Emby is Jellyfin's upstream ancestor and speaks a near-identical MediaBrowser
API, so the existing Jellyfin stack is parameterised by a `MediaBrowserDialect`
rather than forked. `JellyfinClient`, its auth service, endpoint discovery, LAN
discovery, and the add/edit connection screens all take the dialect and keep one
implementation; `MediaBackend.emby` and `ConnectionKind.emby` carry it through
the neutral models, the Drift `kind` discriminator, downloads, and caches.
Every divergence below was measured against a live Emby 4.9.5 server, not
inferred from documentation, and each is documented at its capability getter.
Jellyfin's request strings stay byte-identical so nothing about its behaviour
changes.
Routes and auth
- Emby only accepts the pre-10.9 user-scoped item routes (`/Users/{id}/Items/…`,
`/Users/{id}/PlayedItems/…`, `/Users/{id}/FavoriteItems/…`); the unprefixed
forms Jellyfin 10.11 added return 404.
- The API is also served under a legacy `/emby` prefix, and both dialects accept
the token as `X-Emby-Token` or `api_key=`.
- Emby answers only its own LAN discovery datagram ("who is EmbyServer?") and
ignores Jellyfin's; its default HTTPS port is 8920.
- No `/QuickConnect` route exists, so Quick Connect stays Jellyfin-only.
Row fields Emby withholds
- `ProductionYear`, `OfficialRating`, `PremiereDate` and `DateCreated` are absent
from list rows unless named in `Fields`, which would otherwise strip the year
and age-rating badge from every card in the app.
- `UserData.LastPlayedDate` never appears on a list row under `Fields=UserData`,
`EnableUserData=true` or the user-scoped `Ids=` form — only on the single-item
detail route, or when the Emby-specific `UserDataLastPlayedDate` token is
requested. Without it every recency-ordered surface silently degrades to
library-add time, and `JellyfinApiCache.applyWatchState` stamps
`DateTime.now()` on watched rows, so an offline watch-state pull would rewrite
the cached play time of everything it walked.
Continue Watching and Next Up
- Emby computes Next Up per series only: the library-wide `/Shows/NextUp` query
returns nothing under every parameter combination tried. The shelf is
therefore reconstructed from a played-episode recency scan plus one
`/Shows/NextUp?SeriesId=` per distinct series, bounded by a shared wall clock
that covers the scan as well — per-request timeouts cannot bound the pass
because `MediaServerHttpClient` times the connect and receive phases
independently. Rows are stamped with their series' newest play from the same
response that ordered them, so no per-series enrichment request is needed.
- `/Shows/NextUp` ignores `NextUpDateCutoff`, and no server-side played-date
filter exists to delegate to (`MinDatePlayed` and `MinDateLastPlayed` are
ignored; `MinDateLastSaved`, `MinDateCreated` and `MinPremiereDate` filter
unrelated dates), so the 365-day window is applied to the scanned dates.
- The resume route returns items with no saved position, including plain next
episodes, so the Emby resume leg reads from `/Items?Filters=IsResumable`.
- Emby is ahead of Jellyfin in one place: `/Users/{id}/Items/{id}/HideFromResume`
makes Continue Watching removal a real capability.
Everything else
- `/Sessions/Playing` and `/Sessions/Playing/Progress` reject a body with no
`PlaySessionId` (HTTP 400), so playback reporting always sends one.
- Passing any `MediaTypes` value to the playlist query returns an empty list.
- There is no aggregate `/Items/Filters` route; the four filter facets are
reassembled from `/Genres`, `/OfficialRatings`, `/Studios` and `/Tags`.
- Metadata writes take name-pair lists (`Genres: [{'Name': 'Action'}]`); the
plain string array is accepted and then silently discarded.
- Custom artwork uploads must be base64 text, not raw bytes — which was broken
for Jellyfin too and is fixed for both.
- Trickplay, media segments and lyrics 404 on Emby, so scrub previews are absent
and intro/credit markers fall back to chapter names.
Verified against a local Emby 4.9.5 and a Jellyfin 10.11.11 control server:
onboarding, browse, detail, playable stream URLs serving real bytes, subtitle
sidecars, watch-state write and restore, hubs, cross-server aggregation and
search across both backends simultaneously.
A local profile had no picture of its own and always fell back to
initials. It now borrows the user picture of the connection it was
linked to first — oldest Connection.createdAt, ties broken by
connection id, since the join table carries no creation time.
