Server Version#: 1.23.4.4712 on Ubuntu 21.04
Player Version#: Web Player 4.59.2, Firefox 89.0.2 on windows 10 / android
EDIT: I think I fixed it, the host time was wrong, which kept getting synced to the VM, which would then talk to NTP servers and set it back to the right time. I noticed htop just…stop refreshing after a while, then checked the logs and realised the timestamps jump around, by a lot in some cases.
Anyway it’s too late to keep testing, but every video I’ve tried since fixing the time has now worked 
If it’s broken again in the morning I’ll edit this again.
I have this frustrating issue whereby the transcoder refuses to process more than a minute or two of video before giving up and complaining that the idle timer of 180 seconds was reached. At this point no more data is sent to the web player, which then buffers indefinitely. Watching the same video through the web app on android or iOS also fails, but the native android app plays flawlessly.
Some background info: Most of my videos are MKVs with vp9 video in them, which means they all have to be remuxed / transcoded for the web player. I’ve also tried playing some h264, as well as h264 in MP4s without success. In the dashboard the server reports transcoding initially then switches to showing ‘direct play’ after a few seconds.
Server is a VM in a small ESXi box, 3 cores allocated with 4 GB RAM. While transcoding the bar races well ahead of the playback scrubber, so it doesn’t feel like the system is out of compute or IO. The media is housed on a CIFS share on an adjacent VM. Library is in its default place in /var. Transcodes are done in /tmp, which never exceed more than a couple hundred MB in size. The current library is a copy of my main library, which came from a very similar server running CentOS 7. That server plays these same files flawlessly, using basically the same setup.
Things I’ve tried without success:
- Updating the server from a prior version of both Ubuntu and PMS
- Updating firefox + windows on the clients
- Connecting via ethernet
- Disabling IPV6 / secure connections
- Messing with the transcoding throttle buffer, as well as the “Terminate Sessions Paused for Longer Than” setting
- Toggling Strict TLS, GDM, DLNA settings
- Toggling every option in the transcoding page (disabling video stream transcoding results in no playback at all)
- Disabling firewall on both server and the problematic clients
- Clearing Cache / Codec folders, as well as the Preferences.xml
- Wiping the entire library and making a new one with only a handful of files
