Two regressions since 2.9.1 broke subtitles on transcoded playback. Since
a1b6a8971 sidecars load with the media behind a 10s open guard, so a
subtitle URL the server is slow to serve — Jellyfin extracting an
embedded stream while its transcoder spins up — tripped the guard: stop,
reopen without subtitles, "Selected subtitles could not be loaded"
snackbar, and an emptied subtitle menu. Since 2b3853a88 every embedded
Plex subtitle was handed to the player as a sidecar whose URL is the
original container, so a transcode also range-read and demuxed the
source over HTTP — for a 40 GB remux, purely to find a subtitle track —
which is also why PGS never appeared: the client was handed a container
to demux rather than a rendition to play.
Delivery is the server's job again, backported from the AVPlayer branch
(42ba01440, the subtitle subset of 6852ac274, and a3da81e83) and adapted
to main's mpv backend:
Plex burns every embedded track (subtitles=burn); only a real external
file with a /library/streams key stays a client-fetched sidecar. A burn
is a re-encode, so directPlay is withdrawn — a real PMS answers HTTP 400
to directPlay=1 with burn — and the burn is aimed by selecting the
stream on the part first via the selectStreams PUT, because the decision
endpoint ignores subtitleStreamID alongside subtitles=burn. An
unaimable or undeliverable burn (dvb_teletext) refuses the transcode and
falls back to warned direct play rather than welding the wrong language
in or silently dropping the caption. Main's per-preset
directPlay/directStream pinning is kept; verified against a live PMS
that burn works under directStream=0.
Jellyfin never offers image formats as External, so bitmaps fall through
to Encode and are burned; text External is withheld per request when the
effective selection — including the server's DefaultSubtitleStreamIndex —
is embedded, and offered when it is a real file, so a file is delivered
as a file and never fetched twice. The burned row is excluded from the
sidecars; remaining text rows stay extractable, which is how a secondary
track still renders over a transcode. Sidecar URLs now use the format
extension the endpoint expects instead of the reported codec name.
The controls and selection layers learn what burning means: burn
eligibility is the codec's property, so burned rows stay selectable in
the menu; any change away from a burned selection renegotiates with the
server instead of pretending a local switch worked; the visibility
shortcut explains itself instead of doing nothing; and the track manager
is told when the primary is server-rendered so it stops waiting out a
thirty-second deadline for a native track that is already pixels.
Verified: analyzer parity, clean_translations --check --strict, full
flutter test (5749), and decision-level runs against live Plex and
Jellyfin servers — text and PGS burn decisions, the directPlay=1+burn
400, External file delivery, an unchanged no-burn baseline, and a real
burn session serving its playlist. The pre-commit aggregate was bypassed
for pre-existing main-state findings outside this diff: 21 format-drifted
files and three unused test seams in lib/main.dart.
close#1738
Refs #1815, #1622.
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.
Episode advance carried live player state, so the viewer's choice only
survived while every episode could serve it: one episode without the
picked audio or subtitle fell back, and the fallback became the carry for
the rest of the session. The screen now keeps the last explicit audio,
subtitle, and secondary-subtitle choices for its lifetime; automatic
outcomes never overwrite them, so the choice retries on every following
episode and reattaches as soon as a catalog can serve it again.
Audio catches up with the subtitle carry from #1785. The old matcher
required raw language equality (a 'sv' pick never found a 'swe' row) and
otherwise took the first same-language track, flipping a commentary or
alternate-mix pick back to the main mix on every episode. Audio now uses
the same evidence bands as subtitles: bridged language parity is
authoritative, a unique title match vouches for untagged tracks, codec
and channel-count parity only break ties, and an ambiguous catalog
declines to the server's own choice instead of guessing. The synthesized
source descriptor also prefers the row's own title over the display title
that collapses to the bare language.
Episode advance previously sent no audio hint to negotiation at all, so a
transcode baked in the server's default audio no matter what was playing.
Both backends now resolve the carried semantics against the new episode's
streams: Jellyfin sends the resolved AudioStreamIndex, Plex feeds the
transcode decision, an explicit per-part stream id always wins, and a
failed match falls back to the server's pick.
close#1785
Opening a detail screen issued two identical full-detail GETs for the same
id, concurrently: `_loadFullMetadata` calls `fetchItemWithOnDeck`, and
`_initWatchlistState` calls `fetchExternalIds`, which fetches the same item
purely to read `ProviderIds`. Playback start adds three more for its own id.
Each of those makes the server rebuild the entire dto — `People`, `Chapters`
and `MediaSources` cost a database query apiece and `Trickplay` costs several
plus a filesystem stat — so the duplicate is expensive on both ends.
`fetchItem` now shares an in-flight request per item id. Single-flight only:
once a request settles the next caller re-fetches, so nothing can serve a
stale item.
