Jump to content

Issues playing/seeking/resuming program while recording is in progress


bubba_nuts

Recommended Posts

bubba_nuts

I got a tuner recently and have been enjoying Live TV and Recordings with Emby, but have been encountering issues playing a recorded program while that recording is still underway.

Emby Server Windows 4.5.2 with Emby Web clients (Firefox and Edge)

HDHomeRun PRIME (HDHR3-CC with 20200907 firmware)
 
I've tried with the "Allow hardware transcoding" setting enabled and disabled, doesn't seem to change anything.
 

 

Example 1:

A recording is scheduled for 12p to 3p.  I start watching this recording at 12:30p.

As soon as it starts playing, Emby thinks that the length of the recording is only 2 mins, even though its been recording for 30mins.

Every few seconds, the length increases by 2 mins.  So after watching for 30 seconds, Emby thinks there's 15 mins left.  After 60 seconds, Emby thinks there's 30 mins left.  (And so on.)

If I want to play from the very start, that works fine, but it's not possible to skip or seek until Emby "discovers" the duration you want to get to.

This behavior also seems to be the cause of two other problems, which I'll try to describe below.

 

Example 2:

A recording is scheduled for 12p to 3p.  I start watching this recording at 12:30p.  I watch for 30 mins and then back out around 1p.  At 1:05pm I attempt to resume playing from 0:30:00.  (The recording is still active at this time.)

Emby flashes a couple of frames from the very beginning of the recording, hesitates for a second, and then plays from 0:00:00.  If I back out, Emby has already reset my played position and resume is no longer an option.  I think what's happening is that Emby is trying to seek to that resume timestamp, but since it hasn't "discovered" that the recording's duration is farther out than the initial 2 mins or so, it fails and just starts over from the beginning.

 

Example 3:

A recording is scheduled for 12p to 3p.  I start watching this recording at 12:30p.  I watch for 30 mins and then change the audio from English to SAP.

Emby flashes a couple of frames from the very beginning of the recording, hesitates for a second, and then plays from 0:00:00.  The same thing as Example 2 seems to be happening.  Emby is starting the playback over, trying to resume from the 0:30:00 timestamp, but the recording's duration initial appears to be only 2 mins, so it fails and just starts from the beginning.

 

In all of these examples, if I manually stop the recording, Emby immediately realizes the correct duration of the recording and seeking/resuming works correctly.  It's only when the recording is active that playback issues happen.

 

Help!

Edited by bubba_nuts
Link to comment
Share on other sites

needbrew99

I am have been seeing the same issue.  I was recording two shows and trying to skip between them to avoid commercials.  When you start from the beginning it appears to work but is laggy  when you skip and you cannot skip many frames without a long pause as it appears to be scanning.  All is fine until you try and resume from where you were watching.  A frame from the beginning is shown and sometimes it will recover after a very long time (3 - 4 minutes) and other times the spinning circle will pop-up and a "too many errors " error will occur and kick you out to the main screen for the recording.  Once the recordings are done everything works fine.  These are running on a dedicated server doing nothing but emby.  Has 16gb of ram and a 3,4 Ghz i5 processor with an ssd for transcoding and a 2TB raid 10 for storage

Link to comment
Share on other sites

glbarnes67

Not only do I have playing/seeking/resuming problem while a recording is in progress, but now all current recording will stop!  This happens even when just viewing.  I have to restart each recording in progress so we don't miss more of the program.  My wife has about had it.  I use HD-Homerun quad tuner, Xeon E3-1285L V4 3.4GHz, and 16 Gb Memory.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

lastwraith

This happens on my setup as well but I know why. Check the disk activity on your emby server when you are getting lag (or it seems to be frozen) trying to fast forward (far ahead) in a live tv recording that is in progress. I bet the disk is pegged like mine (it's an old 250gb 7200rpm spinner....I know but I'm just playing around for now).

On my machine, this is because emby is transcoding like crazy in small snippets as I try to view from my TCL w/ Roku or (somewhat more successfully) from my FireTV. The TCL Roku I understand why it doesn't work very well (not emby's fault) and the FireTV would probably be fine if my drive wasn't a thousand years old.

Check your temp transcode directory and look at the sheer volume of files likely being generated in there. I have over 4k files in there just from today watching 2 DVR'ed football games on a slight delay.

