Video freezes at first frame

[Malmgren 17]

Hi.

Since yesterday I suddenly can't watch any video from Emby on my TV, a Philips 50PUS7906. Anything that I try to watch just freeze at the first frame and nothing more happens until I stop the video. No errors anywhere. Everything works fine on other players using the same Emby server (tried LG WebOS player and web browser player) and also watching other stuff on the Philips TV works without any problem. I haven't upgraded or changed anything on the server or on the TV.

Things I've tried:

• Complete restart of the TV
• Purging the Emby apps stored data
• Resuming a previously started video. It jumps to the correct place in the video and then freezes there instead...

Anyone knows what could be the problem?

/Daniel

[Malmgren 17]

Hi.

Logs have been sent according to instructions now. I reproduced the problem at 17:34 Swedish time, which I think should correspond to 11:34 eastern time. The logged in username was "malmgren" and the video I tried to play was named "1x04 - Episode 4.mkv" (fourth episode from first season of the serie "The Long Call"). Hope this says something to the developers

[ebr 16169]

Hi. There are no errors in your log.  The item is direct playing.  Is it possible there is a network issue from this one TV?

[Malmgren 17]

1 minute ago, ebr said:

Hi. There are no errors in your log.  The item is direct playing.  Is it possible there is a network issue from this one TV?

That's weird, no errors at all? No, everything else works as it should. Everything in Emby (entire UI) works except for watching video. And in other apps everything works including video streaming. So I'm quite positive the networking works as it should

[ebr 16169]

Try using the "Playback correction" option in the menu during playback.  What happens then?

[Malmgren 17]

6 minutes ago, ebr said:

Try using the "Playback correction" option in the menu during playback.  What happens then?

I'll try and report back!

[Malmgren 17]

18 hours ago, ebr said:

Try using the "Playback correction" option in the menu during playback.  What happens then?

Ok, really weird findings follows: The first time I used the playback correction nothing happened. So I tried another time and suddenly the video worked just fine. Stopped the video and started it again, and yet again it worked fine after using playback correction twice. Also tried this on some other videos, all are the same. After using playback correction twice I can watch them. I just hope these findings are less strange to you than they are to me...

Oh, also tried on a video which I've previously watched a part so I could resume in the middle of a dialogue. Noticed that the first playback correction actually did something, it started the video but with lot of stuttering and it stopped again after about one second. And then the second playback correction started it "for real".

Edited March 22, 2022 by Malmgren

[ebr 16169]

6 hours ago, Malmgren said:

The first time I used the playback correction nothing happened. So I tried another time and suddenly the video worked just fine.

Hi.  Can you please send an app log right after doing this?  Then also include all the ffmpeg logs that are generated on the server.

Thanks.

[Malmgren 17]

3 hours ago, ebr said:

Can you please send an app log right after doing this?  Then also include all the ffmpeg logs that are generated on the server.

Ok, log sent. Same video and same user, local time approximately 18:24. There was both a directstream and a transcode log created, attaching them both.

ffmpeg-transcode-feb46d05-e8d9-4677-86be-bfe71f6a37c6_1.txt ffmpeg-directstream-681818bc-ce4f-4388-8325-9da96f6fef3f_1.txt

[ebr 16169]

Thanks for those.  I still don't see any errors on the app side but the TV must not like something about the encoding of this item.  The only difference I see between the raw video and our transcoded version of it is the specific codec detail reported by the player:

Raw video is: avc1.64001f
Transcoded is: avc1.640029

@softworkz does that tell you anything...?  

[Malmgren 17]

1 hour ago, ebr said:

but the TV must not like something about the encoding of this item

But how could that happen? This happens for all videos I've tried, whereof many worked the day before. So if I understand things correctly my TV suddenly refuses to play any video unless it's first transcoded, even though it's transcoding into more or less exact the same stream?

[ebr 16169]

43 minutes ago, Malmgren said:

But how could that happen? This happens for all videos I've tried, whereof many worked the day before. So if I understand things correctly my TV suddenly refuses to play any video unless it's first transcoded, even though it's transcoding into more or less exact the same stream?

Any way you can tell if the TV itself updated something recently?

