Today I added 6 new movie titles to my Movies folder. When I tried to play them in Jellyfin, it said the format wasn't supported, so I went to Media Centre to try them there, including one we already watched last week through Media Centre so we know it worked. I've not had this issue before at all and out of ideas. Browsing to the NAS share was fine, but when trying to open the Movies folder it went incredibly slow. Select a movie and try to play it, display on the Z9X went to 00:00:00 and the screen went black. After 30 seconds the player kicks you back out to the Movies folder with no playback. Screen still shows 00:00:00 which doesn't change. We can still watch content in other folders (which is when the display will change and show playback time remaining), so I moved the movie over to a temp folder and watched it from there, except playback was jittery and it only has a bitrate avg 7 814 kb/s, so I had to drop it on USB to play it smoothly. I restarted the Z9X and my NAS, reseated the network cables and still no joy playing from the Movies folder. I removed the 6 new films thinking maybe there's a max file limit (sitting around 2,950 files/folders in the Movies folder) but that didn't seem to resolve it. Is there a way to access a log file on the player to see what's happening when it tries to playback the file? I had the Resource Monitor up on the Synology NAS but stats were steady, nothing under high load. As Jellyfin is the only log I have access to, this is the playback error it threw at me which is strange as transcoding is off and playback is via Zidoo. [2023-10-27 19:39:53.312 +10:00] [INF] [96] Jellyfin.Api.Helpers.MediaInfoHelper: User policy for "sc-jellyfin". EnablePlaybackRemuxing: True EnableVideoPlaybackTranscoding: True EnableAudioPlaybackTranscoding: True [2023-10-27 19:39:53.312 +10:00] [INF] [96] Jellyfin.Api.Helpers.MediaInfoHelper: StreamBuilder.BuildVideoItem( Profile="AndroidTV-External", Path="/volume1/Media/Movies/Transformers Rise of the Beasts (2023).mkv", AudioStreamIndex=null, SubtitleStreamIndex=null ) => ( PlayMethod=Transcode, TranscodeReason=ContainerBitrateExceedsLimit ) "media:/videos/f62c8b3d-0d2b-04f4-7573-e96b3199aed6/stream?MediaSourceId=f62c8b3d0d2b04f47573e96b3199aed6&AudioStreamIndex=1&api_key=<token>&RequireAvc=false&Tag=0598dd489442a7baaf6011dbb53ca5f5&TranscodeReasons=ContainerBitrateExceedsLimit" Z9X on 6.4.42FW with latest Android TV Jellyfin client. Here to solve the playback issue with Media Centre, not Jellyfin, as it seems to be a player-based issue but only over the LAN. Network is currently connected via Ethernet, 1Gbps LAN, no packet loss or spikes in ping times, nothing in the router log to show an issue accessing the share from the network either.
To answer the log question, yes, you can run a debug log as detailed here: http://forum.zidoo.tv/index.php?threads/how-to-create-a-debug-log.93595/ In a situation like this you can keep the debug log as short as possible - ie, start log, immediately start a file, as soon as the problem manifests, immediately stop the log and review. As for the problem, this has the symptoms of a corrupt drive - just to confirm, you can't successfully play any of the files on that share now? First thing I'd do is test another network device - another NAS or a PC. I'd also create another share (a share, not a folder) on the existing NAS and test that. I know you're going to say there's nothing wrong with the NAS - everyone does, but the keys here are "when trying to open the Movies folder it went incredibly slow", "Select a movie ... After 30 seconds the player kicks you back out..." and of course Jellyfin throwing its catchall "format not supported". All obviously points to a network problem, but because the share is accessible it seems to point to corruption of the drive. I could be very wrong of course, but elimination is the name of the game.
Thanks for the quick reply Mark. I have 1 NAS (Synology) with 2 Shares. Media share has my TV, Movies, Temp and a few other folders in it. Nothing in Movies folder will play, but TV, Temp and new folders I create in the Media share still work. So doesn't appear to be a corrupt hard drive, and all SMART tests and HDD performance in Resource Manager during playback look fine. It plays from the Music share (2nd share on the NAS) as well. This morning so far I have turned everything (TV, Zidoo, hub, router, switch, modem, PC, NAS, etc.) off and unplugged it at the wall. Turned it back on starting with router, PC, NAS, then TV & Zidoo etc. Almost identical issue, log file attached. What I mean by almost is that instead of going straight to black, it shows the title of the movie on the screen briefly, a background image even loaded for one, but then it goes to black and no playback actually occurs. At a loss, attached the zip of the debug, hopefully that can shed some insight to it. I'm hesitant to copy 2,500 movies to a new folder just to see what happens (I did rename the folder, not expecting anything to change, and I was right. It was a waste of time lol). I was thinking maybe there's a hard cap on the number of files in each folder, but removing the new content should have put me back under any theoretical limit. I experienced this with music on USB drives in my car, they can only read around 20,000 files so I had to buy multiple smaller USB in order to get music in my car. Doesn't seem to be a file limit issue though.
