Bizarre “up next” behavior when away from home

Channels iOS Troubleshooting
#1

I have observed a strange behavior when watching recorded series remotely. This has been going on sporadically for at least a month, but today I noticed it on several series.

The issue seems to be related to channels dvr getting confused where playback should occur (indexing?) thinking an episode has been fully watched when it wasnt. The weird symptom is the episode will play a minute or so but then skip all the way to the end of the episode preparing for the next episode. The transport indicates 0 seconds left in the episode thats playing, and the next episode prompt will appear (if enabled) while the existing episode continues playing. There is no way to manually skip back or adjust where the program is on the timeline - no matter what you do the material keeps jumping to the end.

Ive have narrowed this down a bit. It seems to only happen remotely. I use tailscale (server based - not the built in channels tailscale). When i get home the same programs behave normally without doing anything other than joining my wifi network.

Remotley, ive tried toggling the individual show as watched and then unwatched (and then I tried the entire series) using the ios app. I also went into the channels server remotely and used the library to mark the shows as unwatched.

Even though it appears the series is unwatched, when playing back the episode the transport still jumps to the end of the show, displays the “up next” banner while finishing with 0 seconds left, getting ready for the next episode. I had one series daisy chain itself like this by hitting subsequent “up next” buttons and the whole series was unwatchable. There was simply no way to unwatch these shows.

This occurs on the release ios version as well as the latest test flight. Im using the latest mac server pre-release.

Happens on more than just one show. Some were TVE shows, some were recorded on my ah4c tuner. I think ive seen this on playon shows as well.

As soon as i go local on my home network, the problem resolves itself.

Very weird, and frustrating not to be able to get unwatched behavior back today until I got home.

#2

Im not sure if this helps with debug of this or not. But I just went into the log and captured the phenomenon:

2026/02/21 11:23:04.012400 [ENC] Starting encoder for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-3792319454/encoder-175-412358755 at 175 (174.810003) (encoder=h264_videotoolbox, codec=h264, acodec=copy, resolution=1080, deinterlacer=hardware, bitrate=7870, segment_size=0.01)
2026/02/21 11:23:04.134081 [HLS] ffmpeg: file10856-ip100.73.147.160:  [vost#0:0/h264_videotoolbox @ 0x15b611e70] -enc_time_base -1 is deprecated, use -enc_timebase demux
2026/02/21 11:23:10.803523 [ENC] Encoder stopped for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-3792319454/encoder-175-412358755 after encoding 175 to 191
2026/02/21 11:23:10.804087 [ENC] Next segment to pre-encode of 204 is 35.033323s from the last request of 169
2026/02/21 11:23:10.812003 [ENC] Starting encoder for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-3792319454/encoder-204-1804336951 at 204 (203.843326) (encoder=h264_videotoolbox, codec=h264, acodec=copy, resolution=1080, deinterlacer=hardware, bitrate=7870, segment_size=0.01)
2026/02/21 11:23:10.855241 [HLS] ffmpeg: file10856-ip100.73.147.160:  [vost#0:0/h264_videotoolbox @ 0x149710b30] -enc_time_base -1 is deprecated, use -enc_timebase demux
2026/02/21 11:23:17.602814 [ENC] Encoder stopped for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-3792319454/encoder-204-1804336951 after encoding 204 to 221
2026/02/21 11:23:17.603922 [ENC] Next segment to pre-encode of 237 is 1m0.05s from the last request of 177
2026/02/21 11:23:17.612167 [ENC] Starting encoder for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-3792319454/encoder-237-2252929090 at 237 (236.876659) (encoder=h264_videotoolbox, codec=h264, acodec=copy, resolution=1080, deinterlacer=hardware, bitrate=7870, segment_size=0.01)
2026/02/21 11:23:17.672799 [HLS] ffmpeg: file10856-ip100.73.147.160:  [vost#0:0/h264_videotoolbox @ 0x12ff06d30] -enc_time_base -1 is deprecated, use -enc_timebase demux
2026/02/21 11:23:20.402766 [ENC] Encoder stopped for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-3792319454/encoder-237-2252929090 after encoding 237 to 240
2026/02/21 11:23:20.405152 [ENC] Next segment to pre-encode of 388 is 3m28.21667s from the last request of 180
2026/02/21 11:23:20.411170 [ENC] Starting encoder for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-3792319454/encoder-388-780260594 at 388 (388.043329) (encoder=h264_videotoolbox, codec=h264, acodec=copy, resolution=1080, deinterlacer=hardware, bitrate=7870, segment_size=0.01)
2026/02/21 11:23:20.456695 [HLS] ffmpeg: file10856-ip100.73.147.160:  [vost#0:0/h264_videotoolbox @ 0x104b05570] -enc_time_base -1 is deprecated, use -enc_timebase demux
2026/02/21 11:23:38.202901 [ENC] Encoder stopped for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-3792319454/encoder-388-780260594 after encoding 388 to 443
2026/02/21 11:23:38.206295 [ENC] Next segment to pre-encode of 602 is 6m35.416685s from the last request of 207
2026/02/21 11:23:38.213050 [ENC] Starting encoder for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-3792319454/encoder-602-1811049958 at 602 (602.260011) (encoder=h264_videotoolbox, codec=h264, acodec=copy, resolution=1080, deinterlacer=hardware, bitrate=7870, segment_size=0.01)
2026/02/21 11:23:38.265314 [HLS] ffmpeg: file10856-ip100.73.147.160:  [vost#0:0/h264_videotoolbox @ 0x14a905690] -enc_time_base -1 is deprecated, use -enc_timebase demux

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After failure replicated..

I marked the program unwatched .....

Then I restarted viewing the episode from the beginning, and the show still jumps to end as if program was watched.

The log then appended this:

2026/02/21 11:30:55.802886 [ENC] Next segment to pre-encode of 944 is 9m33.583355999s from the last request of 371
2026/02/21 11:30:55.812118 [ENC] Starting encoder for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-2854188360/encoder-944-1136068393 at 944 (944.610018) (encoder=h264_videotoolbox, codec=h264, acodec=copy, resolution=1080, deinterlacer=hardware, bitrate=7870, segment_size=0.01)
2026/02/21 11:30:55.881322 [HLS] ffmpeg: file10856-ip100.73.147.160:  [vost#0:0/h264_videotoolbox @ 0x137607450] -enc_time_base -1 is deprecated, use -enc_timebase demux
2026/02/21 11:31:04.425506 [ENC] Stopped encoder for The Beauty S01E06 Beautiful Patient Zero 2026-02-11-1959.mpg in /Volumes/channels/Streaming/sessions/file10856-ip100.73.147.160-2854188360/encoder-944-1136068393 after encoding 944 to 96