[Issue] Playback of a file stuttering with Emby on Web and FireTV (fine with iPhone Emby app and working with Jellyfin) - HW acceleration enabled

[bigcookie 4]

Dear all,

I am running Emby 4.5.4.0 running on a QNAP TS-653B (Intel® Celeron® J3455 Quad-Core 1,5 GHz Prozessor (Turbo bis zu 2,3 GHz), 16GB RAM), including Emby Premiere. Normally all works fine, lately I found a file, which stops playback every ~5 seconds (didnt measure it). Not all players are affected:

- Amazon FireTV Stick 4K new, a few month old - stuttering

- Firefox, Safari, Chrome on MacOS on MacBook Pro 13'' from 2018 - stuttering

- iPhone 8 with Emby App - works fine

When trying with Jellyfin (FireTV and iOS app - same devices), playback worked fine. HW-acceleration enabled (CPU load I saw was 38% max). Attached the log files. First two (Embyserver and FFMPEG with standard logging) the third one (FFMPEG) with debug-logging enabled. It would be great, if someone could take a look... I am happy to run more tests.

Thanks!

 

P.S: Video playback on VLC on the MacBook Pro also works fine. I am happy to provide a file snippet, I just need to get a guideline how to cut the file as it would be too big to share...

 

 

embyserver.txt ffmpeg-transcode-adf5994e-a477-4ad2-92b3-b7ad360c5b2c_1 - nonDebug.txt ffmpeg-transcode-d2ca1ecd-4afe-4643-a57d-fcccd7aad07d_1 - Debug.txt

Edited April 23, 2021 by bigcookie

[bigcookie 4]

It would be great, if somebody could help... Not sure if this is a typical user issue or something else... Happy to support with more log files or whatever is needed :-). Thanks in advance!

[Luke 37012]

Hi, this is a 4K to 4K transcode, which will be very taxing on your server machine. A couple things you could try:

• Set the quality setting in the app to 1080p, and the 4K to 1080p transcode should perform much better.
• Try our 4.6 beta server which has a lot of new hardware transcoding related development

Please let us know if this helps. Thanks.

[bigcookie 4]

Thanks, will try. If you talk about the app - do you mean the web playback and the FireTV app? The iOS app works fine with this movie. 

I will also check the 4.6 beta server and provide feedback.

 

Edit:

I couldn't find any quality setting on resolution on server side nor on FireTV side. On server side I set the transcoding to "very fast" and CRF to 30... @Luke can you point me a bit more into the required direction of settings? The issue is with generic Web playback and the FireTV app. iOS app playback works fine out of the box.

Edited April 30, 2021 by bigcookie

[bigcookie 4]

@Luke: The quality settings on server side didnt help as written above. I installed the Beta.

Web playback: No change with VAAPI hardware decoding, but with QuickSync, everything seems fine and I am able to watch the movie - at least no stuttering noticeable in 1 min playback and jumping back and forth works much smoother

FireTV app playback: No change regardless which decoder I set as preferred. I tried VAAPI and QuickSync in both orders, but also only one of them to be active. In the app during playback I could witch resolution (settings are "auto" in general) and set to 1080p/50Hz or 1080p/60Hz - no change. I also set the bitrate to 10Mb/s (original was 80Mb/s) with no difference noticeable.

Not sure if the quality settings I put in are affecting things though as I didnt see any noticeable change when adapting on server settings side as well as on FireTV app side. I expected the reduction from 80Mb/s to 10Mb/s to show something...

CPU load on server side didnt reach 100% in any case and stayed <39%.

 

[Luke 37012]

Can we please look at log file examples from the beta server? Thanks.

[bigcookie 4]

Sorry, I should have added those. I cannot tell which experiment was exactly which. Let me know and I can reproduce. Attached all logs from today in zipped form (Today I installed Beta and tested).

Archive.zip

[bigcookie 4]

Hello @Luke, did the log file collection help? There are multiple, but they only cover the different tests, no standard usage.

regards and thanks!