Playback Hangs/Freezes

[Pseudomax 3]

I can confirm that I seem to have a similar issue to the one described here.

I have a dedicated media server doing nothing else than direct playing my media. I have a wired home network and dedicated windows PC as a client. But I seem to have stuttering that can be from every few minutes in some movies to just 3-4 times in a movie.

I looked at the stats and my client resources seem fine, similarly the server resources are far from overwhelmed.

I am using default settings... anything else that you can suggest or a troubleshoot guide to understand what maybe causing this?

Thanks

[Pseudomax 3]

Actually, I posted the above before trying to play the same movie in Emby Theatre where it did not stutter. I was playing it previously in Chrome ... so it would seem that similar to some of the comments in this thread there is something in Chrome also causing a problem...

 

Anyhow, I hope it helps someone else who may have a similar problem... (and is less technical like myself)

Edited August 8, 2021 by Pseudomax

[josemanuelmoreno 1]

Hey guys, same issue here. It's happening on Chrome and Edge. I started seeing this after updating to DSM 7 and Emby 4.6.4.0. Would you let me know which logs should I provide to troubleshoot it as well? Also, I could not find the playback transcoding options, would you tell me where they are exactly? Much obliged.

[gungatim 10]

same issue here.

4.6.4 server now buffers every 5 seconds.

Samsung app is the worst, buffers nonstop. completely unwatchable. literally quit 43 minutes in on a show last night.

the new Firetv gui refuses to work at all, can't even reinstall after deleting the app.

the old Firesticks still work, but the server hangs on both computers, as well as my friends server. 

something is wrong with the last update (7/23), everyone is having trouble 2 weeks in...

back to Plex unfortunately.

 

 

[Happy2Play 9780]

Without server and ffmpeg logs going over a specific example it is impossible to say.  It can only be guess work.  

Edited August 10, 2021 by Happy2Play

[josemanuelmoreno 1]

Hello Happy2Play,

I think I'm attaching what you require. Is this more useful?

embyserver.txt ffmpeg-remux-819b8841-9faa-4cdf-8919-dcc79b5884c0_1.txt

[Carlo 4561]

Hi, You have some high access times showing up in your log file for things like graphic rendering.
Looks like you have a open subtitle job running during prime time with a lot of timeouts (likely over daily limit) running as well.

You may want to check/set different jobs to run at night from the scheduled task menu.

The file that was remuxed has 10 streams in it. Do you need to keep the different audio and sub tracks for different languages?

[josemanuelmoreno 1]

Thank you, cayars. I changed the subtitle job to only run once every night (it was running every 4 hours). I usually remux everything I find in the disc, is this a problem? If it is, it is showing up now.

Also, I've been meaning to ask this from a long time. Sometimes watching a 4K movie in my LG TV (Emby Theater 1.0.24), even when it says 'Direct Playing' in the dashboard, the playback pauses for a little bit sometimes and then resumes, very annoying. What can I do to avoid it?

I'm attaching my latest embyserver log.

Thanks again. 

embyserver.txt

[Carlo 4561]

Great job on the subs.  BTW, there is a limit on how many subs can be pulled daily.  Even a VIP account is limited to 1000 daily.

Keep in mind the more tracks in a file the more there is to process anytime it needs to be remuxed or transcoded. With high number of tracks this can become a problem streaming. If fo no other reason if you have limited upload bandwidth and are direct playing files with 4 or 5 languages no one needs you're wasting bandwidth.

How many files/TV do you have playing back in this log file?

[josemanuelmoreno 1]

It should be a couple of movies (one of them 4K, which I didn't finish, only a couple of minutes in) and a pair of TV shows episodes, nothing much. One thing I noticed though, is that the transcoding temp folder used (/var/packages/EmbyServer/var/transcoding-temp) has 25 GB worth of files (it had 40 GB at some point). Is that normal?

[josemanuelmoreno 1]

Hold on cayars, this is more useful:

I recycled Emby, and now the server log is way lighter.

I started watching the first movie, it froze. I did notice that the transcoding temp folder kept getting bigger and bigger, even though the playback is completely paused.

embyserver.txt ffmpeg-remux-10f21ecc-2bf0-4662-83bf-c14f465e1c46_1.txt

[Carlo 4561]

The remux on this looks like it abruptly froze.

Typically when this happens with a remux it's a bad file with encoding issue.

I would remux this file outside of Emby and try it again.

You may want to turn off Transcoding->Allow subtitle extraction on the fly and see if this helps at all in general for playback.

[Happy2Play 9780]

4 hours ago, josemanuelmoreno said:

I started watching the first movie, it froze. I did notice that the transcoding temp folder kept getting bigger and bigger, even though the playback is completely paused.

Pausing media will not stop the processing of the media unless you have throttling enabled, so ffmpeg will process the media until it completes.

[Luke 42078]

@josemanuelmoreno are you still running into this?

[josemanuelmoreno 1]

Thank you @Luke for reaching out. Well, I was having these problems with my browser when watching stuff in my desktop, when I should have been using Emby Theater for Windows in the first place. Well, I installed it! And problem solved. It looks absolutely fantastic with no hanging/freezing at all. The content is streamed perfectly now.

Now, regarding my LG OLED buffering when streaming 4K content. The problem was very simple: it was not transcoding at all, it was just the network card does not take more than 100 Mbps, very cheap, go figure. So I connected wirelessly to the router (very physically close) and problem solved. I know there are usb-3/ethernet adapters that should work with the TV and will give them a test as well.

In summary, thanks for the support! Emby still strong for me.

[Luke 42078]

47 minutes ago, josemanuelmoreno said:

Thank you @Luke for reaching out. Well, I was having these problems with my browser when watching stuff in my desktop, when I should have been using Emby Theater for Windows in the first place. Well, I installed it! And problem solved. It looks absolutely fantastic with no hanging/freezing at all. The content is streamed perfectly now.

Now, regarding my LG OLED buffering when streaming 4K content. The problem was very simple: it was not transcoding at all, it was just the network card does not take more than 100 Mbps, very cheap, go figure. So I connected wirelessly to the router (very physically close) and problem solved. I know there are usb-3/ethernet adapters that should work with the TV and will give them a test as well.

In summary, thanks for the support! Emby still strong for me.

Thanks for the feedback !