I think Emby may have hijacked my Shield?

[crusher11 1321]

I tried to play a movie in a streaming app, but when I hit play it started up “Maroon” by Taylor Swift. Pressing play and pause causes the streaming app's play/pause icon to flash, but only plays and pauses the music. Exiting to the Android TV home screen shows no sign anything is playing. It's running through the entire Midnights album. It's gone way too long without an ad for it to be Spotify, and the only other source I can think of would be Emby. The Emby app doesn't show anything playing, but then neither does the Shield's home screen so that doesn't necessarily mean anything. I just have no idea what's going on here.

[ebr 16771]

Shutting down your server would be an easy way to tell but what does the Emby dashboard show?  Log activity?

[crusher11 1321]

I let it play out until the end of the album, because I was curious as to what would happen. It just stopped. Didn't think to check the dashboard.

The log...does appear to show playback. I booted the theater up at 17:06, and the searches for “sitting duck” and “la synd” are me looking up the movie I was about to watch to see what the correct aspect ratio was in order to put my projector on the correct preset; I would have attempted to start the movie in the streaming app within a minute or two of those searches.

embyserver (1).txt

[crusher11 1321]

@ebr?

[ebr 16771]

Unless you can reproduce, I'm not sure what else to do here. It sounds like some sort of situation where Emby was still holding the media session in the background and so responded to your remote clicks.

[crusher11 1321]

52 minutes ago, ebr said:

Unless you can reproduce, I'm not sure what else to do here. It sounds like some sort of situation where Emby was still holding the media session in the background and so responded to your remote clicks.

There was no media session to hold. I have never attempted, at least not recently, to play Midnights. It certainly wasn't the most recent thing I was doing with Emby. So I have no idea why it even started, or why the Emby app gave no indication anything was playing, or why my Shield gave no indication anything was playing.

[crusher11 1321]

On 9/10/2026 at 11:13 PM, ebr said:

Unless you can reproduce, I'm not sure what else to do here.

It's happened again. Checked the dashboard this time and it is indeed playing through the universal Android app. Doesn't seem to be playing an album, this time...it started midway through “I Did Something Bad” from Reputation and has now moved on to “Love Story” from Fearless. Might be one of my music playlists, though, which was the last thing I was doing on Emby from a music playback perspective but I've watched a dozen movies since then so it doesn't make much sense.

This is also the first time I've used Beamafilm since the last time I had this issue, so it does seem to be some sort of interaction with Beamafilm specifically.

I rebooted the server. It was in the middle of “Love Story” when it shut down, and when it booted up it immediately started playing “no body, no crime.” I'm unable to control playback from the dashboard.

embyserver.txt embyserver-63925689323.txt