Auto quality always low bitrates

[Guest]

I‘m experiencing low bitrates when using „Auto“ in web app.

For Safari direct stream should be used in local network. But it seems to detect 1,5 Mbit/s in nearly every case.

 

WiFi connection is fine with bandwidth at least about 100 Mbit/s.

How could this be improved?

[Luke 42077]

Hi, when you test this, are you inside the local network, or outside?

[Guest]

Hey Luke,

I‘m inside local network with WiFi oder wired.

 

I can add some more Info:

This doesn‘t happen with Win10 and Firefox/Chrome/Opera but on my iPad/iPhone with Safari.

On Win10 the player detects 10 Mbit/s with the same video file (what is above the original bitrate) and forces emby just to change the container with direct stream.

[Luke 42077]

Have you checked the in-app quality setting in the iOS app? Are you sure it's on auto?

[Guest]

Sure I have checked that setting.

Player shows „Auto (720p - 1,5Mbps)“.

As I said, I’m on local WiFi. No issue with Firefox/Chrome/Opera on Win10.

 

But it’s not the iOS app (I don’t have Emby Premier). It’s the WebApp in Safari browser on iOS. Same with Chrome on iOS. iOS app works fine with direct play (only the first free minute).

[Luke 42077]

Can we look at an example? Please attach the information requested in how to report a media playback issue. thanks !

[Guest]

Here is my example.

Playback with iPhone started at 15:36. Player says "Auto - 1,5 Mbps 720p".

Device is on local WiFi and should play original quality (video is about 5.5 Mbps) and just remux due to container incompability.

 

Log.txt

Log_transcode.txt

[Happy2Play 9780]

There is a max limit set somewhere.

http://localhost:8096/emby/Items/5836/PlaybackInfo?UserId=d4a7d2a90ac54c368953000cb8d025ad&StartTimeTicks=0&IsPlayback=false&AutoOpenLiveStream=false&MaxStreamingBitrate=1500000. UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_1_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/12.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
2019-03-29 15:37:47.984 Info App: User policy for Jan. EnablePlaybackRemuxing: True EnableVideoPlaybackTranscoding: True EnableAudioPlaybackTranscoding: True
2019-03-29 15:37:47.984 Info App: Bitrate exceeds DirectStream limit: media bitrate: 5302880, max bitrate: 1500000

[Guest]

That's what I saw in the logs, too.

But player is set to "Auto". User remote bitrate is not set.

 

However this doesn't happen with the same user on Win10 in Opera, Chrome and Firefox and happens either with Chrome and Safari on iOS (iPad and iPhone).

Must have to do with the player on iOS?

 

Edited March 29, 2019 by loeffelpan

[Happy2Play 9780]

Is User Preference (User icon)-Playback-Video Quality set to Auto?  Note this is a per device/client/browser setting.

[Guest]

Yes, as to see in my first screenshot in previous post.

[Guest]

Any news on this issue?

[Happy2Play 9780]

So if you set it to something other than Auto does it get used?

Edited April 2, 2019 by Happy2Play

[Guest]

Yes. For now I‘ve set this to „1080p 60 Mbps“ and any video with lower resolution and bitrate is just remuxing as expected.

And as I said: This is only on iOS with any browser.

[Luke 42077]

Thanks for the feedback.

[Guest]

You‘re welcome.

But this is not the solution?!

Will someone investigate this from technical side?

[Luke 42077]

We'll look at improving this, thanks.

[Guest]

Just tested something concerning to this.

Usualy I use my remote DNS with HTTPS at home, also (just to keep it easy for me to access webapp).

Emby is configured to use apache as reverse proxy.

 

A few days ago I had to use local IP/DNS without HTTPS as fallback, due to my remote DNS was unreachable.

With local IP/DNS there is no problem with selecting the right quality in "Auto"-mode.

 

To be sure I configured Emby to use SSL, but without reverse proxy.

Everything is working fine, too.

 

As a conclusion in my case this is related to reverse proxy.

Unlikely this is my configuration, because I tried just with a quite plain SSL config (no other options/headers, just SSL "on" and cert).

