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Live TV not playing all channels on PC & Roku but plays them on Android Devices


One2Go
Go to solution Solved by softworkz,

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One2Go

Didn't know where to post this whether in Live TV or in the QNAP forum, but since this runs on a QNAP NAS I try starting here first.

I have a HDHomeRun Extend device and it is detected correctly by the Emby server and it fetches the meta data correctly for the OTA channels. However when I bring up the Guide and then try to play back specific channels it plays some back but for others I get the error "No compatible streams are currently available". I tried 2 different PCs and 3 different browsers all of them produce the same error. I live near Washington DC and the OTA channels that I get are ABC channel 7 but not CBS channel 9 and NBC channel 4. The HDHomerun runs the latest firmware and the Emby server version is the latest stable one.

This was not happening with the version emby-server-qnap_4.5.4.0_x86_64 but is happening now with the latest version but I am not sure if it started with version emby-server-qnap_4.6.1.0_x86_64 or the very latest which I have installed. The weird part is it is recording the Today show which is on NBC channel 4 and play back the recording but it will not play back the present live program.

To narrow this down I tried different devices, Roku Ultra and Roku TV show the same problems, on the channels that don't work the bar that shows retrieving stops at about 1/3 of the way. I have no such problems with my Android tablet running Android 11 as well as the Chromecast with Google TV the one with the remote. Also the HDHomeRun application plays all the channels.

I powered down the HDHomerun device, rescanned the channels, powered down the QNAP NAS and restarted it, deleted the Live TV device and guide meta data for Live TV in Emby and reconnected it in the setup of Live TV in the Emby server settings. I use Emby Guide Data for fetching the Guide data.

This is really baffling and have no idea what could cause this on PCs with browsers and Roku devices but not Android devices. Hope someone can shine a light on this.

Thanks
O2G

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One2Go

@Luke @cayars

I am not sure who would know about the Live TV part but cayars has helped me in the past. I believe I have narrowed it even further down. On all the Android devices the Dashboard in the browser shows that the TV channels are "Direct Playing" while on the PC browsers and on the Windows 10 Emby Theater App the channels that play are showing "Direct Streaming" which means they are on the fly transcoded, while the channels that don't play are showing up as "Direct Playing" which of course will not happen as IIRC they need to be transcoded into a different container.

So whatever changes have been made in the Live TV portion must have also effected the transcoding of the channels streamed from the HDHomeRun device to the PCs. It doesn't matter if I change the transcode profile in the HDHomeRun device the results are the same.

This explains why I can record the TV channel and then play it back later on and why I can't watch it live. The channel that always works is WJLA (wjla.com) and one that doesn't work is WUSA (wusa.com) Please give me an idea how to resolve this difficulty, thanks.

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One2Go

Here are two screen shots from the dashboard the first is the working channel the second is the one that doesn't work.

 

Pic-ABC.jpg

 

Pic-CBS.jpg

Edited by One2Go
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As a test, if you disable hardware transcoding on the server, does that make a difference?

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One2Go

If I disable hardware transcoding the channels that don't work will play back.

Here are two screen shots (CBS-1 & CBS-2) the first is when playing back in the browser the 2nd in Emby Theater.

The other 3 screenshots are from my server dashboard showing the impact of the transcoding. The 1st one is from the channel that works ABC, the other two are from the channel that doesn't work 96% for playback from Chrome, 83% playback from ET.

 

 

CBS-1.jpg

CBS-2.jpg

TC-1.jpg

TC-2.jpg

TC-3.jpg

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One2Go

@Luke I tried to find more about why some channels don't play and some do I took some screenshots of Stats for Nerds. ONLY channels that broadcast 1920x1080 have this problem 720 don't have this difficulty. Please see the screen shot of the 4 channels the most left and right don't play.

Stats for Nerds.jpg

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One2Go

@Luke @cayars @Happy2Play

To be honest I am disappointed to not get any feedback to my postings and the problem is clearly with the Emby server.,

Played back Live TV with the identical setup and these channels of Live TV showing problems on version 4.6.2.0 play just fine on an older Emby Server version.

So the problem is with the latest server version. Please take a look at the code that handles Live TV as clearly the problem is with the present server version.

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Sorry @One2Go

We have seen a couple other people with similar issues and have been looking and trying to piece together what could be wrong.  I think I may know what could be leading to this problem but it's just a hunch.  Will be doing some Live TV testing later today (2:15am now).

So we didn't forget about you, just don't have any news for you either.

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One2Go
9 hours ago, cayars said:

Sorry @One2Go

We have seen a couple other people with similar issues and have been looking and trying to piece together what could be wrong.  I think I may know what could be leading to this problem but it's just a hunch.  Will be doing some Live TV testing later today (2:15am now).

So we didn't forget about you, just don't have any news for you either.

Thanks for your reply and let me just post my findings in case that may help.

1. All channels that are broadcasting in 720p at 59.97fps play just fine and indicate "Direct Streaming" reason for transcoding "container not supported".
2. All channels that are broadcasting in 1080 or 480 at 29.97fps DO NOT play and the Dashboard shows "Direct Playing" with eventually showing the error message "No stream found"
3. Recorded channels of 1080 at 29.97fps play back but the Dashboard shows Transcoding with hardware transcoding either set to YES or NO, see attached screenshot.
4. The HDHomerun settings for transcoding (none, heavy, mobile) have no influence on whether it is transcoding or not.

It is my understanding that all live TV channels use the mpegTS container which needs to be on the fly repackaged into a container that can be read by the player. Since the elementary video and audio streams can be read there should be no transcoding of bitrate or frame rate and I guess that is what you have to figure out, why it does that and shows "Direct Playing".

