Playback of some Dolby Vision content freezes near the end

[nicoco007 4]

I'm having some trouble getting Dolby Vision content working reliably on my TV. I haven't had issues with HDR10 content, but some Dolby Vision content freezes near the end of playback, roughly 3 minutes before the end of the file. I tried playing the problematic files from a USB drive plugged directly into the TV and they work fine, so I'm not sure what's going on here. Up until now, it's only happened to TV shows but not movies. Note that all files are being direct streamed - I'm not doing any transcoding (it's disabled at the user level).

Here's a summary of what I did to reproduce the issue:

• Started the video from the beginning
• Let it play for ~30 seconds
• Seeked to ~2 minutes in
• Video froze so I waited ~30 seconds and the player closed without an error message
• Resumed playback, played video for a few seconds, and seeked to ~3 minutes from the end
• Video froze again so I waited ~30 seconds again and the player closed again without an error message
• Resumed playback, let it play until it froze on its own roughly ~2 minutes from the end
• Seeked a few times; the video would either play back for a few seconds then freeze again or just freeze on the frame to which I seeked without playing back at all
• Waited a few minutes expecting the player to close but it didn't, so I sent the log from the TV at 15:00:52 EST. Active user name was Nicolas, the name of the show is The Problem with Jon Stewart.

I left the TV on for ~30 minutes after that and the player was still open and frozen while not paused.

I also randomly came across this topic so I sideloaded the latest ARM v7 release of the Android app from the Emby.Releases repo. Seeking seems to work significantly better but it still ends up freezing around the last 3 minutes.

I attached the MediaInfo output of a working file (movie) and a non-working (TV show) file in case that helps. From what I understand they're both DV Profile 5 so they should work fine for streaming?

embyserver.txt mediainfo non-working.txt mediainfo working.txt

Edited December 9, 2022 by nicoco007

[nicoco007 4]

Forgot to mention I'm running Emby Server 4.7.10.0 on Ubuntu Server 22.04.1 LTS. Also, I unfortunately don't have other Dolby Vision-capable devices to test on - I thought I had it working correctly on my computer (with a green/purple tint because of the lack of support) but now that I've tried again it doesn't play any Dolby Vision content at all. I may have been imagining things.

[Luke 42078]

Hi @nicoco007 are you still running into this with the latest versions?

[nicoco007 4]

Hey @Luke, unfortunately it's still happening. I'm now on Emby Server 4.7.11.0, Android TV 2.0.83g, and Android 3.2.90 but still no dice.

[Luke 42078]

Can you try updating to the latest version of the sideload build?

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

We've updated our embedded video player to the latest version. Let's see if it plays better with that. Thanks !

[nicoco007 4]

Sorry for the wait. Just installed the latest version (shows up as 3.2.92) and the problem's unfortunately still there. I also ran into the issue on a new movie and it was also within roughly the last 3 minutes so I was mistaken in thinking the length of the content was a factor here.

I've attempted to reproduce the issue in other streaming apps that support Dolby Vision (e.g. some content on Disney+) but they seem to be working fine. Not sure if that helps, but thought I'd mention it just in case.

[nicoco007 4]

Alright for some reason it only just occurred to me that the working file is MKV while the ones I've had problems with are MP4. I guess I dismissed that initially as a non-issue since the streams were both H265. Anyway, I was out of ideas I thought I'd see if there's anything there.

I naively ran one of the MP4s through mkvmerge with no additional options... and it worked! The video now plays all the way to the end.

This is honestly good enough of a fix for me for now. It doesn't take very long to run files through mkvmerge. I'd be happy to keep helping debug the issue if you're still interested though.

[Luke 42078]

OK thanks for the update.