[Malmgren 17]

9 hours ago, ebr said:

Any way you can tell if the TV itself updated something recently?

Not that I have found. That was my first thought as well so I've been searching in the menus and can't even find a way to see when Android was latest updated. But to my knowledge nothing has been updated for quite a while.

[Malmgren 17]

Hmm... After reading comments in this thread:

 ...I started testing even more videos and checking their audio format. Actually I find quite many videos that work and I see a pattern. All videos which won't play in my collection have AAC audio. Everything with MP3 or AC3 works fine. It seems I don't have anything with DTS audio to test (I'll fix if it's helpful). I found one movie with AAC that works though, so it doesn't affect everything with AAC, just the vast majority...

[Luke 42077]

Can you try sideloading our standard android app on the same device and let us know how that compares?

https://emby.media/emby-for-android.html

Thanks.

[Malmgren 17]

14 hours ago, Luke said:

Can you try sideloading our standard android app on the same device and let us know how that compares?

Tried it now, same problem there.

[softworkz 5066]

On 3/22/2022 at 7:14 PM, ebr said:

Thanks for those.  I still don't see any errors on the app side but the TV must not like something about the encoding of this item.  The only difference I see between the raw video and our transcoded version of it is the specific codec detail reported by the player:

Raw video is: avc1.64001f
Transcoded is: avc1.640029

@softworkz does that tell you anything...?  

The last two digits are probably the levels:

1f => 31 => 3.1
29 => 41 => 4.1

The source file has in fact level 3.1

For the output, we're configuring 3.1 as well, but maybe the VAAPI encoder is replacing it with 4.1 for some reason (it wouldn't be a necessity, though).

[softworkz 5066]

Possible things to try:

• Disable HW-Acceleration
• Use diagnostic plugin to configure VAAPI or libx264 encoder profile limit, setting it to "Main"

[EmanPaul2000 0]

Hi, was this issue ever resolved by any chance? As I seem to be having the same problem. Checked the audio tracks and it seems that those with AAC do not work as well. Regarding this:

On 3/24/2022 at 8:51 PM, softworkz said:

Use diagnostic plugin to configure VAAPI or libx264 encoder profile limit, setting it to "Main"

How can this be done exactly? As I cannot find the option on the diagnostic plugin

[softworkz 5066]

3 hours ago, EmanPaul2000 said:

Hi, was this issue ever resolved by any chance? As I seem to be having the same problem. Checked the audio tracks and it seems that those with AAC do not work as well. Regarding this:

How can this be done exactly? As I cannot find the option on the diagnostic plugin

When the plugin is installed, you will see a menu entry "Advanced Transcoding". On this page, choose "Advanced" for HW Acceleration, then you will see the encoders further down.

Next to the encoders, there are two buttons. Click the one with the "gear" icon.

[EmanPaul2000 0]

Unfortunately it did not work still after following your instructions. Do you need some specific logs perhaps?

[Luke 42077]

Just now, EmanPaul2000 said:

Unfortunately it did not work still after following your instructions. Do you need some specific logs perhaps?

What exactly did you try?

[EmanPaul2000 0]

On 3/24/2022 at 8:51 PM, softworkz said:

Possible things to try:

• Disable HW-Acceleration
• Use diagnostic plugin to configure VAAPI or libx264 encoder profile limit, setting it to "Main"

These 2 instructions here. I disabled HW Acceleration and set the encoder profile limit to Main. Then I reset the server and tried playing a video with AAC audio. And it still froze on the first frame.

[TommyboyCAN 1]

HI there,

I don't want to hijack this thread at all, but I just setup my emby server again and am having a similiar issue. When watching live TV (HDHOMERUN) only on the AppleTV 4k App, its freezing at the first frame just as this thread is describing. I'm sure it is a configuration thing as it was just working fine before I was forced to reformat and fix the server. I used my backup copy of emby data. Other media works from Emby works fine, just not live TV.

Any suggestions what to try and what to install/reinstall? I had made sure to turn off Hardware Accel. Hardware accel didn't look to be working properly anyway - was getting this message "No device available for decoder: device type d3d11va needed for codec mpeg2video"

Let me know which logs would be helpful. What other things are worth trying.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, we are looking into it. Thanks.