Grey Screen on Start

[bhelm 7]

Almost every Day i start emby the first time, it does only start with a grey screen and appears freezed. Rebooting the FireTV or force-closing the app resolves this temporarly.

 

I do not shutdown the fire-tv or emby after use, so it keeps running over night. A Friend of mine does confirm this problem on his fireTV. I have made a video that demonstrates it:

 

 

we experience this problem for several months.. maybe since we started using emby on firetv.

[ombra040683 1]

I have the same issue with the Android app on my Lenovo Tablet. I always must kill the app and restart it again if Emby is inactive in background for some time. But on my OnePlus Phone Emby works great.

[CBers 7450]

There is a thread here along the same lines:

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/49112-fire-tv-grey-screen-on-app-startup/

 

Are you running the beta version of the app?

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/24350-android-open-beta-testing/

[bhelm 7]

oh, this was on the 2nd page of this forum. So this should be resolved with 1.4.50 right? i will check which version is installed. normal version, not beta.

[bhelm 7]

ah its 1.4.51a as seen in the video. i will post in the main thread again. maybe delete this one.

[ebr 16169]

To what do you have "Auto logoff" set to?

 

Does your server go to sleep?

 

It is impossible to not have the Fire sleep - as far as I'm aware.  It always goes to sleep after about 30 minutes of inactivity.

[bhelm 7]

It was set to 1 Hour. Changed it to never now. Im always logged in.

 

The server is Always-On, but connected over the internet. Its possible that the internet reconnects over night, im not sure on that. Do you thin this could be a problem?

 

Oh i have noticed that with the 30 minutes sleep recently! I have played music with Emby and turned the screen off (and music continued playing, which is nice!). But after 30 Minutes, the Music-Playback stops The amazon music is somehow able to keep the firetv alive, so this would be another feature request

 

Edit: changed my opinion on the autologout

Edited October 9, 2017 by bhelm

[bhelm 7]

got a grey screen again yesterday with autologout: never.

 

could it be related to the fact that i use the same account on the firetv at home and webui at work?

[ebr 16169]

could it be related to the fact that i use the same account on the firetv at home and webui at work?

 

No.

 

Can you try changing the auto logout to 30 minutes just to see if it makes a difference.

 

What I have found is that the Fire TV goes into some sort of sleep mode after about 30 minutes and, in some environments, if the app attempts to do anything (Including shutting itself down) during this time it will crash and that is the state you find it in when you start back up.

 

I have never been able to reproduce this in my environment but several people do encounter it.  I cannot find what the silver bullet is that causes this to be the case but the last release of the app put in code to automatically shut down whenever the Fire goes to sleep.  That appears to have fixed it for the majority of people but apparently not you somehow...

[CBers 7450]

What I have found is that the Fire TV goes into some sort of sleep mode after about 30 minutes and, in some environments, if the app attempts to do anything (Including shutting itself down) during this time it will crash and that is the state you find it in when you start back up.

 

 

Can you not prevent the FTV from entering sleep mode somehow?

[ebr 16169]

Can you not prevent the FTV from entering sleep mode somehow?

 

Not to my knowledge.  Well, other than programatically but we certainly don't want to do that when we are idle.

[mastrmind11 722]

Technically should be able to do this w/ adb:

 

adb shell settings put system screen_off_timeout xxx

 

where xxx is in milliseconds.  So for a day xxx would be 86400000

 

edit:  Also, see here: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=285284

Edited October 11, 2017 by mastrmind11

[bhelm 7]

i have set the autologoff now to 30 minutes, lets see.

 

BUT there is still a point where you want to avoid the idle shutdown of the firetv: when playing music.

 

I have a SPDIF/HDMI splitter between my tv and the firetv and this allows me to turn of the television and the music keeps running.

this works well with amazon music.

also works well with emby (was not always the case, on my first tests iirc emby stopped when i turned of tv).

