234 266]

And set the speaker layout to 5.1.

[dmasterp 2]

I was starting to think, this whole time it must be audio related. Last night when you had me make the audio adjustments, it seems to have fixed it. Not only have I not seen a spinning circle freeze. Videos seem to load just a split second faster than usual. 

To answer your question, I do not believe my receiver does Atmos, but honestly unsure. I never attempted to set it up. Just use my 5.1 setup I've had for years. Here is what Windows Audio shows:

All of the Dolbys but no Atmos. However, I checked it on Amazon and it shows 

• Supports 5.2.2-Channel Dolby Atmos and DTS:X playback or traditional 7.2 Channel surround sound

Here is link on Amazon site if you want to review full product: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XTYXH9M/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I can say that I have not tried to set anything specific to Atmos. I actually even convert nearly all of my videos DTS, DTS-HD & DTS TrueHD tracks down to AC3 or EAC3 for better streaming to device ease. I do have some files with regular DTS but shouldn't have anything Atoms related.

[sooty234 266]

So then it looks like because you haven't configured for hight, Atmos processing is probably disabled, with the same result. But if you only enable DTS and AC3, you'll be able play anything you want, without the need for you convert anything. Just hit play, and enjoy. But there is an option for mpv to re-encode to AC3 on the fly. But there's really no point in your case. Just let mpv do it's work.