Shield Pro crashing, lagging and stuttering when playing certain files

[frasermitcham 0]

Hi all, I hope I'm posting this in the correct space. Any help would be much appreciated - going through a tricky time in life. 

I have been using my Nvidia Shield Pro for a long time as a server. I play films through a locally connected Crucial X9 Pro. I can't figure out how to calculate the size of my library, but it contains around 3.2TB of content. 

Long story short, recently, the server has become quite unstable. Playing certain files results in the videos lagging and stuttering. Sometimes it results in the film crashing and it returns back to the server's homepage. I have noticed that when I turn off audio transcoding (set to "auto" rather than "transcode to Dolby" in the server's settings locally, on the Shield itself), films will play properly.

However, I very much would like the server to transcode the audio. Many - if not most - of my films are in DTS, which neither my Sonos Arc nor Samsung OLED support (S90D). Prior to these issues, the server would transcode the audio and everything would play as expected. Sometimes it would lag, here and there, but never to this extent. 

My server is running the beta version - 4.9.0.33. I recently updated it, having prior been a beta tester, but this has made no difference. I have attached a Toshiba SSD to the Shield and have mounted this as extra internal storage. The Shield is telling me that neither the internal disk nor Toshiba are full. 

I will say that the problem is significantly worse when playing films that are large (in file size) and that contain several subtitle files. Could that be the issue? The challenge is that many of my films are 4K remux files, and I don't really want to sacrifice quality. I read on another thread that changing the path for the temporary transcoding can help - is that potentially the issue? If so, is it best to set the path to the X9 Pro, presumably rather than the Shield's local storage?

I have attached a recent log from when I attempted to play The Godfather Part II. It is a very large file size (from memory, around 60GB), and it contains many subtitle files. Just as a side note, with that film, I am usually only watching it with the subtitle file that contains sporadic subtitles (when Italian is being spoken). 

Please let me know if you need other logs in order to figure out the issue! Of course, I can use my Macbook as the server, as that seems to resolve the issue. The only reason why I don't do this is because it naturally means that I need to have my laptop open, with the SSD connected and with the server running. It's just so much more convenient to have the SSD plugged into the Shield, so that I can just sit down and watch something, without needing to mess around with my laptop. 

Thank you so much for any help! 

embyserver-63870545355.txt ffmpeg-transcode-a9e5f938-d490-4f85-85bd-1f6b256888dd_1.txt ffmpeg-transcode-978126c4-32cf-4de1-a3e7-1d5ed6e1c111_1.txt

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

The Shield works quite well for small libraries and simple codecs but it has neve been very good if the libraries  are big or the codecs are more complex or if transcoding is required.

I had my server on a Shield (I have a pretty large library) and I kept having problems like you describe and i finally had to abandon the Shield as a server and switch to a real computer. 

The Shield is a quite good playback device but it really sucks as a server.  

I do not recommend using the Shield as a server. 
But that does not really help you. For that, I would look at the files involved and, maybe, rip them at a lower bitrate and/or be sure their frame rate is less than 60. (I think higher framerates force transcoding.)

[Luke 42077]

@frasermitcham

Hi.  Can you try searching for our standard android app (Just "Emby" on Amazon and "Emby for Android on Google) on the same device's app store and see how that compares?

Thanks.