4.5.0.50 cover and thumbnails

[sooty234 266]

Since the update, a lot of my images are broken. Refreshing and/or redownloading doesn't fix it, and can make it worse. The actual files are just fine.  They're just broken in emby.

embyserver.txt

[sooty234 266]

6 minutes ago, sooty234 said:

The actual files are just fine. 

I'm revising that, I don't even know where some of those pictures, are. They aren't with the video. So I don't know if they're broken. 

[sooty234 266]

This is awful. More and more of them. And this is how they look in all apps.

Edited September 23, 2020 by sooty234

[pgriffith 88]

Doesn't really help you, but not seeing this in 4.5.0.50 on my system and in other apps. So not a bug affecting everyone.

[Luke 42077]

Are your graphics drivers up to date?

[sooty234 266]

2 minutes ago, Luke said:

Are your graphics drivers up to date?

On what device? The server? The server doesn't use my GPU. And as I said, it looks like this on all of my devices.

[sooty234 266]

Maybe this will help make it easier to understand. If I go to a show that has no issues then refresh the metadata and/or replace the images, the new images are screwed up. 

[Luke 42077]

13 minutes ago, sooty234 said:

On what device? The server? The server doesn't use my GPU. And as I said, it looks like this on all of my devices.

The server. The skia graphics library is hardware accelerated.

[sooty234 266]

3 minutes ago, Luke said:

The server. The skia graphics library is hardware accelerated.

Well that's a terrible idea. How can I ditch that?

[sooty234 266]

The GPU is an old POS that's only function is to give a basic output to a monitor. No software on that machine should be trying to use it for anything else. I built the machine specifically in this way. The latest drive available for it is 4 years old. Why on earth would you make a unilateral decision to use whatever GPU was in the machine, with no way to defeat it?!?!  Stop making these horrible decisions! Oh f**k this! I'm going back to double clicking on the file to play it. 

[Happy2Play 9780]

Nothing has changed here but many be a update in the Skia library, it has always been this way since changing to Skia years ago.  The server does all the image processing.

[Sky blue 2]

Yes, i have get big problem, some video can play, some are not (playback error)
and My movie cover all gone, but all poster have in movie folder.
My server AMD Ryzen 9 3900 12-Core Processor, 24 cores and RAM 128GB

[sooty234 266]

Oh nice! Now that the server has updated, it's crashing again. So even if I'm able to get it to run, it looks like garbage.

Presently, emby is actually unusable. 

[sooty234 266]

4 hours ago, Sky blue said:

Yes, i have get big problem, some video can play, some are not (playback error)
and My movie cover all gone, but all poster have in movie folder.
My server AMD Ryzen 9 3900 12-Core Processor, 24 cores and RAM 128GB

Yup! And if you try to manually go in and choose the covers, it won't work most of the time. 

[Carlo 4560]

Sorry you're having issues.

Do you mind me asking what GPU you have in the server and what the current driver version is?

Have you tried removing the driver and just using generic windows drivers?  That should stop the GPU from getting used for anything.

[sooty234 266]

27 minutes ago, cayars said:

Sorry you're having issues.

Do you mind me asking what GPU you have in the server and what the current driver version is?

Have you tried removing the driver and just using generic windows drivers?  That should stop the GPU from getting used for anything.

It's an old nvidia gpu. I think it's a Gforce 210. The latest version of the driver that's available is from 2016.

Yes, I have tried changing the driver, reinstalling the driver, uninstalling the device and letting Windows choose the generic driver.

This is emby's fault for trying to use the GPU for anything. I expressly don't want the GPU used for anything except putting a picture on the monitor.

Nothing has changed the outcome. Previous server version was just fine. 

Right now, my server is a brick.

[Carlo 4560]

I don't have anything that old to test with I don't think.  Got two old PCs I can check however but I think video is integrated on them.

Not a great way to fix this but better than having a brick.  Do you happen to have another GPU laying around you could use?

You could always roll back while this is being looked into.  You're Emby system should have a copy of the system folder that can be renamed back to get you back to the version you previously were using so you can "unbrick" it that way as well.

I am curious however, when you remove the Nvidia driver and just use the generic video driver what happens?

