All apps? - Descriptive client error messages

[mwongjay 74]

Rather than tell a long story about what happened (frequent intermittent freezes during playback) and the time involved in debugging (which was long due to the number of variables in my setup), the issue was related to the Fire TV being on wifi and many devices were saturating the wifi network. It would be nice if descriptive error messages could be displayed as issues are detected. If you can detect it's a networking error, prompt that is the issue, or if it's transcoding related, or whatever the issue. It seems like exceptions are logged, but aren't bubbling up to the client devices. In this instance it was a network issue, but that wasn't captured in the log.

[Luke 42078]

Hi, can you give some examples? thanks.

[mwongjay 74]

Hi, can you give some examples? thanks.

 

When the Fire tv was connected via wifi and the wifi network was saturated from requests the playback would stop as the device was buffering. Initially my first hypothesis was this was related to transcoding. I jumped onto the server and reviewed the dashboard and the transcoded progress was well in advance of the current playback position. Around the time I was reviewing it the playback started again so continued watching. A few minutes later there was another interruption. I hopped back on and transcoding was nearly 75% complete so I reviewed the transcoding log, looked fine. I then opened the server log to review the last x minutes, didn't see anything. I then thought this might be an issue doing transcoding on ram and memory limits (I'm using ram because of my setup I have many services writing to an SSD for caching that gets moved over later and I've found I get nearly quadruple the performance), so I switched to another Emby server (I run 2 in parallel) and ran into many issues. On my subnet Emby server 1 is on .14, Emby server 2 is on .30. I attempted to switch servers from 2 to 1 and the home screen loaded, but had no content. I then force stopped the fire tv app, restarted, it then couldn't find the servers. I then cleared cache, cleared data, restarted, entered IP for server 1, Kept throwing volley errors (did this for like 10 min). Finally, after enough cache/data clearing and restarting (including restarting Emby server) it finally connected and I went to the movie. Clicked on a chapter and it nothing would play. Reviewed the transcode log and it was in progress, but was well behind (now this issue is due to the 2 servers having separate transcoding storage locations), finally it played, then the intermittent interruptions began again. I reviewed the logs for my managed switch and all looked good. At this point I then noticed the ethernet cable was unplugged from the fire tv so I was using wifi. I then connected the cable, restarted emby fire tv app and all worked well after that. 

 

That is more or less the process I went through the other night. Because it was a network issue it wasn't logged in the server log. It would seem the Fire tv could be capable of detecting network-related issues and pop up a small notification that helps the user debug easier saying something along the lines of "Network connection issues,.. buffering" rather than the image just freezing and no other indicator.

 

I'm sure you read through a lot of threads so I don't expect you to recall, but I've also had issues with HA which you've responded to those issues. The HA issues specifically, when an error occurs during the transcoding process like a filter error, or many other errors I've seen testing HA, the fire tv doesn't stop playback when these errors occur so the user is looking at a black screen until a timeout occurs and it finally exits playback, but if the client notified the user that an error occurred during transcoding then the user could just back out instead of waiting for the timeout.

Edited June 15, 2017 by mwongjay

[Untoten 306]

I gave up on my firetv+emby a while ago, no playing .AVI files, constant volley errors, greyscreen when attempting to initiate video, etc.

Edited June 16, 2017 by Untoten

[mwongjay 74]

I gave up on my firetv+emby a while ago, no playing .AVI files, constant volley errors, greyscreen when attempting to initiate video, etc.

 

You might try Handbrake to convert your avi files to another container (mkv, etc)  https://handbrake.fr/. If you have many videos you should be able to do batch processing as well.

 

Most of the content I have plays fine with Fire tv and Emby. Since I am using HA which is still experimental I understand it may fail and it's a continuing process of trial, error, and reporting. The volley errors that occurred over that time span were out of the ordinary and had to do with switching between servers which I normally am not doing.

 

If you are having issues you may also need to upgrade your Fire tv hardware. There is a topic on the forums where I recall someone having difficulty with the first gen Fire tv's.