Constant freezing when playing 4K

[Carlo 4330]

Yes, many of us can reproduce it so it's not imaginary.

It's definitely network related in some way. As an example with a 2 NIC PC using one NIC ONLY for access to storage and another NIC to send to clients, access internet/meta providers, etc I also don't have the issue.  So basically a dedicated NIC to storage ALSO for me solves the problem using gig networking.

[sooty234 266]

Everyone needs 10G

[Carlo 4330]

4 minutes ago, sooty234 said:

Everyone needs 10G

I concur but it does spoil you pretty quickly and 1G seems so last decade.

It's even more "sick" when you can "bond" multiple 10G connections in your switches. LOL

[sooty234 266]

5 minutes ago, cayars said:

I concur but it does spoil you pretty quickly and 1G seems so last decade.

It's even more "sick" when you can "bond" multiple 10G connections in your switches. LOL

Yeah, I can do that, but it's pointless. I can barely saturate 10. The only time I get close to that is if I'm writing to multiple drive pools, concurrently. The SSDs max out, and I have room to spare. I've actually just ordered another dual port 10G NIC and a couple of singles. I may upgrade my connectX-2 NICs to X-3.  Nice to have spares

[PenkethBoy 2063]

yep its not the network - from my testing

yes i also have a 10g network - as its repeatable across several setups now its easy for the devs to test and fix hopefully

even with a 70+ mb/s movie thats only 8-10 MB/s - so any nas, single disk, usb disk etc can stream that

Why emby passing off the stream directly to the shield - from a NAS or 2012r2 server or any other device causes the shield to pause playback is up to the devs to find out

could be the new exo player or the atv client

As Luke and Eric are so far silent - is a firm indication that its a bug - as thats their default position in situations like this.

[Carlo 4330]

Yea I agree.  I set that up when I was moving 350 TB of info from box to box that were all bonded.  Wanted to get it done in hours, not days.

Drives (even RAID SSD) become the bottleneck for sure! I had the equipment on hand so I used it.  I've got a combination of fiber and copper depending on when I "scored" the equipment.

Those NICs likely won't be spares.  You'll find a use for them if like me. LOL

 

[PenkethBoy 2063]

but i want 40G for xmas and the huge nvme array to saturate it - just for testing obviously - i have been a good boy (mostly) santa!

 

[Carlo 4330]

1 minute ago, PenkethBoy said:

As Luke and Eric are so far silent - is a firm indication that its a bug - as thats their default position in situations like this.

They likely are following along trying to see what we find.  In all fairness this is a "fringe" type situation using very high bitrate files not designed to be streamed.

But we've tested as much as we can and have a SOLID pattern so the ball is in their court.

@Luke, @ebr  can you guys take a look at this please.  There is definitely a bottleneck in Emby causing this as it doesn't happen with some other media server software.

[Carlo 4330]

2 minutes ago, PenkethBoy said:

but i want 40G for xmas and the huge nvme array to saturate it - just for testing obviously - i have been a good boy (mostly) santa!

 

The house next door to me is for sale.  If you don't mind a move across the pond a simple fiber run will have you in media glory. LOL

[CHA0SENG7NE 28]

10 hours ago, FrostByte said:

Did you also try ET on the Shield?  That has a newer version of Exoplayer than ATV currently

Yep I tried the new version, it didnt work Stuttered straight away

[PenkethBoy 2063]

so you have 40g already then?

Right just ringing my movers for Monday and getting them to charter a plane you my stuff

now where is my passport....

 

 

Edited September 27, 2020 by PenkethBoy

[CHA0SENG7NE 28]

So correct me If im wrong. (still learning)

The network I have 1gbps wired throughout should be able to handle this size movie because it has been demostrated when direct play works:

Emby app on Nvidia Shield - Using VLC as external player, direct path option switched on

Emby Theater on PC - Plays without issue

So the current problem is a latency/bandwidth limitation because the direct play function isnt actually working correctly?

[Carlo 4330]

6 minutes ago, CHA0SENG7NE said:

So correct me If im wrong. (still learning)

The network I have 1gbps wired throughout should be able to handle this size movie because it has been demostrated when direct play works:

Emby app on Nvidia Shield - Using VLC as external player, direct path option switched on

Emby Theater on PC - Plays without issue

So the current problem is a latency/bandwidth limitation because the direct play function isnt actually working correctly?

It's an iffy answer.  Ripped 4K images/MKVs or however you have them are meant to be played back from a subsystem that can read the optical disc very fast and output directly to HDMI. We are changing it from DISC Player->TV HDMI to in your case NAS->PC->Device->TV HDMI which adds a lot of things in between and you're pushing the bitrates this type of system can handle properly.

Can it be optimized? Maybe

Right now we've proven high bitrate media is an issue in this type of setup.  Switching to DAS storage for at least the high bit files will fix it.  Making the server dual homed (duel NICs) should fix it

At this point we need dev feedback.

[PenkethBoy 2063]

for me the issue is not network related - its not latency or bandwidth - if it was VLC/ET etc would show evidence of the pausing

even a 100mb/s network could play this video - although the headroom margin would be small so an even higher bitrate movie could exceed that

there is some combination of factors with emby and shield that cause this when emby server is the middleman handing off the the shield.

