"Playback Error" on mp4 or mkv files for the last few months

[d4005b]

Is anyone else experiencing this? The video will be happily playing on my Android TV box with the file being read from local network. Then at random it pauses the video and has a dialog with Playback Error on it. If I press the << button on the remote, to go back 10 seconds and hit OK on the remote to continue playing, it will start playing again and get past the same point without issue - thereby implying there wasn't actually a problem in the file because if there was, it would get the same error again. This fact makes me think it could be an issue with network latency but we're talking about a LAN connection from the TV box and a fairly low res video (e.g. 854x480 @ 1 Mbps). If I run a network speed test on the Android box I get 100 Mbps, limited by the hub.

I don't see any buffering options on the Android version like I do on the Windows version so I can't verify if that's the issue. I'm currently running a locally-copied version of one of the MP4's I've seen this error on. If I can re-run it many times without error then at least I'll definitely know the network aspect of things is the problem. The reason I'm doubtful of that is that I've been using this TV box over this network with the videos created from the same source without issue for a few years. All of a sudden sometime earlier this year, this error starts appearing (several times a day). It could be the software generating the MP4 videos but I have tried running them through FFMPEG and converting them to MKV and that didn't help either.

Ideas for what it might be and what I could try:
- Could be Network, try copying files locally to the Android box and play directly from there (trying this currently).
- Could be MP4/MKV issue, try converting to MOV or AVI or even WMV see if the problem goes with it.

[Aza]

I definitely looks like a network issue. What system is your network machine running on?

Could you please share some logs? Reproduce the issue and then go to: Settings > Advanced > Debug logs.
To retrieve the logs on Android TV, you should follow this: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.ph ... ck#p509973
Then share the logs with the sharing service you prefer (Google Drive, Dropbox, pastebin...).

[d4005b]

I'm pretty much in agreement. What I've started doing since this post on Wednesday is rather than trying to open the mp4 or mkv directly from the network folder and play from there, I copy all the videos I have there to the local downloads folder on the Android TV box and play from there instead. So far I've watched maybe 4-5 hours worth without a single playback error. Normally during that amount of playback time I'd have an error roughly every half hour. So it's looking like a decent workaround.

The problem does still exist though ... if you watch a video from the network (even via LAN) and the network is otherwise not being used, so it's not like it's busy, you can get a buffering issue. I proved this by watching a video on the Android box coming from the network and then in parallel, rebooted my router so that the file was not available. The observed behaviour is identical, it pauses the video and shows "Playback error". So I'm guessing that if the buffer runs down to zero, either because someone rebooted the router, or just because of network latency, then this happens.

The solution would be to offer the access to the buffer size in the Android UI just like you get on the Windows version of VLC. Then I can set a decent buffer size and this shouldn't happen again.

I'm reasonably happy with my workaround though - it's no big hardship. Copying a few hours worth of video across the network only takes a couple of minutes.