foleys 6 Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 I'm experiencing a unique issue with one specific setup in my house. This issue only occurs in my living room where I have a receiver, with my Fire TV device plugged into the receiver. When watching a TV series on shuffle, lets say Big Bang Theory, every time one episode ends and the next one begins, the audio drops out completely. I can fix it by power cycling either the TV or receiver, unplugging and re-plugging the HDMI cable, or sometimes by cycling the inputs on the TV or receiver. The weird thing is that this issue only occurs if I let the episode naturally end and emby automatically starts playing the next episode. If I press the "Start Now" button that appears towards the end of the episode, the audio never drops out. Another thing to note is that when the audio drop out occurs in emby, I can open other apps like netflix or hulu and the audio does not function in those apps either. It seems like an HDMI negotiation/sync issue. I have tried a Denon AVR-1603 and a Yamaha TSR-700 receiver. This issue occurs with both a Fire TV Stick 4k and Fire TV Cube (Gen2), but much more often with the Cube. I've also tried multiple brand HDMI cables. Where do I begin to debug this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted January 22, 2021 Author Share Posted January 22, 2021 Also, the media is being played directly, so no re-encoding or transcoding is involved. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14917 Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 Hi. Is the stick plugged into the receiver directly or using ARC? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted January 22, 2021 Author Share Posted January 22, 2021 (edited) Directly into the receiver. All my inputs go through the receiver, so ARC should not be used for anything. I also disabled ARC on the receiver for testing. Edited January 22, 2021 by foleys Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14917 Posted January 22, 2021 Share Posted January 22, 2021 Interesting. I cannot say I have any ideas at the moment, unfortunately. Any one else ever seen anything like this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37088 Posted January 24, 2021 Share Posted January 24, 2021 Can we please look at an example? Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. thanks ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted January 24, 2021 Author Share Posted January 24, 2021 (edited) I submitted my "Emby for Android TV/Fire TV" debug logs on 1/24/2021 @ 10:24am EST The local emby username is "foleys" I was playing the episode "Cougar Town - Free Fallin", which transitioned to "Cougar Town - To Find a Friend" when the audio dropped out. Also attached is my embyserver.txt log file from the time period of concern. No ffmpeg log files were created because the videos are direct play. embyserver.txt Edited January 24, 2021 by foleys Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14917 Posted January 25, 2021 Share Posted January 25, 2021 Hi. I don't see anything of interest in that log but that doesn't really surprise me. This sounds like a hardware issue of some kind. Were all the HDMI cables high-quality (and 4K rated)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted January 25, 2021 Author Share Posted January 25, 2021 My TV is only 1080p, but I did replace the cables with 4k rated ones as part of my debugging. I also tried every other cable I have in the house, which is about 3 different brands. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
speechles 1920 Posted January 25, 2021 Share Posted January 25, 2021 (edited) Make sure the cables are rated for HDMI 2.0 as that is required for full eARC support. Is the output on your TV ARC or eARC? If it is eARC you should be using it. Edited January 25, 2021 by speechles Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted January 25, 2021 Author Share Posted January 25, 2021 Cables are rated HDMI 2.0, and do support ARC, but I'm not using ARC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
speechles 1920 Posted January 25, 2021 Share Posted January 25, 2021 (edited) I Know. But if you are using ARC is there still an issue? That is where I am headed.. lol. The reason for the drop out is the HDCP is broken probably. But only affects the audio strangely. Maybe this is Cinavia? It blanks the audio to protect itself. That is why I think if you used the HDMI chain for both video and audio and introduced ARC you would not have the problem. Â Reading around the interwebs have you tried this fix: So I went to the audio settings and instead of selecting "best available" I selected "Always use Dolby Digital Plus" https://www.reddit.com/r/firetvstick/comments/je9jgw/solved_audio_stutter_audio_dropout_with_firestick/ Edited January 25, 2021 by speechles Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted January 25, 2021 Author Share Posted January 25, 2021 Thank you for the suggestion speechles. While forcing either Dolby Digital or Dolby Digital Plus did not change anything, forcing Stereo did eliminate the audio drop out. Obviously that's not a solution because I want more than PCM 2 channel, but maybe its