I am in a bit of a rush out to the dentist so excuse any errors in my post and wish me luck!
So i am running Xibo on an S905 Android TV Box and it works fine for the most part. The main issue we were having was the transitions from video to video which is mostly just down to the time it takes for the Player to stop one video then load and play the next. So i began a bunch of test to see if i could improve the load time by removing apps, cleaning the memory etc etc and nothing changed. I had also rendered the videos being played with fade to white (So i could see what was happening) and the transition was still not great. I then changed the background to white and what was happening was the video would fade to white, then black, then white (The Background) then black then the next video. This was all happening in about a second but unacceptable none the less.
Sooooooo with a bit more exploring i disabled surface rendering in the CM and boom! perfect transitions, no gaps nothing. Even the end of the playlist wasn’t hanging to restart like it was in the past. I did discover that the background was actually covering up the section between the videos after but who cares. It works perfectly.
Now. the problem im having is the player just decides to freeze the video after a given period of time. The whole application responds, i can close and re open it and it will play again until it freezes but thats it.
As i am writing this i extended the server check in time from 1 minute to 5 minutes and it appears to have stopped the issue and bang on 5 minutes it froze again. I have now extended it to 4 hours to see if it has no issues while i am gone.
If anyone has any information on this it would be great. Will keep you posted on what i find here.
Those are XMR errors, which in itself should not cause the player to freeze.
That being said, do you have XMR correctly configured?
If yes, then please navigate to Displays page -> edit display -> advanced -> reconfigure xmr -> Save and restart Xibo for Android.
If not, please configure XMR correctly (please also make sure that ZeroMQ is installed and enabled - Report fault page).
Is this display using internal or external storage?
If it’s on internal you could try switching it to external storage.
OK so i attached external storage and nothing changed. It is still freezing. I tried other android boxes and i am having the same issues with them.
I didnt see XMR anywhere. I am still using 1.7.9 which i suspect is part of the problem. I want to upgrade to 1.8 but i want to familiarize myself with the upgrade process by doing a few trial runs on my testing server first! I will only get one shot at this sort of thing and i dont necessarily understand it. Mind you ive probably made the process more complex in my head.
Ok, so an update with an update 27 days later. I am now running 1.8.2 with r102. Although the issue has changed a little it is still occurring only when surface rendering is disabled. It is talking longer for the box to freeze, usually on the last couple of frames of any given video. I have checked the logs and this is what is showing.
It is interesting that your latest screenshot shows that the “Player is missing dependencies” - can you confirm that screenshot was taken at the end of a video?
Can you also confirm that the device is not “locked up” and that the player application is not “locked up”? I suspect not, as you can clearly get to the client information window.
Instead of closing and reopening, can you open the settings and then back out - does that also clear the issue?
From a technical perspective the error messages aren’t linked directly to a video lockup. They come from separate parts of the application, which actually run in separate “entities”. However it does seem odd that in both cases you get some messages related to networking.
Are your videos locally stored or streamed?
Does this only happen with video content - i.e. if you have a layout with a set of images, does it do the same?
Ok so the player hasn’t locked up. I can still access the status and settings as per normal. I actually took that screenshot with teamviewer so the player is operational.
I can confirm that it froze at the end of/or near end of video, maybe 2-3 frames short. I know this because we use fades on the end of our renders and the you can still see the content, just about before it hits the last blank frame.
When i open and close settings it restarts and works fine.
My videos are stored locally.
I haven’t tried it with images and surface based rendering disabled but i will run tests now. I can confirm that it all works fine with surface rendering enabled only it transitions between content is awful.
I tested this across three different players which are all still online but frozen and they all shared the same issue
I have also noticed in the CMS that players that displayed this issue have an X in status. These are the only players doing so. The rest, not using this display profile, download and change back.
It happens totally at random. It might be 5-10 minutes all the way up to never. (If it doesnt freeze up, it will start doing it again if the player is restarted, this would be manageable if its frequency was 1 in 100 froze but not 9 out in 10 and possibly higher ) .
Here is the log from another player having the same issue. As you can see the white image is the last frame of the video (White Fade). There are no Log errors. In fact the only setting different to the others is Surface View is disabled.
Great - hopefully we can generate some helpful debugging messages.
Would you be able to recreate the issue with auditing switched on? You could create an new display profile for this, with surfaceview off and auditing on. Assign that to your display, and while you are doing that, in your advanced tab switch on auditing there too - enter a date several days into the future.
Then recreate the issue - grab a status screenshot as you’ve been doing - and restart the player so that it is able to send the logs.
If there is any chance of remote access to the CMS, that would make those logs really easy to see - if not, you can filter the log page by the display in question and export to PDF.
I will only get one shot at this sort of thing and i dont necessarily understand it. Mind you ive probably made the process more complex in my head.
