Emby App is constantly crashing in Xbox Series X

[MBSki 1114]

The Emby app on the series X is constantly crashing. The issue seems to have started with the last 1 or 2 releases. I don't remember having such frequent crashes before. Everything seems to make it crash: scrolling down on the home page, logging in, pausing a show. I've uninstalled and reinstalled, rebooted, nothing will get rid of the frequent crashes. 

@Luke I don't know what I can send you to investigate the issue. I don't think logs would have anything, but let me know what would help.

[Luke 42078]

OK we'll take a look at it. Thanks.

[MBSki 1114]

Just now, Luke said:

OK we'll take a look at it. Thanks.

Ok, thank you. Do you have an inside tester with an Xbox Series X? If not I'm happy to test interim builds on my series x.

[SamuelWinsor 12]

Just throwing it out there that in addition to my lengthy issues with playback, I’m now having all the crashing problems too. The program crashes randomly, sometimes won’t play things, HEVC suddenly freaks it out. The Series X version of Theater is nothing short of an unusable mess right now, and has been for almost three months. People are paying you guys for this. A fix has surely got to be coming soon. 

[MBSki 1114]

4 hours ago, SamuelWinsor said:

Just throwing it out there that in addition to my lengthy issues with playback, I’m now having all the crashing problems too. The program crashes randomly, sometimes won’t play things, HEVC suddenly freaks it out. The Series X version of Theater is nothing short of an unusable mess right now, and has been for almost three months. People are paying you guys for this. A fix has surely got to be coming soon. 

Yea, it's in pretty bad shape. Regarding the crash though, Luke pushed out an update a few days ago that at least fixed the crashes for me. It's still really flaky, but at least the crashes stopped. I think dev time is focused on the new version, but it seems to be taking awhile so at a minimum the current version needs to at least work for basic things while we wait.

[AndyBak 17]

I've just started to experience the same crashing/errors on Series X, whilst navigating the Emby UI after playing something it seems to glitch (either freeze/resize) and then when continuing to the next video/show I want it won't play, just a black screen within the player.

Have found quitting the app does't resolve but if I reboot the xbox all is good for navigating and playing the next item.

[SamuelWinsor 12]

The whole thing is still completely broken for me. It sometimes won’t get past the Emby landing page, won’t play anything HEVC, and I’m lucky if it plays anything else. Four months’ worth of paid subscription and I haven’t been able to watch a thing on the Series X. At this point, it’s beyond a joke. 

[AndyBak 17]

Switching the Xbox UI to 1080p vs 4k seems to be a temp workaround, i'm also having similar problems with the HDHomeRun TV app and they have acknowledged that to be due to an update pushed by MS.

Believe MS have a fix on the latest developer access build so fingers crossed this will be addressed soon for all.

[Zaphod414 5]

This issue is not unique to the Xbox version of Emby Theater.  I am experiencing the same behaviour under Windows as well.  Just as the OP describes, any random action performed in on or to the Emby Theater UI - resizing or moving the window, starting or stopping playback of something, scrolling, clicking on anything within the UI - stands a chance of crashing it.  To elabourate on "crashing it", what happens is the Emby Theater window completely disappears.  Note that it is just invisible, not gone.  Even though it is entirely invisible, anything behind it won't respond to being clicked on because the Emby Theater window is blocking the click.  The icon for Emby Theater remains in the taskbar, but the Windows preview of the application's window is empty (screenshot attached).  Follow me so far?  So now here's the weird bit begins.  I've been using Emby Theater full time for about a year or so now.  (whenever I say Emby Theater in this discussion, I'm always referring to the Windows desktop version.  I don't know if this issue also affects the UWP version, and I don't care.  I do not and will not ever use the UWP version, so let's not bother bringing it up again).  This issue is new, only having started about 3 months ago.  I had been using Emby Theater on this desktop hardware under Windows 10 for several months without any problems.  Then I decided to try the upgrade to Windows 11.  That was a monumentally bad idea for several reasons really, but one of the worst and the one that matters for the purposes of this post is that's when this issue with Emby Theater began.  So I just wrote it off as a problem specifically with the brand new Windows 11, which isn't at all surprising.  I gave Windows 11 about 3 months of actual use to see if the many problems I have with it would be addressed, and after seeing no improvement whatsoever I gave up and returned to Windows 10.  By returned to Windows 10 I mean a complete FFR - FDisk, Format, Reinstall.  So now I'm in a brand new vanilla install of Windows 10 (on the same hardware as before - no changes), and as expected all my problems with Emby Theater went away.  For about 3 weeks, that is.  Ironically enough, the other day I was showing it off to my buddy how stable it was again now that I was back in Windows 10 the first time it crashed on me.  I was moving the window from one monitor to another.  Since then, it has started crashing more and more frequently for every random reason.  It's still not up to being as frequent as it was under Windows 11, but it's well past the point where I'll actually bother killing an hour bitching about it on a forum.  So pretty frequently. 

I've attached a logfile, but there's not much to it.  In that run, all I did was open Emby Theater, drag the window from one monitor to the other, then I tried to grab a corner and resize the window.  As soon as I started to resize, it crashed.  Once crashed, since the application window isn't visible the only ways to close it are through the taskbar icon or task manager.

As an aside, what are the chances you guys will ever develop decent versions of the Emby Theater application that are properly coded for the platform they're aimed at?  What I mean by that is natively coded, rather than using some shim type solution like Electron.  Electron is hot garbage.  There's no nice way to put it.  It's a wonderful idea, but in practice it is absolutely terrible.  If I wanted to just literally use the web UI, then I'd just use the damn web UI through a web browser.  The only reason in the world to prefer the Electron version to a standard web browser is that the web UI transcodes absolutely EVERYTHING through a standard web browser.  The Electron version at least will direct play most everything.  For the most part, in the past I've been using Kodi on my desktop and set-top use cases, which is a fabulous and very well written solution that behaves far better than the "native" Emby Theater application and direct plays anything you could think to throw at it..  For my desktop use at least, I've been giving Emby Theater a chance lately because I just wanted something lighter weight than running Kodi.  I'll be heading back to Kodi if this crashing of Emby Theater continues, though.  If you're not going to bother coding your own proper player applications, then perhaps Kodi is a good choice for you guys as well.  As your main focus, I mean.  Put all your dev efforts into the Kodi plugins for the platoforms that Kodi exists on rather than having a native application.  If all your native application is going to be is a stinking pile of Electron garbage, then I think that's the better way to go.  Since the Kodi plugins are worlds better than Theater, then why not promote them from community projects to the official clients.  It's already bad enough that you're splitting the Windows client development into two separate versions already, the desktop and the UWP versions, but you're also ignoring the far better options that already exist.

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