Fire TV remote playback stops constantly except on lowest quality setting

[shaddox 1]

I have an Emby server running on a Synology NAS, and my partner is watching remotely from a Fire TV Stick. She experiences videos stopping every few seconds on every quality setting except for the lowest (which is around 700 kbps). Even the 1 Mbps quality settings immediately and constantly skips.

 

Obviously this sounds like her Internet connection, but her connection is much much faster and is able to easily stream 1080p on YouTube, Netflix, etc. (and my server is on a very stable 300 Mbps upload). I also have no problem streaming remotely on my phone's 4g connection.

 

Is there anything I can troubleshoot to verify if the problem is somewhere other than her Internet connection? I've also noticed that the Dashboard shows her playing a video file and every few seconds it flickers between saying "Trancoding at ~700 kbps" and "Direct play," which seems very strange to me. Also, sometimes the section of her playing the video disappears completely for a second or two before reappearing.

 

I haven't seen anything helpful in the logs, but I'll attach those in case someone can help. You can see her trying different quality settings if you search the embyserver log for "max bitrate". Thanks a lot, I just discovered Emby and I'm really liking it!

embyserver-63722505600.txt

ffmpeg-transcode-e3c8b82e-4390-4583-bf2d-fa384bcf22fa_1.txt

[maegibbons 1287]

Hi

 

I seem to keep saying this a lot at the moment! Probably because everybody is at home.

 

WAN connections and isp's are fickle. (I know we deal with loads of wholesale suppliers as we are a WISP)

 

Do not believe speedtests AT DIFFERENT SITES to work out the BETWEEN SITE speed. Routing is involved and your packets may be going in a totally diffetent way compared to speedtest servers.

 

To test actual throughput between Site A and Site B run 'iperf'

 

Google it.

 

If your test comes back and says throughput is >5Mbps then we can investigate if emby is doing anything wrong (probably not)

 

Krs

 

Mark

 

A 'like' is always appreciated!

[ebr 16184]

Hi.  What is the upload speed of your connection at the server location?

 

More than likely, this is the bottleneck.

[shaddox 1]

Thanks for the help. I understand that the routing between point A and point B might be slower than either A's or B's normal connection speed. I just find it very unlikely that this particular connection, between two very high speed residential Internet connections 20 miles apart in a densely populated area, is able to stream 700 Kbps rock solid but constantly stops and starts at 1 Mbps. It's possible one of the ISPs does some extremely strict limiting of certain services, or there's some very major routing problem, but I think it's very unlikely. We haven't had problems streaming Plex video between the exact same locations at much higher bitrates (although Plex has other major problems unrelated to this).

 

My Internet connection where the server is running routinely gets 300 Mbps upload, and sometimes much closer to a gigabit per second. I can also stream from this server on my phone's 4g connection (using the iOS Emby app) at higher bitrates. This, combined with the odd behavior I was seeing on my Emby server dashboard (flickering between "direct play" and "transcoding" every few seconds), makes me think there might be some issue with the Fire TV Emby player, or some miscommunication between the Emby client and server. I was hoping that the logs might indicate that, but I wasn't able to see anything in the logs myself.

 

I will check out iperf, thanks for that tip.

Edited April 16, 2020 by shaddox

[Luke 42078]

There could also be ISP throttling occurring on either end. It's becoming increasingly more common now.

[shaddox 1]

There could also be ISP throttling occurring on either end. It's becoming increasingly more common now.

 

It's definitely possible. I would just be very shocked if they throttled it that aggressively. I might try serving Emby through a VPN to see if that works any better.

[Luke 42078]

Please let us know if that helps. Thanks.

[mastrmind11 722]

Might also look into a reverse proxy over cloudflare.  Both free.

[maegibbons 1287]

Firstly, the Fire TV is a pretty capable device especially the 4k variant. The very original not so good.

 

I use them internally and from Spain. Internally I get them to Direct play most things. Externally I usually run them at 2mbps from Spain (1500 miles) which gives a stutter and glitch free performance "usually".

 

Are you using the same ISP at both ends? Please prove its not bandwidth first then we can explore other things.

