Pandora on Xbox One freezes on ads

[Woody]

I have a pretty vanilla Pi-Hole setup. Ubiquiti Unifi network behind Spectrum internet. Pi-hole is DNS, Unifi controls DHCP. My Adlist is Steven Black's from github.

I'm IT competent, but not terribly so with Linux.

We have an Xbox One with the free Pandora app that we use for Christmas music. Before installing Pi-Hole, we'd get ads, and then more music. The ads consisted of a photo and about 30 seconds of audio.

After Pi-Hole, we get to an ad, there's a 'play' symbol on it, and silence. It basically freezes up the Pandora channel, and I have to close and restart the app.

I honestly don't mind the ads that much, but I don't necessarily want to whitelist the Xbox, if that makes sense.

Any thoughts or troubleshooting steps I should take next?

Thank you for your advice.

Debug Token: https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/cn0InFA7/

Debug Token:

[[https://tricorder.pi-hole.net/cn0InFA7/]

[chrislph]

@Woody

After Pi-Hole, we get to an ad, there's a 'play' symbol on it, and silence.

This kind of thing is quite common once Pi-hole is blocking domains. I see the same on some embedded video – the player loads but the content can't load and the player is just a sort of shell. That's because the player loads as part of the app or site, but the content for the player typically comes from a content delivery network somewhere else; these often have "cdn" in their domain names. Pi-hole may be blocking this, and hence you just get the empty player.

What happens next depends on how the app or site deals with that. It may freeze up waiting for content that never arrives, or it may try to play the next item, then the next, just skipping through a bunch of titles that don't work.

Here's a post from the Pi-hole Reddit where someone posted a load of whitelist and blacklist domains for Pandora radio. It may be worth a play with, but it is 4 years old so probably of limited use.

You may have to find where the content is coming from, and create a fake domain entry so it resolves to something, so the Pandora app "thinks" it's merely broken rather than unreachable, and this might be enough to stop it freezing. Your Query Log will help you see what's blocked and what's getting through. This post gets quoted a lot and may help.

How do I determine what domain an ad is coming from?

Block ads or fix broken sites This FAQ is written in the context of finding out how to block an ad that isn't blocked automatically, but the same steps can be used to troubleshoot issues with sites that don't function properly. An example is that sometimes certain payment gateways try to collect metrics on the sale, but these domains are blocked by Pi-hole, so the payment cannot be processed. Also, some links send you through several referrers and if one of them is blocked, you may land on a …

But it may be that the current version of the Pandora app simply cannot deal with advert content being blocked and sits there waiting, locking everything up.

[Woody]

Thanks. That's pretty much what I thought was happening. "Thanks for listening; here's your ad. Hey, Ad, let us know when you're done, and we'll get back to music..."

So, just after posting this, I fired up Pandora and it seems to be working. It's been playing for over an hour now, and no breaks. (I'm not actively watching to see if an ad is skipped, just listening in the background.)