Measured on a remote Jellyfin server, 12 interleaved show-detail opens per
version: requests 4 -> 3, payload 28.4 KB -> 18.6 KB. Median wall time is
unchanged (1394ms -> 1386ms) because the duplicate ran alongside the first
rather than behind it; this removes duplicated work, not latency.
Two things were tried and rejected because measurement did not support them:
starting `/Shows/NextUp` in parallel with the detail fetch (the requests
contend rather than overlap — NextUp went from 380ms alone to 1395ms beside
it — and it costs a wasted request per movie), and dropping `Trickplay` /
`Chapters` from the detail field set (no measurable effect; both are real
data the playback path reads).
Refs #1784
The Discover tab fanned out its whole request set twice on every cold
start and replayed slow rows on a shrinking timeout ladder, so a healthy
remote server produced anywhere from 4s to 15s of loading.
Measured against a remote Jellyfin server with four libraries, 24
interleaved cold-start samples per side:
requests 19 -> 9 payload 219 KB -> 94 KB
settled 5231ms -> 2502ms median, 13222ms -> 5927ms p95
Four independent causes:
- Retry policy. `Client.send` resolves on response headers, so the
connect budget covers the server's think time and a slow-but-alive
query raises `connectionTimeout`. Replaying it made the server re-run
the query with a shorter budget than the one it just missed; the
`[10s, 8s, 5s]` ladder turned an 11s answer into an empty row after
23s. Hub surfaces now get one whole-request deadline, retry only
immediate connection errors, and the deadline bounds the whole call
including the request still in flight.
- Request shape. `/Items/Latest` groups a TV library by series, so its
rows are Series folder dtos and `RecursiveItemCount`/`ChildCount` cost
a DB count each, per row. Hub rows now ask for `Overview` only; watch
state survives because Jellyfin derives `UserData.Played` from
`UnplayedItemCount` when the count fields are absent. `/Shows/NextUp`
sends `NextUpDateCutoff` to bound the server's series-key scan, and
`Thumb` leaves `EnableImageTypes` since nothing reads it. `UserData`
and `PremiereDate` leave the browse set: neither is an `ItemFields`
member, so the server dropped them anyway.
- Fan-out. Per-library hubs ran in batches of three separated by a
barrier, so one slow library stalled every library behind it. A
sliding window keeps the same peak concurrency without head-of-line
blocking. Concurrent `fetchLibraries` calls now share one `/Views`
instead of racing two identical round trips, Plex's global and music
hub legs start together, and Jellyfin gets Plex's pool tuning.
- Duplicate pass. `DiscoverScreen.initState` starts a load and the
online-entry hook asked for a full refresh on top of it, which
`CoalescedLoadCoordinator` correctly queued as a trailing pass. The
hook now calls `primeRefresh`, which rides along with a load already
in flight; profile switches still go through `fullRefresh`.
Refs #1784
Jellyfin has no DirectStreamUrl field — MediaSourceInfo carries only
TranscodingUrl, and a DirectPlay decision returns no URL at all, leaving the
client to build /Videos/{id}/stream itself. The branch reading
DirectStreamUrl was therefore dead against every Jellyfin version, along with
the 'DirectStream' play method and the doc comment promising both.
The static URL also dropped MediaSourceId whenever the item had a single
source whose Id equalled the item id — an ordinary episode. The streaming
endpoint resolves a blank MediaSourceId to its own first sorted source
(VideoFile first, then widest video), so the omission silently streamed a
different file as soon as the item gained an alternate version. Forward the
id the negotiation settled on, as jellyfin-web, Findroid, and Streamyfin all
do unconditionally.
Every "pinned" fixture used a source id that differed from the item id, so no
test exercised the shape that dropped the param; add one that does.
Plex treats a subtitle stream as forced when its title says "Forced" even
with the API flag unset. Every forced comparison now uses that effective
forced-ness on both sides: the match scorer, the low-metadata hard gate,
the Jellyfin OnlyForced/Smart profile modes, and stream-index negotiation.
Carrying a track choice into the next episode no longer reuses the
same-item identity matchers. A sealed SubtitlePreference (off / track
reference / semantic intent) replaces the id-'navigation' pseudo-track
through the whole preference channel, and cross-item intents hard-require
language and forced-class parity. When the next episode has no track of
the same class, the intent declines and selection falls through to the
server's own per-episode choice instead of latching onto a full track by
position and persisting that mistake back to the server.
Intents wait for pending native tracks under the same catalog-completeness
rule as source ids, so an early decline cannot retire the selection
listener before the real track arrives.
Ref #1716
The scoped lookups run in sequential batches, and MediaServerHttpClient
applies a per-call timeout to connect and receive separately. A silent
endpoint therefore cost up to two request timeouts per batch, and six
batches of that outlast the single request the scoped form replaced —
the enrichment could hold Continue Watching longer than the query it was
introduced to fix.