As I stated in the opening post I am not sure where to post this so please feel free to move the post where it has the best exposure and can be helpful to others and I can contribute with what I have experienced.

Recording-1.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...
One2Go
1 hour ago, Luke said:

Have you updated to Emby Server 4.6.3?

Thanks for remembering the issue and reminding me. Yes I have updated to version 4.6.3 and still the same issue those channels that broadcast in 1920x1080 with a frame rate 29.97 still display in the Dashboard "Direct Play" and after short time the error message "No compatible streams are currently available" pops up. While those channels who broadcast in 1280x720 with a frame rate of 59.97 play just fine and show in the Dashboard "Direct Streaming".

Again thank you very much for staying on top of this. From my research it looks like whenever a channel broadcasts a frame rate of 29.97 the on the fly conversion into a compatible container doesn't kick in thus the difference in the Dashboard between "Direct Playing" with error and "Direct Streaming" with no error.

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  • 2 weeks later...
One2Go

Yep issue is still there, just updated to the latest Roku firmware on my Ultra and yes those channels with 29.97fps will not play back on Rokus or in different Web browsers.

 

@Luke I appreciate you staying on top of this.

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  • 2 weeks later...
One2Go

@Luke Installed server version 4.6.4 and still the same issue with TV playback when selecting the channel that doesn't play it says "Direct Playing" instead of "Direct Streaming" since the container needs to be switched on the fly.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Quote

it says "Direct Playing" instead of "Direct Streaming" since the container needs to be switched on the fly.

That by itself is not necessarily a problem.

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One2Go
4 minutes ago, Luke said:

That by itself is not necessarily a problem.

I was just imagining that if a new container has to be created on the fly since a TS container can't be used by devices like Roku that this would be indicated by the note of "Direct Streaming" which s the case for all TV channels that play. The ones that don't play they all say "Direct Playing".

It still is not working and hopefully someone can look into it. Android devices stream fine Roku Devices do not.

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  • Solution

The first thing we can try is to change the graphics driver to i965.

I'm not sure whether this would work because I don't know which package you are using!

  • First, you need to download the Diagnostics Plugin from the catalog
  • Reboot
  • Change the LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME to i965 as shown in the screenshot below
  • Reboot

image.thumb.png.d1615e6d6f184b3135f620740b661bb7.png

 

Please let me know whether this works!

 

 

Another possibility:

When QuickSync would be available on your system, you could just switch encoders and decoders from VAAPI to QuickSync and see whether that would work.

 

If all fails, you can still disable the VAAPI decoder for H.264 (only this one) and at least have hw accelerated encoding (which is the harder part anyway).

 

 

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One2Go
1 hour ago, softworkz said:

The first thing we can try is to change the graphics driver to i965.

I'm not sure whether this would work because I don't know which package you are using!

  • First, you need to download the Diagnostics Plugin from the catalog
  • Reboot
  • Change the LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME to i965 as shown in the screenshot below
  • Reboot

Thanks for the help and tip. I did exactly as you suggested, installed the Emby Diagnostics Plugin, then rebooted changed the driver to i965 then rebooted and tried out the different TV channels using a Roku device.

The TV channels that worked before which had a 720p resolution worked exactly the same with showing "Direct Streaming" in the Dashboard.

The channels that didn't work with 1080i resolution NOW WORK with showing "Transcoding, Reason why? Container not supported" in the Dashboard.

So thank you very much for this fix, the CPU usage is a bit higher for the 1080i resolutions and Transcoding versus the 720p resolution channels and Direct Streaming, but I can live with that.

Thanks again for the fix, but one final question, will this driver change have an effect on movies and TV shows that are stored on the server for simple playback?

 

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21 minutes ago, One2Go said:

Thanks again for the fix, but one final question, will this driver change have an effect on movies and TV shows that are stored on the server for simple playback?

Yes, it will affect all VAAPI transcoding. I would just try and see how it goes.

QuickSync might provide better performance, but I'm not sure whether it's available on your system. I'd need to see the hw detection log.

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One2Go
31 minutes ago, softworkz said:

Yes, it will affect all VAAPI transcoding. I would just try and see how it goes.

QuickSync might provide better performance, but I'm not sure whether it's available on your system. I'd need to see the hw detection log.

Thanks for the quick answer. The QNAP NAS I have is a TS-253Be with an Intel Celeron J3455 processor. It does say "Featuring advanced 9th-generation Intel® HD Graphics, the TS-253Be supports dual-channel 4K H.264* hardware decoding and real-time transcoding".

How could I produce the HW detection log, where would I find it on the NAS and is there a setting that could be changed to engage QuickSync?

Thanks for bearing with me.

I tried different movie and TV shows that I have on the server, they are all H.264 in either MKV or MP4 containers and all show up in the Dashboard as "Direct Playing" with virtually no effect on the CPU as it is only showing 4% usage. So far I see no difference between OTA TV programming quality and stored files on the server.

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1 hour ago, One2Go said:

tried different movie and TV shows that I have on the server, they are all H.264 in either MKV or MP4 containers and all show up in the Dashboard as "Direct Playing" with virtually no effect on the CPU as it is only showing 4% usage. So far I see no difference between OTA TV programming quality and stored files on the server.

As long as it's not transcoding, there's no hw acceleration involved anyway. You could enforce transcoding for testing by lowering the bandwidth setting in the client.

1 hour ago, One2Go said:

How could I produce the HW detection log, where would I find it on the NAS and is there a setting that could be changed to engage QuickSync?

Go to "Logs" in the server dashboard. The hw detection log is already there (it's always created on startup).

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