Emby theater Client stuck on "pause" forever

[exus 16]

I've a friend that connects to my server using emby theater and during the last month he told me that very frequently the playback suddenly stops (and never resume even if wating for minutes).

Play/pause does nothing, changing quality (triggering a transcode) resume the playback.

Inside my admin dashboard I see that the playback is not on pause but it keeps "resetting" after ~ 10 seconds .

The files he's playing are hevc on direct play

Bandwidth is not an issue (>300Mbps Upload)

I told him to use emby theatre with developer console enabled and he sent me a .har file. I'm not expert but as far as I can see there are no errors, the only thing I noticed is that usually on the network tab there's a new POST line every 10 seconds, but everytime he has this issue there's a longer gap (13/18 seconds instead of 10) and from that point inside the new requests (that now "normally" ticks every 10 secs) payload the "PositionTicks": value never changes.

I'm attaching the server log, the issue happened at 20:06:05 (host9)

I'm on latest version but not Beta (I prefer to stay on stable branch)

embyserverMidistuck.txt

Edited May 19, 2023 by exus

[Luke 42083]

Hi, a good thing to try would be to have him lower his in-app quality setting. That will usually resolve issues such as this.

[exus 16]

This is happening with low bitrate files (~3Mbps). Do you mean lowering the quality below that value?

[Luke 42083]

Yea you could try that, or something lower bitrate.

[exus 16]

the playback resume if he lower the quality when the issue happens (as I already wrote) but this doesn't look like a solution. I can't ask him to change quality every time, or, even worse, to put a super low quality as default setting (triggering transcodes from my server)

[exus 16]

he keeps reporting this issue, is this a known bug and can expect to see it fixed or do I have to tell him to leave with this annoying issue? is there anything else I should try?

[exus 16]

another friend is reporting this issue, playback "freeze", and on admin dashboard I see he's still playing with a 10 seconds infinite loop. Remote connection - Emby theater - Direct playing of a different file but same encoding (x265 ac3 audio at a low ~ 3Mbps bitrate). I'm still trying to reproduce this behavior on my side with my backup connection (to recreate the same remote scenario) but so far I wasn't able to do it. It looks completely random

[exus 16]

aaand a third friend with the same issue, he never told me but I decided to investigate and asked him if he was experiencing the "infinite pause" issue (when direct playing). He told me that it happens frequently but he usually just close and restart the stream and never reported me.

Edited May 24, 2023 by exus

[exus 16]

Still trying to figure out what could cause emby theater app to randomly "pause forever" remote streams.
I tried to stream the same file on direct play on both browser and emby theater with wireshark opened. The logs for emby theater show TCP ZeroWindow Warnings frequently (more than once per minute  ) while the logs from the browser do not show this kind of behaviour. I don't know if this could lead to problems like mine. I'm throwing darts blindfolded