No control over playback in "Video Files" library

Free Man · March 5, 2024 at 10:51 PM

I'm running LibreELEC-RPi5.aarch64-12.0-nightly-20240303-d72cc46 on an RPi5, Embruary skin, and EmbyCon to connect to my Emby server running in a docker on UNRAID. (Just upgraded from LibreELEC-RPi5.aarch64-12.0-nightly-20240215-540999d, happened on both versions. Haven't tested on anything older.)

I've added my "Sports" network share where I have mostly race videos, organized like this:

Code

Sports
--F1
----2023
----2024
--V8
----2023
----2024

Side Note:

Each directory can have anywhere from 3 to 10 files covering one race weekend. I have these videos in just a file structure, because I've got recordings of practice, qualifying & the race for various race series and it doesn't fit neatly into Emby's format - it wants to list everything in one huge "episode list" and I don't like them that way - I prefer to organize the files into race weekends so I can watch an entire F1 race weekend, then maybe jump to a Supercars weekend, then to something else. (If anyone knows of a good way to integrate this as a "TV Show" in Emby, I'd be more than happy to rearrange, but this is the best I've come up with.)

The Problem:

Once I start playing a video from this directory structure, I've got no remote control over it other than "Stop". I can't hit pause, the jump forward/back don't work. Hitting stop does not set a bookmark, so I have to restart from the beginning (which can be annoying, some of the files are a full day's worth of coverage - 8-10 hours long). Fast forward & rewind do not work.

If I play a show or movie from a media library, everything works fine.

I've done it this way for more than a decade and I've never had issues before.

Anyone have any idea where I should start looking to figure out what's going on?

Unfortunately, I can no longer log into the Kodi forums to ask (my old account doesn't seem to work, nor does password recovery), and it won't let me create a new account, insisting that my @gmail.com email address is invalid... :shrug:

**Da Flex** · March 5, 2024 at 11:31 PM

Please provide a full debug log.

How to post a log (wiki)

1. Enable debugging in Settings>System Settings>Logging
2. Restart Kodi
3. Replicate the problem
4. Generate a log URL (do not post/upload logs to the forum)

use "Settings > LibreELEC > System > Paste system logs" or run "pastekodi" over SSH, then post the URL link

**chewitt** · March 6, 2024 at 7:25 AM

I've recently seen media that only displays a "stop" button in the OSD and the underlying issue was the container (mkv) reporting no duration and thus Kodi has no way to calculate progress. Kodi logs showed this:

Code

Duration: N/A, start: -0.005000, bitrate: N/A

No guarantees your media is the same, but maybe..

Two suggestions for organising things:

Have a look at the "node editor" add-on in the Kodi repo. Nodes are things like "recently added" and "genres" that appear in the GUI, so they combine a node name (can be anything) with saved searches (inclusions and exclusions) and sorting to leverage media metadata in the library DB. I've no idea how that function might be influenced with Emby as the underlying back-end, but it's worth a look.

Kodi Omega also gained a new "versions" capability for movies, allowing e.g. the standard movie, the directors cut, the 3D version, the fan remix, etc. to be stored under a common movie name. Race Weekends are not movies, but some creative abuse of .nfo files and the local file scraper could probably bastardise things into showing a movie name (Race Weekend) with different versions of the movie (Practice, Qualifying, Race, etc.).

Free Man · March 8, 2024 at 11:14 PM

Oddly enough, it started working fine shortly after I posted this question. Not sure what the issue was. :shrug: