When a gapless advance was announced, the new track's tracker sent its
initial report from live player state, which still carried the finished
track's position and duration - telling Plex the new track was already
at ~100%. PMS recorded a play (and a Last.fm scrobble) at track start on
top of the one from the real playthrough, and the tracker latched the
new track watched locally the moment it began.
The music bind now pins the initial report to the track's own start
(position zero, metadata duration); timer ticks keep reading live state.
close#1849
Watching an episode to the end left it stuck as watched for the rest of the
session. Unmarking it on another device and refreshing did nothing; only a
restart cleared it. Unlike #1829 this needs no second device to cause -- a
normal watch-through is enough, and the second device only makes it visible.
A threshold crossing writes an unacknowledged overlay patch, deliberately:
reporting success proves the backend received the report, not that it
classified the item as played, so the patch stays owed until something
settles it. _settleServerMark has three settled outcomes and only one of them
did. The explicit-mark branch promoted; the two branches that skip the mark
because the backend already recorded the watch itself -- Jellyfin from
/Sessions/Playing/Stopped, Plex from a timeline crossing past
LibraryVideoPlayedThreshold -- returned without promoting. Those are the
common paths, so nearly every completed playback stranded a patch that the
store then refused to suppress, because an unacknowledged entry is never
retired by an authoritative read.
Both now promote, through one idempotent helper that clears the id so the
delivery callback and the settle paths cannot promote twice.
Promotion has to follow delivery rather than the settle decision. A
marks-on-stop backend settles when the crossing latches, which happens before
the stop is sent, and until that stop lands the watch really is still owed --
promoting there would let a refresh retire a patch the server had never
heard about. MediaBrowser also drops a stop for a session it never opened, in
which case the watch it would have recorded never happens at all. So the stop
path promotes only once the report reached a session able to act on it, which
is the same condition that already governs whether the stop persists its
position; that condition is now named rather than recomputed, and reset with
its siblings when a session re-arms. The crossing branch needs no such gate:
it is assembled from two delivered reports, so delivery is already proven.
Verified against a live Jellyfin server driving the real client and tracker:
before, the server reported the item unwatched after a second device cleared
it while the overlay still rendered watched; after, the overlay follows the
server. The optimistic mark still appears immediately during playback -- it
now yields to a later authoritative read instead of outliving one.
The #1287 and #1740 contracts are unchanged: neither branch issues an
explicit mark, and the tests assert that alongside the promotion.
Pausing an episode on one device, finishing it on another and pressing
Refresh left the first device showing the old "minutes left". Restarting the
app showed the right value. Two independent defects produce that, and either
alone reproduces the report.
The first is the watch-state overlay. Every local watch event lands in
WatchStateStore as a patch, and WatchStateSnapshot.apply overwrites
viewOffsetMs unconditionally; isNewerThan only ever orders one patch against
another, never against the server row underneath. Nothing expires a patch and
nothing clears the map except a profile switch, so the Mac's own paused
position kept winning over every subsequent fetch until the process died.
A patch exists to bridge the gap between a local action and the next server
read of that item, so it should stop applying once that read happens. The
store now records the watermark at which a successful authoritative response
returned each key, and suppresses an acknowledged session patch at or below
it. Only a watermark is stored, never the observed state: WatchStateSnapshot
cannot hold a container's leaf counts, and keeping max() per key makes the
order two concurrent responses complete irrelevant. Suppression is a
read-time predicate, so nothing mutates during build.
The barrier covers the parentChain too. patchForItem picks the newest of the
item's own entry and its ancestors', so retiring only the item's entry would
let an older season mark win and render watched/0 -- worse than either the
stale value or the fresh one. An authoritative read of a child already
reflects any container mark that preceded it, so the child's observation
judges its ancestors as well; a newer container action still wins.
Provenance decides what may be suppressed at all. WatchStateEvent now carries
serverAcknowledged, defaulting to false so an unclassified emit site degrades
to today's behaviour rather than silently becoming retireable. An offline
write is owed to the server and a read must never retire it, so it stays
until a WatchPatchPromotionNotifier promotion says the queue replayed it. That
channel is deliberately not a WatchStateEvent: OfflineWatchSyncService reacts
to watched/unwatched by purging queued progress, so replaying one there would
delete a newer rewatch. Promotion matches an exact WatchPatchId -- session
minted for live crossings, derived from the persisted (profile, row, revision)
for queued ones so it still joins after a restart.
Report acceptance is not delivery: PlaybackReportSession resolves true for a
same-state startup heartbeat it drops, so acknowledgement now keys on
onDelivered. A MediaBrowser Started saves play count and last-played date but
not the position, so it cannot acknowledge an offset. No report-derived
watched crossing is acknowledged on any backend -- Jellyfin hard-codes its
threshold and Plex never loads the server pref that would tell it the real
one -- so only an awaited explicit markWatched settles one.
