Playback briefly pauses when Roku tries to "phone home"

[Volfan6415 19]

Ok so i have been having a weird playback issue that i couldn't track down.  It only happens on some 4k hevc videos.  I thought it was video network related etc. but ruled everything out.

What i do see happening is that when i watch the roku device in my microtik router the freezes happen when roku tries to "phone home" using googles dns (8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4)

I should add that I have a pihole setup on the primary dns given out by my router.  There are numerous attempts between the roku trying the hard coded addresses but once the attempts at the hard coded dns addresses happen the video paues and playback takes a few seconds (20-30) to resume again.

 

Has anyone else seen this behavior?  I really don't want to have to let the roku bypass pihole.  Is this something with the EMBY app that it thinks network connectivity is being lost?

 

I am using server version 4.9.0.26 and the current version of the emby roku app.

[speechles 2055]

https://community.roku.com/t5/Solving-playback-issues/Forced-ads-amp-spying-or-it-goes-into-Recovery-Mode/td-p/971117

It looks like some of the update functionality of the Roku depends on being able to call home. Otherwise it might get stuck in a recovery loop. That recovery loop might lag the Roku enough that you notice it during 4K playback. But otherwise you don't notice it. You can leave a post on that thread on Roku and see if any official Roku people want to chime in.

[ebr 16169]

Hi.  This is not our app but, rather, the Roku system itself.  They collect metrics on everything you play...

[Volfan6415 19]

Ok so i have done some more testing.  I whitelisted the scribes.logs.roku in pihole.  No change in behavior roughly every five minutes there is a pause in the video feed and my router shows dns calls to 8.8.8.8 and the video freezes.

 

I also tested two other roku apps (ESPN and Pluto.TV) and watched the tracelogs on the microtik.  There were never any attempts at 8.8.8.8.  These only occurred with playback in the EMBY for roku app.

 

I am on version 4.1.24 of the roku app.

 

 

[Luke 42077]

What data is in the requests?

[Volfan6415 19]

I used packet sniffer in microtik the pcap file is below.  But these are the packets that get generated that I was talking about at the time of the freeze

capture.pcap

[Volfan6415 19]

Anyone have ideas?

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

FWIW: I use Rokus nearly exclusively and I have never seen any glitches of this sort. Yes there have been various glitches but none seem related to Roku contacting the mothership. 

I have quite a few issues with the way Emby behaves but not once have I seen glitches that resembled the glitches described here.
One of my Rokus is wired and the other is wireless and neither has any issue of this sort. 

I also often browse my Emby servers while watching on a Roku and even that, except the one time I crashed my server, has had no issues show up or affect my playback.

I tend to wonder if the playing files are high bitrate and that, combined with Roku phoning home, cause short term network congestion. 

Also it seems that the Rokus have a pretty good buffer I have even, once or twice, restarted my server while Roku was playing content and after the restart the program continued to play without interruption. That is I started playback on my Roku and a little later I restarted my Emby server and the playback continued and during and after the restart the playback remained smooth. I'll admit I was surprised when I realized what had happened but it was what it was and I think I am happy to know that my Emby playback is unaffected by small network glitches.  

[Volfan6415 19]

@Gilgamesh_48I assumed it had to be a network issue or something.  But I have been able to consistently nail this down to roku trying to do a DNS request to 8.8.8.8.   What is wierd is that the pause doesn't happen when it makes the request to the DNS server that is handed out by my router. (pihole) And additionally I have watched the traffic while using other apps and the 8.8.8.8 calls never happen.  It is only the emby app that triggers the 8.8.8.8 call roughly every 5-6 minutes and then this is timed up with the video pausing.

 

The 8.8.8.8 calls also happen regardless of whether I have the roku mothership whitelisted in pihole or not.

 

 

[ebr 16169]

Are you accessing your server via domain name or IP address?

We obviously don't control any DNS lookups in the app but, perhaps, it is related to how you are addressing your server.

[speechles 2055]

Is this a Roku STB/Stick or a Roku TV? The Roku TV will capture images/screenshots every so often to detect what you are playing and creates a hash for these. They have a gigantic database of still images with hashes corresponding. They want to know what you are playing so they can make suggestions on other services that may offer the same or similar content. Then it pops up an overlay letting you know about these offerings. These can be disabled for the most part in the Roku settings. Make sure in Roku settings you go to Settings -> Privacy -> Advertising and uncheck everything so it doesn't personalize anything. Go to Settings -> Privacy -> Privacy Choices and uncheck everything there too. Then go to Settings -> Homescreen and choose HIDE for anything you do not want to see on the home screen. That will disable most of the call home stuff it does in the background. But for Roku TV there is no way to disable it sending in the screenshot hashes to their server of what is playing on your device.

------

Side-note:

All TV do this. It is just an industry where they are forever evolving ways of gaining metrics to sell to keep the costs of their TV lower than their competitor.
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/12/12/your-smart-tv-knows-what-youre-watching

You can even get the entire TV for free, I even signed up for this thing a few years ago and never got one yet. It is ridiculously full of adware/spyware but interesting if it can be hacked into something useful rather than intrusive. Might be why I never got one yet because I want to tinker with it. Not really use it for their purposes..lol.
https://www.telly.com/
 

 

[Volfan6415 19]

Sorry for the delay in responding.  This is a ROKU TV.

 

I do see that the personalize ads is checked will uncheck that and see if that has any effect.

 

I am accessing the emby server via ip address over the local network.

[Volfan6415 19]

Ok just wanted to post back here to say that I finally found the issue.  And it indeed had nothing to do with EMBY and or ROKU.  That was just where i was seeing the problem.  It turned ot it was a hyper specific issue related to my setup.  My files were stored on a separate server that was sharing the files to a lxc container running emby via an NFS mount in proxmox.  Something with how proxmox was handleing the NFS mount was timing out and causing the network stuttering.  I have solved the issue now by changing how the NFS mount was being handled on the proxmox server and the issue has gone away.

 

I think the network pings I was seeing where incidental but may have been related to what was causing the network storm that was crashing the NFS server.  Man that took way longer than it should have to work out.

 

Thanks