Cinema Intros take an ice age to start playing [PARTIALLY SOLVED]

[flexage 125]

[Skip to the bottom of this post for the solution I found when working though the issue in order to report it on this post]

 

Hey all,

As my wife and I aren't as up to date with recent movie release as we might have been in the decade prior, I recently enabled Cinema Intros for the first time, as I thought it would be a good way for us to discover some newer movies.

It works, and properly selects content based off all the checked options in Cinema Intros settings screen.

I'm purely using online trailers as the source for this, I have no desire to establish and maintain a local collection of trailers, my time overheads are already high enough

Only thing is, when clicking play on a movie, it's slow to start playing each trailer. It takes around 25-35 seconds before the trailer starts playing. When it finishes that trailer, there's another 25-35 second pause before the second (final) trailer starts, after it completes, the local movie playback begins instantly.

I've seen this behaviour (yes the 'u'  in that last word is there on purpose, I'm English) in both the Web Client and the Android Apps (Nvidia Shield & Xiaomi Mi Box).

I've ruled out transcoding by monitoring the dashboard, the trailer doesn't even show on the playback overview screen until the second it starts playing, and even then it doesn't show as transcoding.

My guess is that Emby Server is doing 1 or both of 2 things when the excessive wait times happen:

1. The entirety of the trailer is being cached on the Emby Server before playback on the client begins
2. Emby is going out to fetch metadata (title, art, age rating) about the movie before the trailer begins

Once a particular trailer has successfully started playing once, it plays without delay the next time its randomly selected to be displayed before a movie. Leading me to believe that the results of whichever operation was being performed to cause the slowdown are persistant.

I'd sincerely hope that in the age of streaming, we're not waiting for and caching an entire trailer before playback, I respect the dev's abilities and judgement too much to assume that this is the case.

Which leaves me with option number 2 - the server is fetching metadata ad-hoc for each movie.

I remember Cinema Intros requiring the Trailers plugin, so I would have thought that the Trailers plugin would be front-loading the trailers meta into the database/library for quick access on playback.

I can't find any other users complaining about slow start time of the Cinema Intros, so it must be something I've inadvertently screwed up, or some sort of an environmental factor on my installation.

 

[Solution found while writing this post!]

So it seems writing this post was my Rubber Duck of sorts... I got thinking about the Trailers plugin, and about how I thought it should be grabbing metadata ahead of time, so I went and checked the plugin config.

There were 4 options for movie trailer sources in there, the first of which "Movie Trailer Archive" was unchecked.

I don't know if I unchecked it manually when I installed the plugin, or it that was its default state after being installed a couple of months ago.

I enabled the checkbox and did a library scan, which solved the issue.

Trailers for Cinema Intros start playing back within 5 seconds now, which is more than acceptable.

This doesn't seem to be explicitly documented anywhere, so maybe some messaging in the trailer plugin settings screen informing the user of the consequence of unchecking that box, or even some info in the Cinema Intros setting screen about this requirement would be beneficial.

 

Even though I've solved my issue now, I'm going to post this up anyway, in the hopes that it may help anyone else who has been fruitlessly Googling for a solution to this problem, as I was.

 

Edit: After try a few more runs through the Cinema Intros trailers sequence it seems the wait times before playback of the trailer are much improved. Now the wait seems to down from the 25-35 seconds it originally was, to around 13-20 seconds on average, even with trailers that don't require transcoding - not great, but markedly better.

I'm open to and would be grateful for any suggestions that may improve this further.

Edited October 3, 2020 by flexage

[Luke 37022]

Glad you figured it out.