... but it works only for 30 minutes. after exactly 30 minutes the music stops. i think this is the idle standby. finding a way to avoid the idle timeout while playing music would allow this use case. maybe there is a way to find out how amazon music is doing this?

[ebr 16169]

Emby has a very nice display while music is playing.  You could leave the TV on .

 

We already use the standard mechanism to prevent the screen saver/screen from shutting off during music playback.  The only thing I can figure is the fact that your display is actually off is throwing the Fire itself for a loop and making it sleep.

[bhelm 7]

Amazon Music keeps playing all day with screen off. would be nice if that is possible with emby too. i still have a plasma screen that draws 200W+ (with nice image quality) and i do not want it to waste energy.

 

i had set the AutoLogoff to 30 minutes and got a Grey Screen again. It happend when i were playing a movie with external player (Kodi), turned off tv for 30+ minutes. When i returned, kodi "forgot" the movie (was on main screen) and quitting kodi returned to gray-screened emby. Kodi is cache-tuned, but i dont know if this is related.

 

when emby is crashing for one or another reason, would it be possible to print a trace on the screen or something that gives a clue whats going on? would it help if i submit debug logs after a crash?

[mastrmind11 722]

Amazon Music keeps playing all day with screen off. would be nice if that is possible with emby too. i still have a plasma screen that draws 200W+ (with nice image quality) and i do not want it to waste energy.

 

i had set the AutoLogoff to 30 minutes and got a Grey Screen again. It happend when i were playing a movie with external player (Kodi), turned off tv for 30+ minutes. When i returned, kodi "forgot" the movie (was on main screen) and quitting kodi returned to gray-screened emby. Kodi is cache-tuned, but i dont know if this is related.

 

when emby is crashing for one or another reason, would it be possible to print a trace on the screen or something that gives a clue whats going on? would it help if i submit debug logs after a crash?

Have your tried the previous suggestions?

[ebr 16169]

i had set the AutoLogoff to 30 minutes and got a Grey Screen again. It happend when i were playing a movie with external player (Kodi), turned off tv for 30+ minutes. When i returned, kodi "forgot" the movie (was on main screen) and quitting kodi returned to gray-screened emby. Kodi is cache-tuned, but i dont know if this is related.

 

Okay, this is definitely an unusual workflow and certainly something I've never tested.

 

What, exactly, was done in between playing the movie in Kodi and turning off the TV?  Did you pause? Did you stop?  What?

[bhelm 7]

Have your tried the previous suggestions?

The adb stuff? No, I thought you were talking to ebr. But I can try.

 

Okay, this is definitely an unusual workflow and certainly something I've never tested.

 

What, exactly, was done in between playing the movie in Kodi and turning off the TV? Did you pause? Did you stop? What?

Just Paused and turned off tv, as I wanted to return and continue.

Could it be related to the fact that I set the kodi cache to 500000000? According to kodi docs, setting this to 500MB would use 3x the memory.

[ebr 16169]

Could it be related to the fact that I set the kodi cache to 500000000? According to kodi docs, setting this to 500MB would use 3x the memory.

 

I really don't know but, the way you are doing this, you have suspended our app and gone to Kodi.  At that point, the Android OS could potentially just shut us down if it deemed it needed to and that could explain the weird behavior I saw.  Your having Kodi require that much memory could conceivably cause that to happen.

[icsy7867 8]

I am having the exact same issue.

 

Running FireTV Emby app (not on top of Kodi or anything). Should be the latest app, as I have only had it installed for a couple weeks.

[ebr 16169]

I am having the exact same issue.

 

Running FireTV Emby app (not on top of Kodi or anything). Should be the latest app, as I have only had it installed for a couple weeks.

 

Hi.  Whatever you are experiencing is likely not the exact same issue (any return to the app after it has crashed will manifest as this blank grey screen).  Can you please open a new topic with as much detail as you can provide?  Thanks.

 

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