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.
ConnectionRegistry.upsert already preserved isDefault on conflict but
rewrote created_at from the in-memory model. Re-signing in rebuilds the
connection with DateTime.now() under the same stable id, so the row's
creation time jumped forward on every reauth.
That was cosmetic while created_at only drove list ordering. It is now
behaviour: it picks which connection lends a profile its picture, so
re-adding the originally-first connection could hand the avatar to a
later one. remove() also promotes the oldest remaining row to default
and was reading the same restamped value.
Preserve the existing row's created_at on conflict, reusing the lookup
upsert already performs for isDefault.
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
Delete unused registry members (ProfileConnectionRegistry.insertIfAbsent /
removeAllForProfile, ProfileRegistry.reorder, ProfilesView.countFor,
ConnectionRegistry.getDefault) and their orphan tests, refreshing the stale
docs that named removeAllForProfile as the profile-delete cleanup path.
Repair the "one default per profile" join-row invariant: the connectionId FK
cascade (foreign_keys=ON) silently drops a profile's default row while its
other rows survive, leaving it defaultless. Add promoteMissingDefaults, share
a deterministic re-promotion helper with remove(), and re-promote in
removeAllForConnection.
edde746