1080p Transcoding Issues

[arx237 10]

Hi,

Setup is Emby on Unraid running on a lightly loaded Ryzen 9 5950X. This used to work flawlessly but for the last few months I have had issues with either my remote vpn'd in ShieldTV or browsers on the local net getting 1080p files to transcode consistently. 480p files pretty much instantly play. I use cpu to transcode and not hardware transcoding. Oddly enough the Android app on my phone when vpn'd in has no issues transcoding and playing. Internet is 1gig down/600 up and everything server and backbone at the house is on 10g fiber. 

 

I cleared out all of the logs and restarted Emby then tried streaming a 1080p movie which seemed to result in three separate logs files for the one and only attempt at viewing. I have noticed on occasion that I can restart Emby a time or two and it will start playing the failed movie but I can't seem to figure out the why of it. It is also very inconsistent on whether that works or not.

 

Thanks in advance!

Emby log, transcoding logs, and Brave Browser console log

 

embyserver (2).txtffmpeg-transcode-4d970c55-ddee-45ae-b8f0-dcf8e9f06abc_1.txtffmpeg-transcode-ab09e39b-d082-4d25-9da1-4cae9c0d3c69_1.txtffmpeg-transcode-36c73a66-a0d2-41d6-a36c-374dc13be1dd_1.txt1736007905928.log

Edited January 4, 2025 by arx237
Additional Info added

[GrimReaper 4739]

Since those were local playbacks/seen as such:

Quote

http://10.0.10.20:8096/emby/videos/172743/main.m3u8?

"IsRemote":false

and item is transcoding due to bitrate limit:

Quote

&TranscodeReasons=ContainerBitrateExceedsLimit

I'd assume you have in-app quality setting either set too low or it is "Auto" fallback.

Try to change in-app quality to some fixed numerical value high enough your network can handle so your items could DirectPlay (in this particular example, >24 Mbit).

Quote

"BitRate":24156191

 

 

Edited January 4, 2025 by GrimReaper

[arx237 10]

Hi thanks for looking,

 

I don't necessarily want direct play as I am trying to see why it doesn't want to transcode 1080p files at all anymore on anything other than the phone.

 

Here is a log from a 480p that transcodes and starts instantly, same network, same player if that would help.

 

ffmpeg-transcode-fd39b0ad-da08-4bc1-8e35-53637cc4bc5b_1.txt

Edited January 4, 2025 by arx237

[arx237 10]

And the log from my Android app vpn'd into my network which again will transcode a 1080p movie almost instantly.

 

ffmpeg-transcode-6ed8fc90-a8cd-4d7c-9692-093a3852c5e3_1.txt

Edited January 4, 2025 by arx237

[arx237 10]

I still cannot figure this out. Am I missing something incredibly stoopid simple here? 

[Neminem 1518]

Well you are trying to blow with flour in your mouth.

And now flower is everywhere.

You need to either

1) rise the bitrate limit to something that sooth your media file.

or

2) live with transcoding.

[arx237 10]

Hi thank you for the feedback.

Flour thing an inside joke? I know I am new here  but it appears that there continues to be a very basic misunderstanding:

 

I WANT to transcode.

 

480p transcodes perfectly and instantly on all devices and browsers

1080p is hit or miss and usually involves a restart of the emby app. When it's hit it works well and then it doesn't for the next movie.

 

I WANT to solve the mystery of why 1080p is not transcoding consistently anymore. Especially since it used to work flawlessly.

 

Thanks,

 

Edited January 11, 2025 by arx237

[Neminem 1518]

Then lower your bitrate limit, to something that works.

Or manually transcode your media to 480p, so it always work.

You could even add an extra media file in 480p along side your 1080p file.

and then select that when out of you lan. 

[arx237 10]

My friend you still are not understanding and unfortunately I do not know how to say what I want to fix any simpler.

 

I am not about to re-encode all the movies and tv shows when the server it's sitting on is well and truly capable of transcoding multiple streams at the same time on cpu alone. And again this worked flawlessly up until recently so it needs a fix and not a workaround. 

 

 

[Neminem 1518]

Oh well have fun working it out.

Cheers.

[arx237 10]

Yes, cheers indeed. 

[Lessaj 467]

The logs themselves aren't really presenting any errors, even though it doesn't really look like the transcoding actually starts. Looks like you're trying to playback in Chrome, does this also happen if you're trying to transcode with a different browser or any of the apps? IE Theater, Android/iOS, etc.

It looks like you're running unraid so I'm not sure if this runs natively on that system or if it's in a docker container (I think it's docker), but either way would it be possible to try to run one of the ffmpeg commands reported in the logs manually and see if it ever kicks off or takes a really long time to start? You'd have to change some of the paths, like where the logs and temp files go, and honestly I'm not sure if this is needed for this setup since it's /bin/ffmpeg (and it is emby's ffmpeg but given it's location this may be just a link) but at least in a Linux environment what I would normally need to do is run /opt/emby-server/bin/emby-ffmpeg instead because it has some export directives for things like LD_LIBRARY_PATH so it knows where all the libraries are for the ffmpeg that emby ships since they would generally be in /opt/emby-server/extra/lib which normally wouldn't be part of your path.