It seems like the auto-generated ZIP is corrupt, so I selected all folders in rtk_dump and made a new ZIP attached to this post.
I'm no expert at reading these logs, but I think the key is line 2701 where there's a "Failed HIDL Return" which means a transport error and after that there's the crash log. So the player just seems to be failing to read the data. Not really helpful as I don't think this is anything to do with the Zidoo. You say in the last post "TV, Temp and new folders I create in the Media share still work" - do you mean they work perfectly as before (because in the first post you said playback from other folders was jittery). What happens if you move an older movie from the Movies folder into the Temp folder or another newly created folder?
Yeah, we watched Transformers in a Temp folder a couple weeks ago and it was fine, then wouldn't play in the Movies folder. Put it back to the temp folder and it played fine. The movie that was jittery yesterday was in the temp folder as well, but today after all the reboots I played the same parts of the film that jittered and it didn't happen, so I think that network glitch has been resolved. So right now playback of films in a temp folder continues to work ok, even large 1080p content, haven't testes 4K as I don't have much. TV shows and documentaries have been flying all day though since the reboot without any glitches. I just tried to play a 400MB Christmas short in the Movies folder to see if maybe there was a cache issue, the picture played for about 10-15 seconds then went back to the Zidoo home screen, but the audio kept going and I had to reboot the player to get it to stop. I'm not sure if the size of the file has any bearing on it though given a full 9GB feature length film played from a different folder without issue and the TV shows are still fine. So moving out of Movies and into temp folder is fine for playback, no black screen and jitters seem to be gone.
Ok, so it seems like for whatever reason, when you moved those 6 movies into the Movies folder that somehow corrupted the file structure of that particular folder. Never seen that before, but definitely not beyond the realms of possibility and I have seen plenty of other weird s**t go on with NAS shares. So, I'd try this, in this order: 1. Create a new folder in that share called MovieTemp 2. Copy 5 random, but not new, movies from the Movies folder to the MovieTemp folder 3. Check those 5 movies play ok and and you can skip around them - if so proceed to 4. 4. Copy the rest of the movies from Movies to MovieTemp 5. Rename Movies to MoviesOld 6. Rename MovieTemp to Movies And check playback. You should be effectively in the same boat as before but the file allocations will have been rewritten and hopefully the issue sorted... (Copying the movies should be a relatively fast operation - because both folders are in the same share, copying doesn't actually change the physical location, just the file allocation, so the data itself doesn't have to move.)
Ok so now I have Media\Films and moved everything from Media\Movies to the new folder, 2,945 files/folders. The problem persists with the Films folder. Here's what I did over the past 1.5 hours: I moved the first 15 back to the Movies folder, no playback issue noticed on 2 films I tried before that were failing. So I moved all #-A titles across, 209 in the Movies folder. Pick 2 more random movies, no problems with 15GB 1080p film or a 35GB 4K rip. I went to 1,100 titles and tried a few more, still playing OK. 2,000 titles, a 4K now took longer than the first one to load (about 5 seconds), but it played. At 2,100 titles, a 1080p also took a few seconds, but it did play. So it seems like time to load/play a file is starting to slowdown now. 2,200 titles, playback start time is noticeably slower, even a 576p file is taking 10-15 seconds to start playback. Network traffic on the NAS is showing about 2.5MB/s during a 576p playback. At 2,300 titles it's taking ~23 seconds to start playback of a 576p or 1080p, same time regardless the quality/size. During the black screen before playback, NAS traffic is showing no activity, doesn't see a jump in traffic until playback actually starts, so doesn't seem like the network is doing much while the black screen is up. 2,400 same result with start times taking between 13 to 25 seconds. 2,500 titles and things start to get interesting. The Matrix takes about 30 seconds, plays about 3 seconds of the WB logo, then goes back to the Home screen while the audio continues to play. Try a 5 minute 140MB short after a reboot, it did the same thing. About 25 seconds to load, played about 2-3 seconds, then back to Home while the audio continued. But when I copied 100 more across and played another title, after about 25 seconds this one played and continued to play. Still slow load time, but it didn't crash out back to the home scree (1.41GB 576p file). 