 

Krs

 

Mark

 

A 'like' is always appreciated!

[shaddox 1]

I just threw up LibreTest on my home server and had her run a speed test from her place. She got 3.83 Mbps download and 0.11 Mbps upload, so it does seem likely that there is some throttling or very slow routing going on between us (although it's still very strange that 700 Kbps works perfectly and 1 Mbps skips constantly). My other friend got 410 Mbps download and 220 Mbps upload on my speed test, so it must be something specific about her connection and mine.

[mastrmind11 722]

I mean it could be 20 different things, but it isn't emby.  The server will serve, and thats what it's doing.  Based on this thread I'm assuming vanilla ISP out of the box setup with their shit equipment on a congested 2.4g provided modem/router?  Does she have anything hard wired like a PC to the router she can test with a browser to determine if its her shitty wifi?  This is, imo, 100% network related, but unfortunately it's going to be painful to properly debug/fix with this beer virus everywhere.

[shaddox 1]

I mean it could be 20 different things, but it isn't emby.  The server will serve, and thats what it's doing.  Based on this thread I'm assuming vanilla ISP out of the box setup with their shit equipment on a congested 2.4g provided modem/router?  Does she have anything hard wired like a PC to the router she can test with a browser to determine if its her shitty wifi?  This is, imo, 100% network related, but unfortunately it's going to be painful to properly debug/fix with this beer virus everywhere.

 

I understand, and you're right, if I could show up in person I could do all that troubleshooting. I know that YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and Plex remote (from my same home server and Internet connection) all work fine streaming higher bitrates on her exact same Fire TV, WiFi, and Internet connection. That, combined with the strange Emby dashboard behavior I mentioned, is why I asked if there's anything Emby-related that I should look into.

 

And again, to me it's very suspicious that only the lowest quality setting works fine, and the jump from 700 Kbps to 1 Mbps makes it essentially completely stop working. I would expect that if it were simply a matter of connection speed, there wouldn't be much difference between a 700 Kbps stream and a 1 Mbps stream. Sure, if the connection was somehow throttled to exactly 900 Kbps, there would be some occasional buffering of the 1 Mbps settings, but that's not the behavior we're seeing. 700 Kbps works fine, never has any problem, and 1 Mbps all the way up to 15 Mbps behaves exactly the same: every few seconds the video pauses for a few seconds. It's very fishy, and doesn't look as simple as connection bandwidth.

[mastrmind11 722]

I understand, and you're right, if I could show up in person I could do all that troubleshooting. I know that YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and Plex remote (from my same home server and Internet connection) all work fine streaming higher bitrates on her exact same Fire TV, WiFi, and Internet connection. That, combined with the strange Emby dashboard behavior I mentioned, is why I asked if there's anything Emby-related that I should look into.

 

And again, to me it's very suspicious that only the lowest quality setting works fine, and the jump from 700 Kbps to 1 Mbps makes it essentially completely stop working. I would expect that if it were simply a matter of connection speed, there wouldn't be much difference between a 700 Kbps stream and a 1 Mbps stream. Sure, if the connection was somehow throttled to exactly 900 Kbps, there would be some occasional buffering of the 1 Mbps settings, but that's not the behavior we're seeing. 700 Kbps works fine, never has any problem, and 1 Mbps all the way up to 15 Mbps behaves exactly the same: every few seconds the video pauses for a few seconds. It's very fishy, and doesn't look as simple as connection bandwidth.

is it like this on everything or just a particular activity or media type?

[ebr 16184]

All of the other services you are comparing to have adaptive streaming capability such that - even though she may select a particular quality or bitrate - the app will adjust down automatically during playback if needed.  Additionally, everything except plex is coming from an industrial server farm.

[rbjtech 5284]

Are you using the standard emby ports ? (8096/8920) - it may be worth trying port 80/443 just to see if your ISP(s) are throttling 'emby' or traffic in general.  All the other services will be using 443 most likely.

 

Also to note - I have remote users @ 20 Mbit/sec using FireTV, no issues at all - so I don't think it's the app.

Edited April 20, 2020 by rbjtech