Default dir = C:\Users\YOURUSERNAMEHERE\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\transcoding-temp

 

TL;DR - If your client is waiting a long time when you try to FF an in-progress Live TV recording, chances are that emby is transcoding like mad and your emby server is starved for resources (most likely disk). Check your disk activity and make sure it isn't pegged. While you are looking at disk activity and checking the above-mentioned transcoding-temp directory, you may want to make sure it is actually emptying on the regular. Mine wasn't and I ended up just setting a script to run nightly to clear it out at 5am when I knew I wouldn't be using it. C:\Users\YOURUSERNAMEHERE\AppData\Roaming\Emby-Server\transcoding-temp

Not sure if any of this is as-intended function but on my end I am aware that I have some serious negatives in my setup currently (VERY old spinning rust emby/transcode-temp/etc drive, TCL Roku client with no built-in storage, etc). It's all good as I am just experimenting at the moment but I will likely pop a dedicated SSD in there for transcoding to thrash and stick to my FireTV as a client instead.

 

If anyone wants to chime in on what they think a minimum spec transcoding-temp drive should look like or a better setup for pairing an HDHR with TCL Roku (or FireTV) though, I'm always up for suggestions. Thank you to the emby devs regardless, the software is really great and almost all the "problems" I have run into have been due to my own lack of knowledge with regards to the product. Perhaps more importantly, you are all very responsive in the forums and don't make us newb users feel bad for asking questions. In addition, you are more than patient with a few people I see complaining about stuff in here that has nothing to do with emby itself (performance on TCL Rokus comes to mind as I perused a few of those topics).

 

*Addition - I forgot to mention that when recording, if you have everything happening on one drive only (as I do at the moment)....that is a LOT of i/o. A large media file is recording to your DVR directory, another copy of that large media file is recording to the transcoding-temp directory, and then if you go to watch the recording in progress and seek it......a ton of smaller files are being created in transcoding-temp if you have a setup like mine. It's almost a miracle it works at all on my 250gb 7200rpm drive (which is also the boot drive).

Edited by lastwraith
Grammar is hard
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
lastwraith

Just wanted to mention that I cloned my single drive over to an SSD and most of the "problems" have been resolved. Seeking still takes a few seconds if you jump far ahead in a recording that is in progress for Live TV, but it's tolerable. It no longer freezes for all eternity if you try to seek forward 20+ minutes. My setup is certainly not optimal, there is no dedicated transcoding drive, just everything on the one OS drive, but the SSD definitely makes a huge difference to tame IO operations.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

lastwraith

Of course, thanks for actually responding when real issues arise. 

Based on all the disk activity Emby is doing during a LiveTV recording + playback I don't think this is really a problem once you know why and where things are happening (as a user), but it's nice to know the experts are lurking regardless.

Somewhat related - I had no reservations signing up for lifetime Premiere. It was a no-brainer. 

Edited by lastwraith
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

bubba_nuts

LastWraith's issue seems different than mine.

If Emby has "discovered" the timestamp I want to skip to, I can click to it almost immediately.  The problem is that the duration of the recording isn't known when I start playing and only grows slowly.

Regarding HDD vs SSD, all of my Emby bits are running off an SSD.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

lastwraith

This is only for "in progress" recordings recordings that you are trying to view though right? What device are you trying to stream to? This will happen with in progress recordings when playing to my Roku TCL TVs directly (with the source being OTA via my HDHR) but my understanding is this is because of the limitations of the TCL ROKU, Emby having to feed the stream in little slices, and the TCL Roku being unable to process the format that it comes off the HDHR natively, so I can only fast forward a minute or so at a time and the timeline is all off. Accessing Emby via Fire device (AFTV) fixes all these issues and presumably I could even add USB storage to my TV to give it a place to buffer even though it would still dislike the format of the video from the HDHR. 

If that's not your specific issue I'm guessing the devs will want your Emby logs. Or they may want them regardless. 

Suffice it to say that TCL Roku TVs seem like a very difficult target for Emby because of all the limitations of the implementation. If you are streaming direct to the TV my suggestion would be to try a "real" streaming target like a Fire device, standalone Roku, etc to see if the behavior improves. 

Edited by lastwraith
Because I'm dumb and had to reread your original post.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

bubba_nuts

Yes, the issue is only with in-progress recordings.

I've tried a few devices, but ruling all of those out and just doing Emby web it still happens.