2.700 and another 576p played ok, put on a 720p HD title and it crashed to the Home screen with no audio in the background after 2-3 seconds of the 20th Century Fox intro. Similar story at 2,800 titles, except both SD & HD are stopping after 2-3 seconds of playback and ~25 second start time delays. For some it sounds like the audio playback actually continues but the Home screen is up and the LED display is stuck on the time remaining in the film. I'm guessing when I thought the audio stopped, it was just due to silent intro's, like a WB feature doesn't have an audio track like 20th Century Fox for instance. At 2,850 titles I notice 576p files under 2GB will play 2-3 seconds while a 10GB 1080p will only play for a second or less then both return to the Home screen. Again, the audio seems to continue with playback time still on the LED display. Same at 2,870 titles. In some instances the audio stops when the video stops, but mostly the audio playback continues when the video stops and throws you out to the Home screen. I thought I noticed a pattern of what screen you get thrown to (file list of Movies folder where you left off or Home screen) but seems not to be the case. In cases where audio continues after video stops it throws me back to both screens randomly, same with audio/video crashing, could be thrown back to either screen with no apparent pattern. Once I got to 2,895 I started adding films 5 at a time as I was closing in on what I had previously. Same patterns continued, in most cases audio kept going but not always and playback stopped after 1-3 seconds. From 2,945 I started adding films one at a time, same behaviour through to all 2,952 films being added, including the handful of new ones I added that started it all. Movie will take about 25-30 seconds before it plays, go for 1-3 seconds, then kick you out and keep playback time on the LED. I noticed on a few occasions after I rebooted the player it would seem to play the first thing I selected OK but everything after that crashed. But other times after a reboot, the same title would crash, so again I couldn't find a pattern or consistency with it. I don't watch movies very often, mostly TV shows, so it's hard to say when the playback problem occurred. According to Trakt, the last time I watched a movie via Jellyfin before this issue was Oct 15 when one of the kids watched something (I'll confirm in the morning if the full movies played OK or not). According to Trakt, nothing new was added between then until yesterday when this issue started. So it seemed to start after crossing the 2,950 title barrier, though as above delays seem to kick in noticeably from around 2,200 titles and is consistently over 20 seconds after 2,300 titles, and playback starts to fail from 2,500 titles in the folder.
Wow - that's really really odd - I've never seen that sort of behaviour from a NAS before - like you said earlier, there seems to be some sort of file limit, if not in terms of storage, certainly in terms of performance. I really don't understand why that would be the case, but one workaround that springs to mind is to split the collection up alphabetically? You shouldn't really have to I know, but sometimes practicality trumps common sense and I do tend to prefer pragmatism...
I was thinking the same, going to hit the Jellyfin forums today to find out what happens when you try to span a library over different folders and if the existing metadata/images will be retained, etc. I've spent most of the past year verifying the collection and I'm at the T's now, I would hate to have to go through another re-scan and do that again. Hopefully it will recognize the folder move and just update the file path with nothing else. It's easy enough to add a second path to a library, so hopefully the folder move doesn't mess anything up. Will you report the issue to the devs and see if there is in fact a limitation of some sort for a single folder? I thought about it this morning, in case it's a size thing rather than file number, here's total size of the collection at key points (assuming it would go alphabetical...) 2,200 titles = 6.12TB 2,300 titles = 6.41TB 2,500 titles = 7.14TB 2,950 titles = 8.45TB Also confirmed the movie the kid watched on the 15th played successfully in Jellyfin, so it seems to be those last 6 additions that pushed it over the edge, so I'm guessing file-based limit rather than data limit. The last time I played a movie in Jellyfin was Oct 6. I added 37 films on Oct 9, using Jellyfin I don't recall any delays starting the movies, let alone up to 25-30 seconds, so it seemed to be playing back fine around the 2,920 movie count. I'll double check if JF will play movies if I have under 2,950 files in the folder and if the same sort of issues occur as Media Centre. I assume they should, as I have Zidoo as the external player.
Ok everything you know about life just got thrown out the window. I thought I would do a quick Jellyfin test. I opened Jellyfin, picked the most recently added film and played it. Time remaining came up on the LED almost instantly, then the film started playing. No delays, certainly not 20+ seconds. And no weird unsupported format error like 2 days ago. So I closed Jellyfin, went to Media Centre, picked a random film... long delay, failed after a couple seconds. Same as before. I go back to Jellyfin, pick the same film that just failed, it's playing fine. WTF?? Go to Settings, preferred media player is still External App. I'm dying here. what the hell Well, I'm gonna try to watch one of them in full via Jellyfin this afternoon and see how it goes, I'm blown away though that it's even playing if External App is set and it still fails via Media Centre.