Jellyfin links resolve to /Users/{id}/Images/Primary, keyed by the
PrimaryImageTag now captured at authentication and refreshed from the
/Users/Me body checkHealth already fetches. That endpoint is anonymous
on every Jellyfin release, so the URL carries no api_key and the access
token stays out of the image cache key. Plex links resolve the Home
user the link points at against PlexHomeService's live cache, so no
account-level lookup is needed and the picture tracks Plex's own
refresh.
The picture is derived per snapshot and never written back onto a
Profile: ProfileDetailScreen upserts the model it holds, so a
persisted URL would go stale and outlive the connection it came from.
Plex Home profiles are untouched, including one whose Plex avatar is
unset — it keeps its initials rather than borrowing a lent connection's
picture.
close#1667
Plezy rendered exactly one score per item. MediaRatingBadge._ratingDataFor
took `rating` and fell back to `audienceRating` only when it was null, so a
Plex movie carrying four attributed scores surfaced one, and which one was
whatever the server happened to put in the scalar slot. #1755 asked for a
setting to choose the source; showing all of them answers it without one.
The data was already on the wire and being thrown away. `/library/metadata/
{id}` returns a `Rating[]` child array — IMDb, both Rotten Tomatoes panels,
TMDB — with no extra query parameter, but PlexMetadataDto declared no field
for it, so json_serializable dropped the key. The identical parse already
existed in plex_catalog_source for the Explore tab and had simply never been
wired to library items.
Model the scores as a list rather than widening the scalar pair. The neutral
MediaItem gains `ratings`; PlexMediaItem loses audienceRating, ratingImage
and audienceRatingImage, which the list subsumes — Plex sends those images
on listings too, so the same field covers both response shapes and no caller
narrows to a backend type to read a score any more. CatalogRatingSource is
promoted to lib/media as MediaRatingSource instead of growing a second
near-identical type beside it, and plex_catalog_source's _ratingsFor becomes
the shared plexRatingSources so one implementation serves both paths. There
is no persistence to migrate: MediaItem.toJson has no production caller, the
offline path re-parses raw Plex JSON through the same mapper, and Plex's
audienceRating sort is server-supplied data, not a model read.
Cards and the dashboard still show fewer scores than detail screens, and
that part is a real Plex limit rather than a shortcut. Section listings send
only the scalar pair; includeRatings, includeElements=Rating,
includeFields=Rating, includeChildren and includeExtras were each probed
against a live server and none surfaced the array, while includeGuids=1
demonstrably does add Guid[] — the probe works, the parameter does not
exist. Hydrating every card would be one request per row, so listings render
whatever their own response carried, which is one or two attributed scores
rather than the single one they showed before.
Jellyfin has no per-source array at all: the server collapses whatever its
fetchers found into CommunityRating and CriticRating. CommunityRating's
provenance is unknowable from the DTO — TMDB vote_average, IMDb via OMDb or
a local NFO, last writer wins — so it stays the generic `audience` source
with no brand mark. CriticRating is the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer as a
0-100 percent and is divided by ten explicitly rather than folded by
magnitude, because a Tomatometer of 9 means 9% and range-sniffing would have
promoted a rotten score to fresh. Photo rows are skipped, since Jellyfin
reuses CommunityRating for the EXIF 0-5 star.
The badges share one slot on every surface. On the phone hero the scores go
in a single pill because that chip row is a height-clipped Wrap and a chip
per source would push year, certification and runtime out of the visible
band on short heroes; on the TV detail line and the dashboard spotlight the
group occupies the one metadata slot so bullet separators do not multiply.
The group announces itself as a single semantics node naming each source,
because a bare row of four percentages tells a screen reader nothing about
which score is which. rating_utils drops parseRatingImage and
isRottenTomatoes — the URI vocabulary now lives only in the Plex mapper —
and the source-key resolver and label map, previously private to the Explore
detail screen, become the shared pair both screens use. The label strings
move from explore.ratingSource to common.ratingSource accordingly, which
costs no translations because every non-English value was empty; running
clean_translations also scaffolds startup.quitPlezy and
startup.restartRequiredBody, which were already drifted.
Verified against the live server the probes came from: a detail response now
yields TMDB 83%, IMDb 8.3 and Rotten Tomatoes audience 96% through the
production mapper and badge resolver, and the listing response for the same
title yields TMDB 83% alone. Both payloads are pinned verbatim as fixtures.
Coverage adds mapper ordering, dedupe against the array's repeat of the
scalar, out-of-range rejection, the Jellyfin scale and photo guard, the
CatalogItem conversion that feeds Explore's dashboard hubs, and the three
render surfaces including the semantics announcement.
close#1755
edde746