Maybe related to apache?

 

Anyone with nginx as reverse proxy facing this issue?

Any other suggestions?

[pir8radio 1312]

Just tested something concerning to this.

Usualy I use my remote DNS with HTTPS at home, also (just to keep it easy for me to access webapp).

Emby is configured to use apache as reverse proxy.

 

A few days ago I had to use local IP/DNS without HTTPS as fallback, due to my remote DNS was unreachable.

With local IP/DNS there is no problem with selecting the right quality in "Auto"-mode.

 

To be sure I configured Emby to use SSL, but without reverse proxy.

Everything is working fine, too.

 

As a conclusion in my case this is related to reverse proxy.

Unlikely this is my configuration, because I tried just with a quite plain SSL config (no other options/headers, just SSL "on" and cert).

Maybe related to apache?

 

Anyone with nginx as reverse proxy facing this issue?

Any other suggestions?

 

why would you pass through your reverse proxy locally?  I get that its easier.  But its messy...  I would just setup two servers in the emby apps a local and remote.   its probably the local loopback that is slowing things down causing the slow speed test..       So every time you watch video using your external DN your traffic passes through your router back into the local network, causing double the traffic in your router, if you use the local IP/DN your client device goes right to the server just passing through the internal switch of your router, or switch depending on your network setup, and you only have one stream of data on your network.

[Guest]

why would you pass through your reverse proxy locally?  I get that its easier.  But its messy...  I would just setup two servers in the emby apps a local and remote.   its probably the local loopback that is slowing things down causing the slow speed test..       So every time you watch video using your external DN your traffic passes through your router back into the local network, causing double the traffic in your router, if you use the local IP/DN your client device goes right to the server just passing through the internal switch of your router, or switch depending on your network setup, and you only have one stream of data on your network.

 

Maybe you're right. But I would guess, that my router is smart enough to get thats his own external IP and route things locally.

Gladly emby apps are discovering Server names by themself even local or remote.

 

However, even with double traffic "Auto" should get more than 1,5 Mbps.

Didn't you use a nginx reverse proxy? Could you test local access via reverse proxy and check the bitrate in Auto mode.

[pir8radio 1312]

Maybe you're right. But I would guess, that my router is smart enough to get thats his own external IP and route things locally.

Gladly emby apps are discovering Server names by themself even local or remote.

 

However, even with double traffic "Auto" should get more than 1,5 Mbps.

Didn't you use a nginx reverse proxy? Could you test local access via reverse proxy and check the bitrate in Auto mode.

Yeah I still use nginx, but my server is located in a data center so everything is remote to it. So I couldn’t try it out for you.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Guest]

Anyone else with a local nginx to check this out?

[cptlores 40]

Just an observation but with 4.2.x I have noticing that my users are now often streaming at lower bit-rates then usual. No sure if that caused by auto, but it seems strange that multiple users suddenly decided to stream at lower quality. Seen on both webplayer (mostly chrome) and chromecast.

[Luke 42077]

Just an observation but with 4.2.x I have noticing that my users are now often streaming at lower bit-rates then usual. No sure if that caused by auto, but it seems strange that multiple users suddenly decided to stream at lower quality. Seen on both webplayer (mostly chrome) and chromecast.

 

Hi there, can you please go over an example? Thanks.

[cptlores 40]

Sure, I had a chance to do some testing today and there is definitively something wacky with Auto quality.

Source for this test is a BR remux (h.264 ~35Mbit) and both emby server and streaming client have nice fiber connections with >200Mbit both ways, no problem direct streaming the 35Mbit video if I manually select 1080p - 60Mbit quality.

 

For the test I changed both the user and server max bitrate settings to 100Mbit (server is usually set to 15Mbit), but when using auto quality I get < 6Mbit. For other users I now also often see bitrates below 2Mbit, when they previously did mostly direct streaming.

embyserver.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-97f0ee1a-fb8e-4709-8729-7095c9c43734_1.txt

Edited August 13, 2019 by cptlores