TV App often stuck for a long time before playing content

[ajkessel]

I've been beta-testing the latest TestFlight Apple TV 4K VLC (3.1.0 395) and have encountered a mostly but not 100% reproducible problem where I select video content from an SMB share and the player just gets stuck with "please wait" and a spinning wheel for quite a while -- as long as 1-2 minutes -- before it starts playing.

When I navigate to the identical content item on the same network share with VLC iOS (over WiFi) or VLC desktop (over Ethernet), the same item plays instantly (no perceptible delay).

The Apple TV is connected to the SMB server via Ethernet, not WiFi, and once it starts playing, it is fine -- so it seems unlikely that this is a network speed issue.

Is there any way I can troubleshoot this? VLC-ATV is opaque to me -- is there a way to generate a log file to see what is going on?

[summit48]

I would look at the log file on the Ubuntu SMB server. It is possible there is an issue with Ethernet on the Ubuntu SMB server. If possible try testing a win10 or macOS SMB server.

There could also be an issue with VLC-tvOS V 3.1.0 395 TestFlight. I am not on VLC-tvOS TestFlight so I cannot test with my Win10 and macOS SMB Servers. A quick test would be to roll back to the latest version of VLC-tvOS.

[ajkessel]

Confirmed that this delay only occurs in the Testflight release. I switched back and forth twice between the App Store version and the Testflight version. The App Store version always started playing content immediately, while the Testflight version had a long delay before content began.

[Rickers123]

I see this on tvOS and iOS. It happens when there are 100s and 100s (don't have an exact figure) of items in the list. It's almost as if it walks the entire list before playing the selection. FIltering is broken on tvOS but, if you filter it down to a handful of files using search on iOS, the clip will start right up.