Digging into this a little more I found that the for “problem” movies the “View XML” link under “Get Info” will not load. I assume if that can’t be loaded then playback will never even try to start. It also seems that just trying to view that XML causes the CPU load on the server side.
this sounded like a similar issue->
And I had the same experience, if I update the includeRelated query param to =0 then the xml loads instantly (no CPU death spiral)
I’ll also note that disabling includeRelated for “good” media (media that doesn’t cause a death spiral) makes the metadata responses much faster (as just a few ms) where as it can take 2-10secs when that flag is enabled. This is similar to the playback delay I notice when starting playback. I actually haven’t checked if playback uses this query param flag to request metadata before playback… but seems like includeRelated would not be needed for regular playback…
