Live TV playback freezes after exactly 10 minutes

[mrklarth 1]

I'm not sure when this problem started, but I definitely did not have this issue on older builds. It seems to be happening whether direct play or transcoding, but it only happens with Live TV as I have tested with TV shows/Movies (with and without transcoding) and the issue does not present itself. I've ruled out the source being the issue as I see the same problem whether I'm using an outside provider, HDHR, or local ErsatzTV feed. I've attached two sets of logs of this issue.

embyserver -6ad90aaa-bcb6-4ffb-a95c-7ff451902020_1.txt ffmpeg-directstream-6ad90aaa-bcb6-4ffb-a95c-7ff451902020_1.txt embyserver 6a874a30-f9c7-43a7-a090-066d51e978ba_1.txt ffmpeg-directstream-6a874a30-f9c7-43a7-a090-066d51e978ba_1.txt

[Luke 42505]

Hi there, please attach the complete emby server log. Thanks.

[mrklarth 1]

I have attached the full emby server log.

embyserver-63911635200.txt

[mrklarth 1]

I did some additional testing and found this issue happens on both the Android app completely direct playing or through browser, and happens whether using hardware transcoding or not. The playback stops at exactly 10 minutes every time.

[mrklarth 1]

Any update or ideas on this? I've tried everything I can think of and the fact that it's exactly 10 minutes to the second is very peculiar.

[visproduction 360]

Service log

line 134724 +

Quote

    19:52:45.318 ffmpeg version 5.1-emby_2023_06_25_p4 Copyright (c) 2000-2022 the FFmpeg developers and softworkz for Emby LLC
    19:52:45.318   built with gcc 10.3.0 (crosstool-NG 1.25.0)
    19:52:45.318 Execution Date: 2026-04-12 19:52:45
    19:52:45.323 [h264 @ 0xb811d80] non-existing PPS 0 referenced
        Last message repeated 1 times
    19:52:45.324 [h264 @ 0xb811d80] decode_slice_header error
    19:52:45.324 [h264 @ 0xb811d80] no frame!
 

See: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15005436/errors-when-decode-h-264-frames-using-ffmpeg

[mrklarth 1]

Thanks for sharing this response, but I'm not sure from that link whether the issue is something I need to address or if it's an issue with Emby itself. I'm positive that on older builds I did not have this error while streaming from my HDHR. I'm curious if anyone else has seen something similar.

[mrklarth 1]

So for anyone else who sees this, I think I found the answer and it has to do with a specific setup. The clues were in this thread:

Basically in my setup I'm also using IPTVBoss to feed Emby. Unlike the other thread, I was not outputting an M3U through Boss but instead fetching the M3U via the XC server feature. Adding "&type=m3u_plus&output=m3u8" to the URL is what did the trick.

 

[visproduction 360]

12 hours ago, mrklarth said:

Adding "&type=m3u_plus&output=m3u8" to the URL is what did the trick.

Where do you add that?  Is that inside a DLNA setup?

[mrklarth 1]

12 hours ago, visproduction said:

Where do you add that?  Is that inside a DLNA setup?

So to be clear on what my exact use case was...

My provider includes both Live TV and VOD content. In IPTVBoss, VOD content is pushed through so it is accessible in Tivimate and other streaming clients.

When using the typical API call "<url>/get.php?username=<user>&password=<pwd>", the output will contain live TV plus VOD content.

My idea was to use this tool I found that will reformat the file to exclude VOD content:

https://github.com/ovosimpatico/xtream2m3u

So then I was able to set my Emby TV source like this: 

http://localhost:5000/m3u?url=http://iptv.com&username=user&password=passinclude_vod=false

I probably tested this for a few minutes, didn't see an issue, and then called it a day. But I think there was a setting I didn't consider where it is using a proxy to try to mask the stream URLs may have been causing the problem with Emby.

 

[Luke 42505]

By the way for vod you may want to use the Emby webstreams plugin.