[sooty234 266]

I already said what happens when I use the generic driver. No change.

Taking my server off the rack to test a different GPU just to work around the cover/pictures issue isn't going to happen. The server crashing is unrelated, and I already fixed that with the previous server version. Reported in a different thread. But the server upgrade has broken it again. 

All I seem to be doing lately is trying fix what emby breaks. I've never had this many problems before. I'm being forced to have wipe out the installation and try again, but with this new issue with the images, it just isn't worth it. I'll use other software to watch my media.

[Carlo 4560]

Well keep in mind you can roll back easily to the previous version you had while the issue is being looked into.

But of course this is your choice!

[sooty234 266]

As far as I can tell, it's considered my issue, and it isn't being looked into.

[sooty234 266]

Looking at all the issue reports since the latest release, it's really messed up. How can something so bad be released as stable? Are you guys giving yourselves more work than you can handle?

[Carlo 4560]

It did run through the beta process and some skia issues were noted and it changed a couple of times.  I for example picked up on some Android issues.

But I think part of the problem is that the adventurous people who run beta also likely have newer hardware (guessing) so something like this didn't get picked up due to lack of older equipment in the test group.  Sort of the same issue with older OS.

I don't know the answer to this but how old an OS or equipment should be used to test with?  Typically a lot of people have better GPUs than CPUs as the GPU is key to fast transcodes and keeping CPU resources low so you're in something of a minority.  That's not meant to be an excuse, just something of a reality from a test group standpoint.  I don't ask this question from an official position but just as a user who does run Betas and could setup a few VMs for this purpose.

I used to test Emby betas on some older OS like Windows 2012R2 and Windows 7 but I've upgrade those machines due to lack of security updates and drivers. They are legacy OSes at this point.  At what point is hardware considered Legacy as well?

I'm going to dig up some old bare metal to setup I think for testing.

[Carlo 4560]

You are NOT the only person to report this so it's not YOUR issue (only).  You will have to share this distinction as much as I'm sure you'd rather not.

It does need fixing.

The Skia library is being a pain in the ass.  One version doesn't work well on Android, another version does work.  The version that works with Android (fixed my problem) likely caused the problem for you, etc.

I don't know how much you feel look looking at OS things but if you have OpenGL installed on that machine you could try removing that to see if it helps.  I've not really played with Skia so I'm not sure what it uses or if that's in the realm of helping but if you don't use GPU I doubt it would hurt anything.

[sooty234 266]

The GPU shouldn't be used for anything other than a display output. As I already said, I built it that way. Emby has no business usurping it. Stop using it entirely! If I wanted that, I would choose that. What GPU is in that machine should be ignored! I opted out of hardware acceleration! If I ran it headless, this issue wouldn't be present. So why is emby using it just because it's there and not giving me an option to disable it? This is just bad practice! Now I have compounded issues. I'm so annoyed at this horrible decision making and not properly testing. Forcing out releases that are deeply flawed.

[Carlo 4560]

Personally I don't agree with that fully but understand your point of view.  IMHO, software should make use of the machine/host it's running on without user involvement with few exceptions (ie transcoding). If you play back a movie, most apps will use the GPU if present, etc HOWEVER they almost always have a switch to turn HW off and use SW only, so I certainly get what you're saying.

Emby in general is good about that and allows you to turn off GPU use for the transcoding but something like an open source library that you use don't always play by the same rules as they try to work on many different hardware from Raspberry PIs to Linux to Windows with some Mac/iOS thrown it.  You don't always get full control over what the lib does or how it does it, nor do you even think about it when it appears to just work in testing. If we had a more diverse set of beta testers (hint, hint) this type of thing might get picked up before release. during dev.

None of this is meant to be an excuse and I fully get where you're coming from.  I run my main Emby system on a 1st gen i7 with no GPU built in on the CPU but have an old Nvidia GFX 750 TI in it that does do transcoding from h.265 to h.264 when needed for me. I take the time to format my media so it direct plays given bandwidth and will only transcode if bandwidth restricted.

This is something that needs looking into but for now you're best bet is revert your Emby system directory back to unbrick your environment and run the version you previously had running.