I'll grab the logs next time this happens, sorry for not including them straight away.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

AxelAxel3

Something I noticed that is along that note (seeking). I tried to turn on a movie on Samsung Smart TV app that was recording. It had recorded for about an hour and had 1-2 hours left to record. I wanted to skip the first minute of ads and when I did, it never skipped, but only showed the spinning loading wheel and kept playing the ads like I didn't push anything.  So the video kept playing, but I had the loading wheel in the center spinning. So I backed out of the video to get rid of the spinning wheel and restarted the video. Watched it for about 15-20 minutes and got to the next set of ads. I assumed the video had loaded on Emby at this point and I pressed the skip button again. Once I did this, same thing - instead of skipping, it just added the loading wheel that never went away. So I closed the video and reopened and, like the OP said, it restarted from the beginning. I could not FFWD it at all. Just the wheel would come back up.

So then I connected my android app as a remote for the Samsung Smart TV app thinking maybe it was just the button on the Smart TV app not acting right. Still same thing. Then I stopped playing on the Smart TV and switched to my android app. Even after giving it some time to load, I could not FFWD at all. It just acted like I didnt push anything and it said I had -2billion or so minutes left on the video (image below).

Then stopped playing on the smart TV and casted to Chromecast. I was able to skip 30 seconds at a time, but when it takes 5-10 seconds to load each skip, then skipping to 15-20 minutes is not an option. So I tried using the time selector bar, which showed NaN:NaN as the amount of time left, when I dragged to skip, it just restarted the show.

After trying all of that and not getting any success, I had to just stop watching because I couldn't get back to my spot at all.

I can provide logs or screen records or anything needed, but just adding to the thread that there is for sure issues with playing back a recording in progress on the Samsung Smart TV app and Android App as well. We are about to invest in 3 more Samsung Smart TVs with the hopes of using Emby more with Live TV. This will be a big blocker in getting "family approval".

I just now tested from the HTML5 web client and got what the OP of this thread said.

erMwuEsGqIERWNksyYwfCi6oAvTeE_FcD2jy-ludEFqJE1zE1hxlEtRJN3R9ntSfVjXxraGTszPU8J9gVSz5vTb9E5--bZD5aaSZZMxBl5L0qnexozVqK06x8HG-3T6mc6DICN3R7GvWX9JWNlImjkEqrUmsJGw6Gxjj0EQoEVg4_pEbN6lJ1OILyvJvFzToYUOd89xRXLPs_XiOm_oEyV4qux8Us7aemyPBoSml3iihtkO92ARDiV5OU5LmuKL10LJtUnPqAymyqq_PdIWMyXsia-HGQzX8NsIHtaPkwslhJAKSDZznVpPHJ6NrgyNciJlomOAF567NIgKR6ldsTA96O6fX7PaBFKHjsP16Daf-6AToaJo73amrKQcqYNICas2_L1UUflVzkuO1eLrD_5-BADd4z1XDVnAHMPxwAoFnFMTOwUC5qdgbmCoKURmfuA4F6NV0CJWD6YVXm9qxZ3i92svCxC7OGxRrrwVCKn0BF8baJBvmNGSQqmC_K8uwfo9A95fiDMcx3h8A0dJd0qiflM3kziriJ-rXU_OSdCAJXqx4iiXGYKdSk-WCTSmR6gUrp1mXFFtg5yIdPxM6jcUfELd7AwOmDJOBVPZQppyWrcr_ilMcs8tStOGBmcBxLbmleIy0Gnvf-z9BCsqrQhmHy4cjCgqAw3C2B6OJOrr_rJIyDn8wHS2PaFNLsO8=w1920-h896-no?authuser=0

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...

I had this same issue on Sunday for the Super Bowl. I set it to record with a 60 minute end buffer and carried about my business. When I went back to try to play back the recording while it was still recording, I couldn't even find the recording to start playing. I went to the local Fox Affiliate in the guide and hit select but there was no option to watch a recording in progress. Good thing we weren't hosting a Super Bowl Party and it was just my wife and I and neither of use are huge NFL fans anyhow.. We were able to pick up the game in progress but missed the first half and part of the second. Great ending though and we won $250 in a pool for the half time score! Log attached. Had to zip it due to file size limitations.

embyserver-63811843200.zip

Edited by Sammy
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
Sammy

Still had the same problem with Survivor on Wednesday night. It's recording and has recorded but the previously available option to start a recording from the beginning or from the Live Stream when selecting from the guide is no longer there. Seems a regression in features that need to be restored sooner than later!

Log from Wednesday attached. Again had to Zip it due to size limitations as it's a daily log.

Next time I'll send an AndroidTV Log too.

embyserver-63813312000.zip

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Try recording in both 4K and 1080 and see if the 1080 version keeps recording when the 4K version faults.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...