Seeking on Android TV client causing delayed subtitles, brief frozen video

[cheeselord]

Hi again, I have another bug/configuration question related to the Android TV client (0.16.5) on my Fire Stick that I recently became aware of.

• When media is transcoding, I attempt to seek (fast forward) and then press play, the audio starts playing instantly, but the video is frozen for a couple of seconds while the server starts a new transcode process.  
  
• Additionally, the subtitles become de synced by a few seconds.  I have to back out of the stream for them to re sync.  Turning them off and back on does not help. 
  
• The frozen video occurs regardless if subtitles are enabled or not.  
  
• The subtitles are external SRT files and the server is set to the "Auto" burn in setting.
  
• This happens on both QuickSync and NVENC.
  

This does not occur during direct playback on the Fire Stick.  Attempting Direct Stream and transcoding on the web browser does not yield this behavior.  The Jellyfin iOS app does not seem to do this during transcode or Direct Stream either.

I've provided NVENC logs for the second transcode that is requested from the Android TV client, after the seek occurs.  They look identical to the logs from the above tests in the browser and iOS app and look very similar to the QuickSync logs.

  jf-server-log.txt (Size: 7.09 KB / Downloads: 37)
  video-frozen-audio-plays.txt (Size: 49.25 KB / Downloads: 13)

I'm thinking this is another one of those quirks with the Android TV client that I cannot find a definitive consensus on, but was hoping someone might have an idea what's going on.  From what I've been told by my other users, this has been happening before Android TV version 0.16.5, but I cannot confirm this since I do not transcode media locally very often.

[TheDreadPirate]

Were you using Exoplayer or libVLC?

[cheeselord]

Sorry, I should have clarified that this only happens in Exoplayer. LibVLC does not do this.

[TheDreadPirate]

For Fire Sticks you should manually set libVLC as the preferred player. A lot of users have been having issues with exo on their Fire Sticks.

This is pretty much the opposite advice I give for other Android TV devices. Normally I suggest that exo be the preferred player.

[cheeselord]

I see, thank you for the advice.  Most of my users seem to use the FireStick, so I will recommend explicitly switching players if heavy seeking is needed.

I would imagine the issues might be solved once the Playback Rewrite issue on Github is finished.  If these issues are caused by a silly limitation on the Firestick though, then that would be a bummer.