Personally I don't think the playback device/software would impact this, but it's just trying to narrow down variables when there is no obvious error. If it does this on every device then at least you know it shouldn't be related to that.

[arx237 10]

Hi, thanks for looking,

 

The lack of errors and associated googling coming up dry was why I turned here in last ditch hopes before wiping the whole darn thing and starting over. 

I have one ShieldTV at a remote location which is primarily where I want this to work again. Chrome was used to help generate logs since I could replicate the lack of transcoding with that on my local LAN next to my server. Chrome is not something I use really ever to consume media but it also used to work flawlessly on my LAN. 

Correct Unraid runs in docker and my docker start logs for Emby are bog standard with no errors. 

 

So just to be straight and reassure that this all used to work perfectly:

ShieldTV on LAN-> Direct play works perfectly. These ShieldTV's are never set to anything other than direct play.

ShieldTV on VPN with normal Emby App -> Transcoding is hit or miss on 1080p only

ShieldTV on VPN with other Emby App in google play -> Does't even try to play

MacBook Pro on VPN with Brave (chrome) browser -> Transcoding is hit or miss on 1080p only

MacBook Pro on VPN with Safari -> Transcoding is hit or miss on 1080p only

Android Phone on VPN with Emby App -> works flawlessly and instantly on any 1080p on the same network as above remote ShieldTV.

 

If it helps I can get reliable 60Mb down and 30Mb up through the VPN from the remote site. But again since it's shared I have this limited to 5Mb in the global Emby settings. It didn't seem to matter if VPN was reset either before during or after failures. 

 

Are there perhaps other debug logs for ffmpeg somewhere else or is Emby server capturing everything?

The hard part is the randomness of it. It will fail to play one time, play one and fail or sometimes even a few before failing. Sometimes it would work but I would pause it to go do something else for a few hours and it would fail to restart or even play any other 1080p files afterwards. 

 

Edited January 11, 2025 by arx237

[Lessaj 467]

If you have the Diagnostic Plugin installed you can go to Diagnostic Options and set the logging level to Verbose or Debug to try to get some more information into the transcode logs.

[Luke 42077]

@arx237are you still having an issue with this ?

[arx237 10]

Yep. But I have given up for a bit on it, bout to nuke the whole darn thing.

[Luke 42077]

@arx237what did you end up doing?

[arx237 10]

BLUF: I hit a wall. 

 

Nearest I can tell Emby was disagreeing with my VM's which again is weird because VM's, Unraid, Emby or anything else I could think of wasn't throwing errors, everything was happy but Emby was just timing out only on 1080p content. Also weird is that it had been working just fine for quite some time. So in the meantime I have killed the VM's and reallocated the graphics card to Docker ops and Emby seems to be doing just fine with this (or strictly software transcoding). Which again transcoding through VPN was priority number one for this Unraid box.  Unfortunately this also leaves me a woefully underutilized server so I am going to have to address that at some point by either moving Emby elsewhere or finding another solution.  

 

I am still all ears for trying to figure this out if anyone has any suggestions that don't involve flour?

[Luke 42077]

On 1/30/2025 at 3:38 PM, arx237 said:

BLUF: I hit a wall. 

 

Nearest I can tell Emby was disagreeing with my VM's which again is weird because VM's, Unraid, Emby or anything else I could think of wasn't throwing errors, everything was happy but Emby was just timing out only on 1080p content. Also weird is that it had been working just fine for quite some time. So in the meantime I have killed the VM's and reallocated the graphics card to Docker ops and Emby seems to be doing just fine with this (or strictly software transcoding). Which again transcoding through VPN was priority number one for this Unraid box.  Unfortunately this also leaves me a woefully underutilized server so I am going to have to address that at some point by either moving Emby elsewhere or finding another solution.  

 

I am still all ears for trying to figure this out if anyone has any suggestions that don't involve flour?

Hi, did you find anything?

[arx237 10]

Best I can do:

Nvidia passed through to Win10 VM and Emby set to CPU only = problems transcoding

Nvidia NOT passed through to Win10 VM and Emby set to CPU only = no problems transcoding

Nvidia NOT passed through to Win10 VM and Emby set to GPU only = no problems transcoding

[Luke 42077]

On 3/5/2025 at 12:59 PM, arx237 said:

Best I can do:

Nvidia passed through to Win10 VM and Emby set to CPU only = problems transcoding

Nvidia NOT passed through to Win10 VM and Emby set to CPU only = no problems transcoding

Nvidia NOT passed through to Win10 VM and Emby set to GPU only = no problems transcoding

OK please let us know if you find anything else. Thanks.