Emby stops responding during Live TV on Android/WAIPU Stick

[desmon62 0]

Hi everyone,

I’m experiencing a reproducible crash issue with Emby Server whenever I watch Live TV via the Waipu Stick or an Android TV client and then tab out or switch apps.

System setup:

• Emby Server on Debian 13

• Intel hardware acceleration (VAAPI)

• 2x 16 TB HDDs in ZFS mirror (media library)

• NFS and SMB mounts active

• WireGuard running on the same host

• 128 GB RAM, Intel CPU

Problem:
Whenever a Live TV stream is active and I switch apps on Android TV or the Waipu Stick, Emby Server becomes unresponsive or completely crashes. The web UI and other clients stop responding until I manually restart the Emby service.

What I’ve already tried:

• Disabled VAAPI (hardware acceleration) → still crashes

• Changed transcoding path

• Checked permissions on NFS and SMB

• Verified no OOM or kernel panic in dmesg

Observation:
This only happens with Live TV streams on Waipu Stick or Android TV when the client loses focus. Normal playback (movies, series, local files) works fine.

Could this be related to how Emby handles Live TV sessions or hardware-accelerated transcoding when the client loses focus?
Happy to provide any logs or crash traces if needed.

Thanks in advance for any help or insight!
– Julian

[Luke 42077]

 

Hi there, let's look at an example. Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. Thanks!

 

[sa2000 674]

16 hours ago, desmon62 said:

Whenever a Live TV stream is active and I switch apps on Android TV or the Waipu Stick, Emby Server becomes unresponsive or completely crashes. The web UI and other clients stop responding until I manually restart the Emby service.

Could you add debug logging on the server. I have come across a case when the android playback setting was set "keep playing in the background" and the device was put to sleep and the server was overloaded with loads of playback progress update  requests when it came off sleep - maybe similar scenareo to switching apps.