Samsung TV App playback desync, crash after pausing longer than x-amount of time

[brothom 219]

I've encountered a strange issue that can be reproduced fairly easily.
This seems to only happen on the Samsung TV Emby App though.

* Play any media where your device can Direct Play video, but not audio
In my case HEVC 4K with EAC3 5.1. Make SURE the audio is being transocded.
* View (or seek) at least 5 or 10 minutes
* Pause playback and take a wee, grab something to drink, maybe some snacks too, take longer than 2 minutes, 5 to be sure
* Resume playback
* After resuming playback, within a minute, max 5, you will notice a freeze (for a few seconds)
* After a few more minutes playback will halt and the spinner will start spinning (looks like it's buffering)
* Eventually playback fully freezes, sometimes also freezing the app

I have a suspicion something goes wrong synchronising the transcoded audio to the Direct Play video. The logs just say that playback was stopped.

[speechles 2078]

When anything is transcoded and the user pauses for an extended amount of time the server has to carry that session. Imagine someone left it paused for days on end. Your server would be stuck on that session. I think what is happening is the server is either pausing the transcoding session since you paused. Or it completely removes the active encoding from the session. Your client gets as much as it had buffered during the pause. There is no more to get because the transcoding stopped. Once you reach that point where it should restart the transcoding you get the playback halt and notice the buffering. The buffering might never continue because it depends on how robust the Samsung video player is to work through these types of conditions. I know on the Roku the same thing happens. But the Roku video player is robust enough to work through the condition and continue playing on after the brief playback halt and buffering after pausing for an extended period.

Instead of pausing for multiple minutes you should just exit playback. Your resume position is noted. Same as it should be with the playback halt and the freeze. Once you restart and go to that item it should show the resume point at exactly the point it had played through the Emby app. The Emby app reported playback position. The part that buffered in is beyond the playback position so isn't counted as watched. So you might as well just exit rather than pause if you intend to be gone for more than a minute or two.

Edited May 6 by speechles

[Neminem 1708]

Hmm why is this a Feature Request

[speechles 2078]

11 minutes ago, Neminem said:

Hmm why is this a Feature Request

Good catch. Why indeed. I just saw the post and went.. its supposed to do that.. (but not the hang part with a spinner) didn't look at the forum section.

Edited May 6 by speechles

[FrostByte 5472]

I was wonder why EAC3 5.1 is being transcoded as all Samsung TVs support that 

[Luke 42451]

@SamES

[SamES 1098]

9 hours ago, FrostByte said:

I was wonder why EAC3 5.1 is being transcoded as all Samsung TVs support that 

It shouldn't be.

@brothomcan you please provide an ffmpeg transcode and server log for this test? Thanks

[brothom 219]

16 hours ago, FrostByte said:

I was wonder why EAC3 5.1 is being transcoded as all Samsung TVs support that 

Well, I don't know what to tell you. It happened especially often when viewing a title with these specs:

Perhaps due to it being a multi-audio file, something wacky is going on like audio extraction (maybe unintended?)

 

6 hours ago, SamES said:

@brothomcan you please provide an ffmpeg transcode and server log for this test? Thanks

I'll reproduce the issue when I get back home and extract the logs.

[FrostByte 5472]

Also, when reproducing for logs try bringing up SFN on the screen and see what that says.

[brothom 219]

43 minutes ago, FrostByte said:

Also, when reproducing for logs try bringing up SFN on the screen and see what that says.

Sure sure, I'll also check the User Sessions plugin for completeness.

[brothom 219]

I haven't had time to reproduce this issue yet, but I've tested this on my desktop by just (the same movie) running in the backend and pausing it after some minutes. After waiting for some more minutes and resuming playback was normal so it seems to be something either specific to my network or the samsung app. 

Will keep you guys posted.

[brothom 219]

Okay so I've noticed something weird is going on with the media in question.

