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.
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
Trakt was the one service outside the tracker abstraction. TraktScrobbleService
re-implemented the whole playback lifecycle beside TrackerCoordinator, and
TraktSyncService pushed watched state from its own WatchStateNotifier
subscription, so the player called two objects at every lifecycle point and one
watch could be written twice. TraktTracker now implements RealtimeScrobbleTracker
like Simkl; the duplicated player call sites collapse to one each, and Trakt
shares the coordinator's ID resolver instead of re-fetching show ids every
episode.
Capabilities are split so a tracker declares what it is rather than being
special-cased: ScrobblePolicy carries each service's own resend/seek rules,
EpisodeHistoryTracker names the remote row a per-item history write targets, and
SeriesProgressTracker covers one-counter-per-series services. Writes from all
four trackers go through a shared TrackerWriteQueue, generalised from the
Trakt-only queue, with the legacy Trakt payload migrated on load. Trakt becomes
the fourth TrackersProvider slot and TraktAccountProvider is deleted, so one
object owns the active session per profile.
Two failure paths found while consolidating are fixed here too.
The queue's retries only ran on profile bind, connect and app foreground, so a
network blip mid-session left queued watches waiting for the next foreground.
OfflineModeProvider now notifies on connectivity changes, not just offline-state
or WiFi-flag changes, and main.dart flushes the queue when the network returns.
The queue also counted every failure toward the five attempts that permanently
drop an item, so a rate limit or a service having a bad hour could discard a
pending watch - the loss the queue exists to prevent. Only an answer about the
write itself now spends an attempt: 4xx counts, while rate limits, 5xx,
recoverable token-refresh failures and requests that never arrived do not. A
back-off answer also defers that service for the rest of the flush, so a queue
holding many rows does not fire all of them at a service that just asked for
quiet.
Explore shelf cards drew a poster, a title and a year. An audit of all six
catalog sources found the rest was lost at two boundaries — the wire-to-DTO
mapping and the DTO-to-CatalogItem mapping — and then simply not drawn: the
grid card fell through every branch of buildMetadataSubtitle to the year-only
case, while the list card used by search already composed certification,
runtime and rating from fields the synthesized MediaItem already held.
Extend CatalogItem with the neutral facts every provider had been dropping:
attributed rating sources, leaderboard ranks that keep their season window,
audience counters that keep their timeframe, broadcast slots, next-episode air
times, server availability and request state, exact release dates, alternate
titles, format, source material, studios, countries, languages, credits, tags,
links, artwork variants, play state, gallery art and background prose. Replace
fetchCast and fetchRelated with one fetchDetail returning the enriched item,
its cast, its recommendations and labelled franchise relations without adding
a request: sources needing two calls keep two and run them concurrently with
isolated failures.
Map those fields in all six sources, widening only field selections that cost
no extra round trip — MAL's fields list, AniList's selection set and a bounded
row cast that lets detail skip its character call, Trakt's guest stars, Seerr's
language parameter and TMDB size ladder, and Plex's includeUserState. Plex hub
artwork widens only on TV, where the spotlight is its only consumer, because it
doubles the payload.
Render them: a rating-first caption and bounded badges on the shelf card,
labelled sections on the detail screen, provider hub styles and result counts
on shelves, and logo, banner and accent art in the TV spotlight.
Verified against live Plex, AniList, Simkl and MAL responses, and on a Pixel 7.
Plex Explore showed only the Watchlist row. `/hubs/sections/watchlist`
answers with placeholder hubs — every entry carries `placeholder: true`,
`size: 0` and no `Metadata` — so `fetchHubs` mapped each one to an empty
page and dropped all of them. That is true no matter what the profile has
watchlisted; the shelves never rendered.
Read `/hubs/sections/home` instead, the section Plex's own web client
renders on its Home > Trending tab, and hydrate each placeholder from its
own key (six at a time). `directory` shelves list browse categories and
`clip` shelves list trailers, neither of which becomes a catalog item, so
they are skipped before spending a request. A shelf that fails degrades to
the ones that succeeded; a pass where every shelf failed still throws.
Discover ignores container offsets on hub keys and truncates with `limit`
instead, so a hub is one page: View All takes the whole shelf in a single
request rather than replaying page one, and hub requests drop `Media` and
`Image` elements the catalog layer never reads.
`dart format --set-exit-if-changed` over lib and test rewrites these.
The analysis job never reached its formatting step, so the drift went
unnoticed. No behaviour changes.
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.
The search screens, the out-of-band auth dialogs, the live TV guide and the
list-download paths each carried their own copy of the same shell. Extracts
SearchInputField and PendingAuthDialog and routes the duplicated download
and guide helpers through one implementation.
Focus chrome was implemented twice, once in the focusable wrapper and once
in the focus builders; both now go through FocusChrome. TvColorPicker's
channel row was a copy of TvNumberSpinner and is now that widget in compact
density.
Also trims unused helpers and fields and simplifies the Jellyfin browse
paths.
Extracts the repeated toolbar fade into a single ToolbarScrim widget, folds
duplicated request/retry handling in the media server HTTP client, and
collapses the parallel playback-source, download-manager and live TV helper
paths into shared implementations.
- Merge SeerrMovieDetails/SeerrTvDetails into one SeerrDetails model and
route both detail endpoints through a single request helper.
- Replace the three parallel tracker session/store/rebind-generation
triples in TrackersProvider with a _TrackerSlot record plus one _rebind
path.
- Fold the three JellyfinSequentialLauncher entry points onto a shared
_launchLocalQueue helper that owns loading, abort, shuffle and publish;
each caller now supplies only its fetch.
Introduces shared seams for paginated views, D-pad reorder, media control
routing, async singletons and the device method channel, then points the
open-coded copies at them.
Also removes unused models and duplicated provider/server plumbing, folds
the twice-implemented artifact store in the server, and factors the
repeated Flutter toolchain prologue in CI into a composite action.