[PenkethBoy 2063]

Question - has anybody tried this test with something other than a shield that runs ATV - Mi Box etc to see if they do the same thing?

could help narrow it down

[rbjtech 4289]

27 minutes ago, PenkethBoy said:

for me the issue is not network related - its not latency or bandwidth - if it was VLC/ET etc would show evidence of the pausing

even a 100mb/s network could play this video - although the headroom margin would be small so an even higher bitrate movie could exceed that

there is some combination of factors with emby and shield that cause this when emby server is the middleman handing off the the shield.

Agree with @PenkethBoy and I have said this many times throughout this thread - this is NOT network bandwidth related, but may be network stack related (*)

The problem is where the traffic passed with SMB (ie the file share) is converted into HTTP packets for the streaming to the client.  This conversion is done on the emby server in memory.  If you change the way this works or remove SMB from the equation - then the problem goes away and you can run multiple 4K remux streams over a 1 gig network with ease.

ie DAS > HTTP - Works fine.   SMB > Non-Emby Client - Works fine.

I'm going to try some high bitrate files to other clients today also - so I'll report back.

(*) @sooty234 -  Are you saying with a 10Gb Networks using a NAS (SMB) - 10Gb   ->  Emby (10Gb)  -> Shield (1Gb) - you are NOT seeing pause issues ?

@cayars - I also tried with a) Multiple VLANS (same single NIC) - ie Storage on one VLAN, Emby/Clients on another - f/w routing the traffic across the VLAN - NO Joy.  I also then tried 2 Physical NIC's in Emby - again using different VLAN's - again no joy.   So can you expand on how you managed to get this working ?  What was the configuration ?

 

 

Edited September 27, 2020 by rbjtech

[PenkethBoy 2063]

"The problem is where the traffic passed with SMB (ie the file share) is converted into HTTP packets for the streaming to the client.  This conversion is done on the emby server in memory.  If you change the way this works or remove SMB from the equation - then the problem goes away and you can run multiple 4K remux streams over a 1 gig network with ease."

What i dont get is that the emby server is not involved with the playback - once it has passed the direct access path to the Shield

you can see that the emby server is not doing anything other than talking to the shield getting playback position info - so dont see how the http packets come into this?

[rbjtech 4289]

Latest update - So I can replicate this on a browser also ..

Using - http://jell.yfish.us/ - h264 files only so no transcoding due to the browser.

NAS/SMB > Emby > Browser (HTTP)

Up to 50Mbit - no stuttering, as soon as I get to 55Mbit - stuttering starts ...

 

[rbjtech 4289]

15 minutes ago, PenkethBoy said:

What i dont get is that the emby server is not involved with the playback - once it has passed the direct access path to the Shield

you can see that the emby server is not doing anything other than talking to the shield getting playback position info - so dont see how the http packets come into this?

If you elect to use an external client - then yes, I agree - the standard client uses HTTP.

[vdatanet 1549]

4 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Latest update - So I can replicate this on a browser also ..

Using - http://jell.yfish.us/ - h264 files only so no transcoding due to the browser.

NAS/SMB > Emby > Browser (HTTP)

Up to 50Mbit - no stuttering, as soon as I get to 55Mbit - stuttering starts ...

 

So it's not a Shield issue.

[vdatanet 1549]

19 minutes ago, PenkethBoy said:

"The problem is where the traffic passed with SMB (ie the file share) is converted into HTTP packets for the streaming to the client.  This conversion is done on the emby server in memory.  If you change the way this works or remove SMB from the equation - then the problem goes away and you can run multiple 4K remux streams over a 1 gig network with ease."

What i dont get is that the emby server is not involved with the playback - once it has passed the direct access path to the Shield

you can see that the emby server is not doing anything other than talking to the shield getting playback position info - so dont see how the http packets come into this?

I doubt that Emby is directly passing the path to the Shield, I think it sends http traffic. 

[PenkethBoy 2063]

ok - but hows the emby emby server providing http packets when its not involved in the playback - its effectively sitting on the sidelines watching how far the playback has got

its not passing the data through the server - so http packets are moot - for this problem

thats why i tried it first with a unc path - which get given to the shield for it to direct access the file system of the hosting file system of the Nas or 2012r2 server

[rbjtech 4289]

1 minute ago, vdatanet said:

I doubt that Emby is directly passing the path to the Shield, I think it sends http traffic. 

.. which is exactly the problem here.

the likes of Kodi and VLC (direct SMB) work perfectly with high bitrate 4K Remux's ..

[PenkethBoy 2063]

How do you know it not doing that? do you have any details of how you know it works

 

[rbjtech 4289]

2 minutes ago, PenkethBoy said:

ok - but hows the emby emby server providing http packets when its not involved in the playback - its effectively sitting on the sidelines watching how far the playback has got

its not passing the data through the server - so http packets are moot - for this problem

thats why i tried it first with a unc path - which get given to the shield for it to direct access the file system of the hosting file system of the Nas or 2012r2 server

How are you telling the Emby Shield client to use direct SMB ?  the only option here is if you select to use an External Client - THEN you get the option to use direct SMB.  The external client, then asks permissions for the share etc, then works just fine.  But I have never seen the EMBY client use SMB directly - not on the Shield anyway.