The second defect is that a failed Refresh reported success. Plex _fetchHubs
and the Jellyfin hub legs both degrade a failure to an empty list, and the
library prefetch discarded its failures, so a server whose every hub request
failed was recorded as succeeded; DiscoverProvider then kept the previous rows,
set loaded and surfaced nothing. Worse, the background Continue Watching
refresh wiped the row outright on zero success.
Hub legs now report what they degraded through a HubFetchDiagnostics sink,
which keeps partial rows alongside the failure and leaves every existing
caller untouched. Failures ride through the aggregation results, a leg that
could not run because discovery failed contributes that failure rather than a
successful no-op, and loaded-server ids became succeeded - failed - cancelled
so one bad leg no longer caches a server as covered and blocks its retry. The
toolbar awaits a DiscoverRefreshOutcome and shows the existing unableToLoad
snackbar on failure while the retained rows stay on screen. Rollback after a
mid-pass exception is version-guarded, refilters against the current hidden
libraries and no longer publishes a system shelf the pass never committed.
Observations are staged with the pass and flushed only once the same disposal,
generation and exception checks that authorise committing those rows have
passed, so a discarded or rolled-back response can never suppress a patch.
Also fixes a live data-loss race the promotion work would have built on:
upsertProgressAction stamped a millisecond timestamp and updated the row in
place, so a rewatch queued during an in-flight replay was deleted by id.
Revisions are now strictly monotonic per row, replay deletes and retry updates
compare against them, and the upsert resets the retry fields because a new
revision is a new logical action.
close#1829
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.
The cross-item subtitle intent required declared languages on both sides,
and a null on either side counted as a contradiction. Any untagged track -
common when a title like "Swedish" is the only signal - declined on every
episode advance, fell to the server's per-item priority, and turned the
viewer's subtitles off (a 2.11.0 regression from the #1716/#1717 hard
gates).
A unique real title match now vouches for a row when language evidence is
missing on either side. Declared languages that disagree still decline no
matter what the title says, forced-class parity is untouched, codec and
external parity only break ties within the title-matched set, and a
residual tie declines rather than guesses, so the wrong-track class of
#1716 stays closed.
A decline is also no longer laundered into a viewer decision: the resolver
keeps the unserved preference on the selection, the open flow hands it to
the track manager instead of a navigation-priority off (late native tracks
may carry the container tags the server rows lack), the next episode
boundary re-carries it instead of hardening it into an explicit off, and
progress reports withhold the -1 subtitle index that would otherwise come
back as the item's server-side default forever.
A pick the screen could not map to a source row (no subtitle catalog, or
an identity-matcher miss) previously never reached the committed session
selection at all, so the next episode carried the stale off while the
picked track was visibly on screen. Such picks now commit the raw native
track without source ids and demote to a semantic intent at the boundary.
close#1785
Plezy reported a completed playback twice: the /:/timeline heartbeats let
the server mark the item played on its own, and the in-player auto-scrobble
then sent an explicit /:/scrobble for the same watch. On PMS 1.30 that adds
a second Play History row; on 1.43 the row is suppressed but viewCount still
lands on 2 for one playback.
Measured against PMS 1.43 to find what the server acts on: a watched-threshold
crossing observed inside one session. Consecutive above-threshold reports mark
nothing, a resume point left by an earlier session does not arm a new one, and
a report at position zero is inert while one at a single second is enough. So
the explicit mark now goes out only for sessions that gave the server no
crossing to observe.
That decision cannot be made while the session is live. A session beginning
past the threshold has no crossing yet, but rewinding and playing forward
creates one, and the server records it — marking eagerly and then hitting that
path leaves viewCount at 2 again. The mark is therefore deferred to the
terminal stop, and rides its future so callers that await the stop before
tearing the player down do not drop it. Deferring also covers a crossing
coalesced away during startup and a seek back below the threshold before
stopping.
Crossing state is tracked from reports the backend actually received rather
than from PlaybackReportSession.report()'s bool, which resolves true for a
same-state snapshot dropped during startup.
The same-file sibling hook (#1500) still runs exactly once, on the transition
to a settled mark rather than at the local crossing, so sibling episodes are
never marked watched while the episode actually played is not.
Local watched state and Continue Watching removal still happen on the observed
crossing, so the only behaviour that moves is the redundant server call.
close#1740
Deduplicates the hand-rolled coalescing/caching maps, the Plex client cast,
the missing-serverId event guard and the progress-failure backoff, and drops
the MusicPlaybackService availability gate, which could never fail in
production.
Report the paused timeline every tick (~10s, matching official clients)
instead of every ~60s, and ping the Plex transcoder keepalive endpoint
alongside it while transcoding — PMS reaps idle transcode sessions that
timeline reports alone historically have not kept alive. Prevents the
transcode-variant of the #1520 stream death; the reporter's direct-play
case is covered by EOF classification and reconnect.
edde746