ATV Emby 2.0.9 (1) - Constant 1-2 second buffering

[SCV44281 5]

Hello, I’ve been having constant buffering issues with the latest Apple TV client release. It is happening across all tv and movie files. It also seems inconsistent how long a video will play before the issue starts. It ranges from a couple minutes to over 30 minutes before playback issues occur.

My issue: after a period of video play back, the video begins to freeze for a couple seconds, resumes playing for 1-2 seconds, freezes again, and resumes a 1-2 second snippet of video.

This freeze and resume cycle continues until I force close the ATV emby app. stopping the video and resuming playback returns to freezing and resuming right away.

My environment: Emby Server is version 4.10.1.0 running in a docker container. The ATV app is set to auto for preferred video player, subtitles are set to play on all content, streaming quality is set to auto, all videos tested are direct playing with no transcoding occurring during playback, videos have been a mix of 1080p h265, h264, and VC1 encodings all in mkv containers

Additional Testing: The same files stuttering on the ATV Client have no issues playing all the way through on the iOS and Windows Emby Theatre clients

Logs: I’ve attached logs that cover the most recent occurrence at 9:53amembyserver.txt

Edited October 16 by SCV44281

[Luke 43542]

HI @SCV44281can you please attach the complete emby server log file? Thanks !

[SCV44281 5]

Hi @Luke sorry about that, here's the full log file embyserver-63927748216.txt
 

One other update for you, the iPhone client started having the same problem when I tried continuing the stuttering/buffering tv show there and some other shows. I haven't rechecked with Emby for Windows yet, but I'll let you know if it seems to be apple only or for all my clients

[visproduction 379]

Related?  There are a lot of postings online about Apple TV buffering for media playback.
 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=apple+TV+seccurity+causes+media+playback+buffering&ia=web

[SCV44281 5]

Been doing some extensive testing this past week. The issue was not isolated to iOS/tvOS clients it was on all devices. It appears the issue is a Caddy proxy issue, not Emby. When I bypassed the reverse proxy and played tv shows over a direct LAN connection, the issues did not reappear after several hours of playback.

Some information for others using Caddy reverse proxy and running into stuttering issues; Caddy server behavior has changed since version 2.11.3 regarding connection timeouts. I updated caddy to version 2.11.7 shortly before this issue began. I have not yet figured out how to fix this issue with caddyfile modifications, but so far after rolling back to 2.11.3 today the stuttering has not returned.

Check your Caddy version to see if it is version 2.11.4 through 2.11.7 and try rolling back. I did not test 2.11.4 but saw GitHub issues referencing that version with improper timeouts. If I figure out how to change caddy settings to resolve the issue I will post here again