a good point for comparison? Another point for comparison: I ran the same TV show on shuffle for over 8 hours with an nvidia shield and the audio never dropped out. The shield was connected in the same way as the FireTV device. When the audio drops out, I can note the particular episode(s) that caused the drop out and then play them manually with no issues. The audio drop out only occurs with shuffle, or probably more accurate is that it only happens when emby transitions from one episode to another; its just that in my case shuffle is the mechanism facilitating the episode transitions. I also tested using the "Play All" feature instead of Shuffle, and that exhibited the same behavior. And remember there's a nuance here that seems most odd to me; the audio only drops out when I let emby handle the automatic transition from one episode to the next episode. If I press the "Start Now" button the audio never drops out. Is there a difference in how the media is loaded or played with these two methods? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14917 Posted January 25, 2021 Share Posted January 25, 2021 2 hours ago, foleys said: Is there a difference in how the media is loaded or played with these two methods? Not from our perspective but the events occurring in the player are different. Also, the issue could be related to something that is at the very end of these episodes... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted January 30, 2021 Author Share Posted January 30, 2021 Apparently my TV does not support ARC, so I'm unable to test that route. I did however plug the Cube directly into my TV and the audio never dropped out when using the TV's builtin speakers. ebr, you mentioned that it could be something towards the end of the episodes, so I tried manipulating the files. The files in question are x265, AAC-LC 6 channel, mkv. Things that did NOT resolve the issue:  - remuxed to mkv and mp4 to test for container flaws  - trimmed a couple minutes off the beginning and end of the files  - removed all chapters/subtitles/flags/etc, leaving only the video and audio elements in the container  - re-encode the video to H264 mkv  - re-encode the audio track to fdk_aac 6 channel (keeping the original bitrate, and changing the bitrate to 320k) Things that DID resolve the issue:  - downmix the AAC-LC 6 channel audio track to AAC-LC 2 channel stereo  - re-encode the audio track to AC3 6 channel So, it appears its possible the system might have an issue with the playback of the audio track. But again, why does this only occur when emby transitions from one episode to the next? And this affects entire series of TV shows, not just an episode here and there, but every single episode in many TV series. So its hard for me to blame the files themselves as being corrupt or flawed. Is there anything else I can test, try, or gather to help narrow this down? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14917 Posted January 30, 2021 Share Posted January 30, 2021 Can you provide me with two of these items for testing? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted January 30, 2021 Author Share Posted January 30, 2021 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/goe2aaa43rbid56/AAC76kVdTMqIxFuCOJ3WhTina Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14917 Posted January 30, 2021 Share Posted January 30, 2021 Those two episodes are not consecutive... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted January 30, 2021 Author Share Posted January 30, 2021 I'm using the emby shuffle feature, so I did not think that consecutive mattered. I added some random episodes to a playlist and ran repeated shuffle tests to ensure that both files caused the audio to drop out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted February 1, 2021 Author Share Posted February 1, 2021 I have uploaded a consecutive episode. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14917 Posted February 1, 2021 Share Posted February 1, 2021 Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14917 Posted February 1, 2021 Share Posted February 1, 2021 Unfortunately, all three play back to back with no issue on my equipment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
foleys 6 Posted February 2, 2021 Author Share Posted February 2, 2021 I figured as much. ebr, you mentioned the below: On 1/25/2021 at 3:03 PM, ebr said: Not from our perspective but the events occurring in the player are different. Also, the issue could be related to something that is at the very end of these episodes... Is there a way to influence the player behavior in the two different transition scenarios? Even if its just for debugging? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebr 14917 Posted February 2, 2021 Share Posted February 2, 2021 13 hours ago, foleys said: Is there a way to influence the player behavior in the two different transition scenarios? Even if its just for debugging? Not that I can think of. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luke 37088 Posted February 4, 2021 Share Posted February 4, 2021 Is this consistent? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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