Roku screensaver coming on causes Emby music player to half-freeze and not continue playing songs. [Solution: disable screensaver]

[redfoxred 0]

(edit note: this was written when I was trying to diagnose the issue)

Hello awesome people,

For about the last month or two, when I'm playing music from my MP3 collection on either a Roku 2 or 4, on "instant mix" mode, the playback will stop and not skip to the next song. The Emby logs always have the following two lines. (I replaced the title with [title] so its not confusing). 

Info SessionManager: Session 053ca1f3523b46439be40b7418506a9a has gone idle while playing
Info SessionManager: Playback stopped reported by app Roku SG 4.0.19 playing [title]. Stopped at 93000 ms

Other notes:

• I'm not sure if the music is actually ending early or if the "Stopped" time is wrong?  I haven't noticed the music end abruptly, the playback just stops.
• The Roku will show the song progress somewhere in the middle, and just stopped. No error, just not ticking forward anymore.
• If I click "back" and restart the same song, it will play as normal and continue to the next song
• I was running an older version of Emby server, and upgraded once the problems started, I also did a Debian update/upgrade to see if that would fix it, it did not.
• It seems to take a while for the stop event to occur, I will pay attention for a long time and it will be fine, then I get up to do something and come back to find it stopped. Thus I think the "screensaver" is usually on when this happens.

I have upgraded the Emby server and restarted it, as well as tried both the Emby app and Emby beta app, and can recreate this on both a Roku 2 or 4, either wireless or wired.  I have also tried rescanning all the libraries, as well as turning off acceleration (but I think it was already disabled since I dont have a premium subscription)  

I am attaching my current Emby server log below.  There are a couple of the "playback stopped reported" events in there.

Thanks for any suggestions you may have! 

embyserver.txt

Edited March 13, 2021 by redfoxred
Updated because I figured out the cause of the problem

[redfoxred 0]

Update: It seems to be caused by the screensaver coming on! while I was typing the above, the Roku screensaver kicked on and the music continued through to the end of the song, then playback stopped and did not continue to the next song. When I pressed a key on the remote to clear the screensaver, the emby client appeared to show that playback had stopped at the moment the screensaver kicked on, except that it actually completed through to the end of the song.

I went into my Roku settings and selected the option to reset the theme to factory default and will report back.

FYI the screensaver was Roku's "city stroll: movie magic"  It appears that this is the default for my Roku's, since that is what got selected again after I cleared the themes to default.  Thus will probably be the same screensaver once it kicks on again.  I just wanted to get this update typed up so nobody wastes time investigating in the meantime, just in case.....

Will see if it happens again and will report back!

 

---

Update 2: It does appear to be caused by the screensaver coming on, regardless of which screensaver it is. I tried the Roku "digital clock" and then the "Bing picture of the day" screensaver by another developer, and the playback stopped for both of them.

 

Solution to this problem appears to be just disabling the screensaver, but I am happy to help the community with any tests or more information!

Edited March 13, 2021 by redfoxred

[ebr 14905]

We will try to come up with some sort of solution for this.

[mskenny 7]

This is definitely caused by the Roku screensaver turning on and prevents me from turning on music while I'm doing something else, such as going to sleep. Please fix this. Thanks.

[thebiggiant 0]

This has been a known issue for 3 years.

I like Emby. Good app with good developers. I don't want to complain about a free app - but... come on now, you've known about this for years. It's very annoying. Please don't blame the Roku. The other Roku apps don't suffer from this issue. Please work on this problem. Thanks!

Edit: I should mention some people have had some success by increasing the Roku screensaver time to 10-15 minutes (the screensaver time needs to be longer than the longest song in your playlist).

Edited March 20, 2021 by thebiggiant

[ebr 14905]

1 hour ago, thebiggiant said:

This has been a known issue for 3 years.

I like Emby. Good app with good developers. I don't want to complain about a free app - but... come on now, you've known about this for years. It's very annoying. Please don't blame the Roku. The other Roku apps don't suffer from this issue. Please work on this problem. Thanks!

Edit: I should mention some people have had some success by increasing the Roku screensaver time to 10-15 minutes (the screensaver time needs to be longer than the longest song in your playlist).

Hi.  That is an old issue that was corrected a long time ago.

The issue being encountered today is different and due to the fact that Roku removed our ability to stop the screensaver from engaging.

 

[ebr 14905]

1 hour ago, thebiggiant said:

Edit: I should mention some people have had some success by increasing the Roku screensaver time to 10-15 minutes (the screensaver time needs to be longer than the longest song in your playlist).

That will not have any impact anymore as that is related to the old issue.  The only thing you can do right now is disable the screensaver altogether.  We're going to have to come up with a "trick" to defeat this.

[mskenny 7]

This only started happening recently. Thanks for the update.

[Luke 37029]

On 3/20/2021 at 2:54 PM, mskenny said:

This only started happening recently. Thanks for the update.

We're looking into it. Thanks.

[TimOlaf 3]

So glad I found this thread.

Just want to say, THANK YOU for looking into this.  I was going crazy trying to figure out what was going on.  Now I know.

Love the Emby!  Looking forward to a fix!

[Armageus 67]

Just registering my interest in this issue, as I'm also affected.