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