Starting it takes quite a while and Emby says it's recovering from playback error: 

ffmpeg-remux-1e4d140f-a7cb-44d7-a8f0-5fb6cb2a79c2_1.txt

 

2026-05-20 11:15:28.246 Info PlaystateService-0HNLM2E7HBR07:0000004F: http/2 Response 204 to host20. Time: 2ms. POST https://host3/emby/Sessions/Playing/Progress. 
2026-05-20 11:15:29.437 Info MediaInfoService-0HNLM2E7HBR0O:00000016: http/1.1 POST http://192.168.2.200/emby/Items/175655/PlaybackInfo?UserId=x_secret9_x&StartTimeTicks=0&IsPlayback=false&AutoOpenLiveStream=false&MaxStreamingBitrate=200000000&X-Emby-Client=Emby for Samsung&X-Emby-Device-Name=Samsung Smart TV&X-Emby-Device-Id=ecf3fc55-4fd1-44eb-80b7-6db26e668ec0&X-Emby-Client-Version=2.2.8&X-Emby-Token=x_secret1_x&X-Emby-Language=nl&reqformat=json. Source Ip: host21, UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (SMART-TV; LINUX; Tizen 5.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 TV Safari/537.36
...
2026-05-20 11:15:36.298 Info HlsSegmentService-0HNLM2E7HBR0M:00000032: http/1.1 Response 204 to host21. Time: 8ms. POST http://192.168.2.200/emby/Videos/ActiveEncodings/Delete?deviceId=ecf3fc55-4fd1-44eb-80b7-6db26e668ec0&PlaySessionId=b85ff8beb1204469b25032150462d12e&X-Emby-Client=Emby for Samsung&X-Emby-Device-Name=Samsung Smart TV&X-Emby-Device-Id=ecf3fc55-4fd1-44eb-80b7-6db26e668ec0&X-Emby-Client-Version=2.2.8&X-Emby-Token=x_secret1_x&X-Emby-Language=nl. Headers: Date=Wed, 20 May 2026 09:15:35 GMT, Server=UPnP/1.0 DLNADOC/1.50, Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy=cross-origin, Private-Network-Access-Name=Servelet, Private-Network-Access-Id=042f1b80d3f04755ad980818a24f7db4
2026-05-20 11:15:36.758 Info DynamicHlsService-0HNLM2E7HBR0T:00000001: http/1.1 GET http://192.168.2.200/emby/videos/175655/master.m3u8?DeviceId=ecf3fc55-4fd1-44eb-80b7-6db26e668ec0&MediaSourceId=mediasource_175655&PlaySessionId=688bb5e67db848b597a80cdae3b53875&api_key=x_secret1_x&VideoCodec=hevc,h264,mpeg2video&AudioCodec=ac3,aac,mp3&VideoBitrate=199232000&AudioBitrate=768000&MaxWidth=3840&AudioStreamIndex=2&SubtitleStreamIndex=56&SubtitleMethod=Hls&TranscodingMaxAudioChannels=6&SegmentContainer=ts&MinSegments=1&BreakOnNonKeyFrames=False&SubtitleStreamIndexes=12,13,14,56&ManifestSubtitles=vtt&h264-profile=high,main,baseline,constrainedbaseline,high10&h264-level=51&aac-audiochannels=6&ac3-audiochannels=6&mp3-audiochannels=6&TranscodeReasons=DirectPlayError. Source Ip: host21, Accept=*/*, Host=192.168.2.200, User-Agent=samsung-agent/1.1, Accept-Encoding=deflate, gzip, Range=bytes=0-

It looks like "something" goes wrong but I'm not really sure what exactly. It's almost as if there's an issue parsing the subtitles. 

I could try to remove all subs and attempt DirectPlay again, but this file runs just fine on Desktop w/ Chrome on W11 so I'm not really sure the culprit here is the file. I remember having issues with certain media before but this is the one that stood out to me and seems easily reproducable.

It's also running as we speak so I'll pause it in a couple of minutes and see what the log says.

Edit 1

Playback error seems gone now, it seems to be still playing suprisingly.

 

Edited 2 hours ago by brothom

[SamES 1098]

1 hour ago, brothom said:

It's almost as if there's an issue parsing the subtitles. 

What type of subtitles does the file have? How many subtitle streams?  Are you trying to play the subtitles? What happens if you disable them?

'Recovering from playback error' means the TV couldn't play the file for some reason even though it should be a supported format. It may have just been encoded with non-optimal settings.

It's possible that Chrome browser is not Direct Playing the file, and transcoding normally fixes these types of issues. It's also possible that the TV is just more sensitive to non-standard encodings.

[brothom 219]

@SamESChrome/Windows only seems to have some issues with the EAC to it's transcoding audio, but I expected that to happen. It's not showing any signs of "recovering playback" or something like that either: 

Still testing, will check in again.

The "stutter" that occurred seems to be bcause the ""recovering from playback" transcode transitions into Direct Play, but the reporting of the stream itself is strange:

 

Stream reports... nothing? It should say Direct Play but it's not. Stats for Nerds also reports this same overview on the TV itself. 

Edited 48 minutes ago by brothom