Give the pass one deadline instead of a per-batch check. It aborts the
in-flight batch and is also raced client-side, because aborting only asks
the transport to stop and not every client honours abortTrigger. Whatever
phase a lookup is stuck in — silent connect, delayed headers, stalled
body — the pass now ends at the deadline with whatever dates it has.
Plezy's device profile declares every subtitle format with
`Method: External`, so Jellyfin answers PlaybackInfo with
`DeliveryMethod: External` and a `DeliveryUrl` even for streams embedded
in a direct-played container. Direct play never fetches those URLs, but
the rows kept the delivery URL as `MediaSubtitleTrack.key`, and keyed
rows only match a native track loaded from the same URL. No embedded
track could satisfy that, so `selectSubtitleTrack` reported "still
pending" forever: playback started with subtitles off and logged the
five- and thirty-second waits, and the server's default subtitle had to
be picked by hand on every item.
Restrict sidecar identity to the rows an open actually fetched as
sidecars. A row that stays in the container loses `key` and
`usesExternalDelivery` and matches on metadata again; genuine
`IsExternal` files keep theirs, and remuxed or transcoded renditions
still resolve their sidecars by URL.
Also declare every subtitle format Embed-first so a direct-played
container reports embedded delivery in the first place, and make the
pending contract match its purpose on every backend. The
complete-catalog escape is no longer Plex-only, so a Jellyfin row the
native player has not produced keeps the pass pending instead of
committing an unrelated default and retiring the listener that was
waiting for the real track. A source id absent from the catalog no
longer defers a decision that can never change, and the thirty-second
deadline resolves from what has arrived instead of re-deriving the same
deferral and applying nothing.
close#1696
The Next Up shelf dated its rows from one server-wide
`/Items?SortBy=DatePlayed&Recursive=true` scan. Jellyfin 12.0-rc3 builds
that sort key by OR-ing an item's own progress with its alternate
versions' (`ItemId == e.Id || Item.PrimaryVersionId == e.Id`,
jellyfin/jellyfin#17044), which no index can serve, so the user's whole
UserData table is scanned per sorted row. Measured on identical
10,120-item libraries, that scan cost 25ms on 10.10.7 and 5.8-13.3s on
12.0-rc3 while pegging a core, so it blew the call's 10s budget and
starved every other client of the server for tens of seconds. Upstream
fixed the order mapper after rc3 in jellyfin/jellyfin#17422.
Ask each pending series for its own newest played episode instead:
`ParentId` bounds the sort input to that series, and the same 21 series
now resolve in 1.5s against the rc3 server with byte-identical dates.
The lookups run four at a time under a shared wall-clock budget and a
short per-request timeout, so a silent endpoint costs less than the one
default-budget request this replaced, and a `count: null` shelf can no
longer fan out one request per started series. Endpoint failover stays
off so a slow enrichment row cannot move the client off a working
endpoint.
close#1699
Consolidates duplicated logic behind shared implementations — paginated
grid tabs, focus chrome, cached remote stores, sheet selection columns,
the server artifact store and a test fixture layer — and removes code
that had become unreachable. Net reduction of about 5,500 lines with no
behaviour change.
Where a fix had landed separately in code that moved into a shared
helper, the fix was re-applied inside the helper rather than left behind
in the copy that went away.
Collapse duplicated setup across the suite into six shared helpers under
test/test_helpers/ and rewrite the 28 suites that were open-coding it:
http_fixtures.dart jsonResponse() for http.Response JSON stubs
library_tab_scaffold.dart pumps library tabs under their required ancestors
multi_server_fixtures.dart MultiServerProvider wiring for widget tests
playback_report_fakes.dart PlaybackReportCall + fake report sinks
profile_stack.dart production-shaped profile dependency graph
theme.dart testMonoTokens for fast-settling widget tests
Net -1245 lines with no change in coverage or assertions.
close#1552
Latest Albums returns MusicAlbum folder dtos, where the browse count/user-data
fields each cost a recursive per-album COUNT query; request it with the slim
album fields + EnableUserData=false under a dedicated latestalbums identifier,
and drop the folder fields and Overview from the played-track rows.
Resolve platform, hardware model, and friendly device name once via a
shared DeviceIdentityService and send them to both backends: Plex gets
a real X-Plex-Platform plus X-Plex-Device/X-Plex-Device-Name (shown as
Player in dashboards/Tautulli), Jellyfin gets the device name in the
MediaBrowser auth header. Transcode and live-TV decision requests keep
their pinned platform names, which Plex validates server-side.
close#1270
FFmpeg's protocol lookup is case-sensitive, so a stored "Https://" base
URL reaches mpv verbatim through the direct-play string concat and fails
with "Protocol not found" (API calls survive because Dart's Uri
lowercases the scheme). Canonicalize at Jellyfin URL intake and in the
connection constructor so persisted configs self-heal on load, and
register mpv-escaped (https\://) redaction variants so option-value
logs stop leaking the server host.
close#1465
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