Some TV Channels fail to play in Emby

[ks09aao 0]

Evening all! I have been having an issue and was hoping to get some support. Trying to get Live TV working on Emby using Threadfin to organise some m3u sources.

Essentially, my issue is that the main channels I want to watch do not load in Emby. The error given to me in Emby by  ffmpeg is "Invalid data found when processing input"

- raw source m3u loaded in VLC on PC - plays fine
- raw source m3u loaded into Emby  - BBC TV channels fail, other channels OK
- Threadfin m3u loaded into VLC on PC - plays fine
- Threadfin m3u loaded into Emby - BBC TV channels fail, other channels OK

I live in the UK, so access UK based channels (BBC) should not be an issue I think if its location related. "ipinfo" tests within docker tell me I appear in the UK.

So far I tried;
- Putting threadfin behind a VPN pointed to the UK
- many "user agent" entries, including mozilla, VLC, and some TV's. I tried these in Threadfin, and also Emby. 

- disabling transcoding in user settings and emby transcode menu

I'm at a loss at to what is wrong here - I'd really like these channels for my family. I've tried two sources that I can find for these channels, both seem to have the same issue

Do we think its something to do with sensitivity to stream format? Is there a way to verify this, or relax that restriction? (I have no desire to record etc, just watch).

ffmpeg-transcode-6d4ef7a9-0610-47bb-affe-2a7f8c525d40_1.txt

[ks09aao 0]

Forgot to reference. Sources I am trying are;

[Luke 42078]

Hi, please attach the corresponding Emby server log as well. Thanks.

[ks09aao 0]

Sorry my mistake, here are two paired together;

embyserver(2).txt ffmpeg-transcode-bfd4e203-77d8-4c64-b376-98d886985bb0_1.txt

[ks09aao 0]

Hi,

What do you make of these logs, is there any additional info that might help?

[Luke 42078]

Hi, we’re looking into it. Thanks.

[ks09aao 0]

Hi Luke,

I don't want you to waste your valuable time - I've managed to get it working. Ill try to articulate what I did here for other users.

The "fix" turned out to be a combination of;

- Threadfin  FFMPEG re-streaming to hide raw stream errors

- Threadfin must have the correct user-agent header for, or it sometimes gets blocked, and passes an empty stream to Emby (I now use "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:90.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/90.0"). Emby also gets blocked but oddly the user agent field does not unlock the issue!


Through testing of lots of variables, including using the same (Threadfin working) user-agent header in Emby - I think the problems are;

 

- Emby rejects streams if there are compatability / quality issues (can't prove it but best guess. Testing BBC streams I see no dropped frames etc.)

- The "user agent" field in Emby is perhaps not working as expected

- I would humbly suggest that if possible, the emby logs information level could be tweaked to give some info as to why "Invalid Data" was found on the stream - just a thought.

[ks09aao 0]

One last bug found + fixed;

Threadfin users - you may need to amend the FFMPEG options. Default had me stalling after 23 seconds playtime.

Try "-re -hide_banner -loglevel error -i [URL] -c copy -f mpegts pipe:1"

[Luke 42078]

Thanks for following up !