Connects MDBList through its OAuth device-code grant, registered as a
Device Code app so no client secret or redirect URI ships in the binary
and TV, mobile and desktop all use the same flow.
MDBList omits `verification_uri_complete`, but its device page seeds the
code field from a `user_code` query parameter and the sign-in redirect
preserves the query string, so the activation link is built locally and
the dialog's open button lands on a filled-in form instead of an empty
one. A server-supplied complete URL still wins if one ever appears.
Poll state is read from the response body rather than the status code:
`authorization_pending` and `slow_down` both arrive as HTTP 400, and a
missing grant answers 404 `device_not_found`.
Writes go out as real-time `/scrobble/*` reports plus `/sync/watched`
for the marks that never pass through the player, with ratings on
`/sync/ratings`. Matching uses IMDb and TMDb only — MDBList's id block
has no `tvdb` field, so a TVDB-only item is skipped rather than written
under an empty id block.
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.
GitHub sized the hotlinked SVG from its 161x44 intrinsic box rather than the
img height attribute, so the badge rendered short beside the other three.
rsvg-convert at exactly 4x intrinsic keeps the aspect ratio bit-identical and
the rounded corners transparent, matching the neighbouring badge assets. All
four now render 60px tall, and the README no longer hotlinks any image.
The features section last changed substantively in 2c54baca3 (2026-05-17),
before the music and Explore subsystems shipped, so two whole feature areas
were missing and several availability notes had drifted.
Adds Music and Explore & Requests sections, and corrects claims that no
longer hold: the locale count (14 -> 21), the EPG guide is not Plex-only,
downloads include music and are unavailable on tvOS, Picture-in-Picture
excludes the TV platforms, and shaders and ambient lighting need the mpv
backend. Footnotes move from numeric to named so adding one no longer
renumbers the rest.
Windows now points at the Microsoft Store listing instead of the direct
installer and portable archives. The App Store and Play badges carry
campaign tokens so README traffic is attributable in each store's own
reporting.
The prerequisite Flutter version matches the pinned toolchain (3.44.0), and
the Maestro end-to-end suite gets the pointer it never had.
edde746