Channels taking more then 2 mins to launch...help?

Fin756 · January 30, 2024, 11:05pm

So I've been having issues where I'm using just any device like a Apple TV or a Nvidia Shield TV And Channels just sits there saying "preparing your TV" and does nothing..

I'm just waiting and it surpasses 2+ mins and I just end up quitting the app and go to my Plex app where it loads and I'm in watching TV under 30 seconds(22 seconds to be exact).

This is with my full library of TV shows and movies and recordings.

I have it on my computer that's band new i7-13700k and 32GB of memory hardwared to my network.

And channels is up to date on a beta.

Both are on a fast SSD, channels is saying 4GBps write and 10 GBps read.
I used to have channels pointing to a Stablebit drive pool so I thought it was that so I moved channels to the SSD with same issue

I use the computer both for gaming and TV..well most of the time each task at once but when I'm gaming Plex doesn't have any issue doing both recording/watching TV on a different device if my family so chooses.

Please any help. Thanks

Oh and I've done a complete reinstall of channels thinking it was that with the same issue.

Morris_Altman · January 31, 2024, 12:00am

Sounds like a network issue. If the only thing that change is the server, then look at it's connections and NIC settings.

Good luck!

Fin756 · January 31, 2024, 12:12am

If it was network issue why doesn't it effect any other media server on the network? it doesn't matter if I'm running them all at the same time or one at a time with same issue Channels is always the longest to launch if it does at all.

tmm1 · January 31, 2024, 12:16am

What does speed test inside the Channels app show?

eric · January 31, 2024, 12:25am

After you've started the app, please go to Settings -> Support -> Submit Diagnostic Logs from your device and let us know when it's been submitted so we can have a better idea of what was going on.

Fin756 · January 31, 2024, 12:27am

Well it seems like channels is just crashing/going back the home screen of the Shild now after the "preparing your TV..." and doesn't get into my content.

Morris_Altman · January 31, 2024, 12:29am

Are those media servers running on the same new computer?

Fin756 · January 31, 2024, 12:33am

Yes, but this was after I started having this issue with channels. I only installed them because channels would take forever to launch.

I've only had the time to figure it out now and channels is now crashing lol

The other two are Emby and Plex which have no issues, but I like Channels more.

Fin756 · January 31, 2024, 12:39am

It also seems like Channels is having a panic alert in the server logs.

I'm going to test my Apple TV to see if same issue.

Fin756 · January 31, 2024, 12:43am

So my Apple TV was able to launch but it took almost a minute and 15 seconds to launch.

Sending logs

Plex over here ready 6 seconds from launch

eric · January 31, 2024, 1:17am

It looks like there's something funny going on with our discovery related to your 78,602 recordings.

Could you do something to help us track this down? Grab out Testflight beta at Channels — Beta Program

Then open the beta app, go to Settings -> Debug and enable Report Performance Telemetry and then kill the app and restart it.

Hopefully that will tell us more about what's going on.

Fin756 · January 31, 2024, 1:29am

Haha I felt that 78k for some reason lol

Just downloaded the TestFlight Channels app and enabled telemetry and killed it, relaunched so done and done.

eric · January 31, 2024, 1:35am

Unfortunately that didn't capture what I hoped it would... I'm struggling to figure out how to get the telemetry needed. Are these mostly movies or TV shows? I'll see if I can replicate this locally.

Fin756 · January 31, 2024, 1:43am

Yes they are

eric · January 31, 2024, 1:46am

Which? Movies or TV shows?

Fin756 · January 31, 2024, 1:54am

Movies about 3,000 and the rest are about 1,000 Tv shows lol so that could acquaint for the rest of the 75k+ episodes of TV shows.

eric · January 31, 2024, 7:56pm

I just loaded up 62k recordings (via strmlinks) to get a large library and pointed the app at it (running on the latest gen 4K Apple TV) and I'm not able to replicate what you're seeing. It looks like it's spending about 7 seconds deserializing all of the recording objects on startup, but I'm not seeing the 1 minute delay you're experiencing.

Fin756 · January 31, 2024, 9:28pm

Well that's unfortunate. The only thing that I can think of that could be different that most peoples setup is I use a hardware firewall called opnsense with Unbound and AdGaurdHome, but I don't have any special settings at all and I don't use TVE.

Fin756 · February 18, 2024, 1:33pm

So some update to this…I continued to work on this on my own () when I could and I thought of just doing a fresh install since I tried everything else even doing away with the hardware firewall and the fresh install seems to have helped a lot!

I’m down from 1min+ load time on my Apple TV to just about 31s. This was just yesterday so it’s still scanning my library so hopefully when it’s done it will drop down to sub 10s like Plex is at right now.

I haven’t tried my Nvidia shield yet to see if it still crashes, but I plan to later on this week.

eric · February 18, 2024, 8:12pm

I'm not completely sure what the disparity is between the times you're seeing and the times that I'm seeing.

It could be that there's something about your library that is more resource-intensive to process on the client, but the other thing that I notice is different is that I've been testing on the newer Apple TV 4K, which does have a faster processor (though I am not sure by how much).