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Announcing Emby Server 4.0

Luke

Entry posted by Luke

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At long last we're pleased to announce Emby Server 4.0. This new release will begin rolling out over the next 24 hours, so please be patient. This has been our longest release period ever, and going forward we intend to get back to a more frequent release schedule. This release is packed with improved performance, updates to existing features, as well as several brand new features.

 

Important Upgrade Information
After installing the update, the server will begin a database upgrade operation. If you attempt to open the web app during this time, you'll be given a friendly message informing you about this. This operation could take a little time, so please be patient with it.

 

After this is complete, any plugins you may have installed will require updates, so please check the status of this on your server dashboard. If any plugins are updated, remember that Emby Server will need to be restarted. After all updates have been applied, we recommend that you run a library scan. The first scan following the update could take longer than usual, so please be patient.

 

With that out of the way, let's go over the highlights of this release.

 

No Telemetry or Anonymous Usage Reporting

 

If you're wondering why the anonymous usage reporting setting has been removed, it's because not only have we removed the setting, but we've removed the function altogether. We know our audience pretty well thanks to this community, and because of that we've decided we no longed need any data reporting.

 

New Emby Live TV Guide Data

 

As previously announced, Live TV Guide Data is Now Included with Emby Premiere, if you're in the USA, Canada, or the UK. What does this mean? This means if you're in the USA, Canada or UK, you'll no longer need to setup an account with another website nor pay someone else for this data. You'll simply enter your zip code into Emby, select your channel lineup, and we'll handle retrieving your guide data.

 

We believe this will provide a better experience for Emby users with fewer setup steps. The new data is also quite a bit richer, and we will be looking at how we can take advantage of that to bring new Live TV features to Emby. Going forward, Live TV will require Emby Premiere in the web app, where previously this was not the case.

 

How to Migrate From Schedules Direct
If you are setting up the server fresh, then you should use our new Emby guide provider, which will be the default. If you are already using Schedules Direct, then you can continue to use it through the remainder of your Schedules Direct subscription. Schedules Direct has pledged to continue to honor your subscriptions, and we thank them for that.

 

New Levels of Performance

 

A database re-structuring brings your Emby Server and apps to new levels of performance that were previously not possible. Screens will load faster, videos will start quicker, and more. This will also manifest itself in other areas, such as improved library scan performance, and faster live tv guide refreshes. Please Note: The first scan after the update may take quite a while depending on your library contents and exactly what features you have enabled. Please be patient as subsequent scans will be much faster.

 

New and Improved Hardware Acceleration

 

This has been rebuilt from the ground up and is better than ever. We now have sophisticated hardware detection that runs on server startup to determine what your system can support. This allows us to provide you with an "easy mode" setting:

 

5bd373e8ef7c1_Untitled.png

 

And if you enable advanced control, you'll be able to see what was detected:

 

5bd37414b1405_Untitled.png

 

Our hardware transcoding has been rewritten to take better advantage of each of the major GPU platforms, whether it be QuickSync, Nvidia, DXVA, VAAPI, MediaCodec, or others. This will allow hardware transcoding performance to perform better than ever.

 

Best of all, you can now monitor this on the server dashboard. The green bar indicates the current playback position while the orange bar designates the range that has been transcoded so far.

 

5c2e97a4d48af_x265subtitles.jpg

 

Important: Hardware acceleration has been truly a major effort for us, and because of this, it will now require Emby Premiere on all platforms except for Nvidia Shield and Western Digital.

 

Transcoding Throttling is Back

 

This feature has returned after a two year hiatus and is better than ever. What is transcoding throttling? Sometimes your server can transcode content much quicker than you're actually watching it. When the transcoding process gets a big enough lead on your watching position, we can slow it down on the fly in order to reduce the load on your server. Then as you're watching, if we need to speed it back up, we can do that too.

 

And best of all, your server dashboard will show you when transcoding is being throttled:
5c3c2b4ee53dc_Untitled.png

 

Emby Server Now Available for Android and Nvidia Shield

 

Stay tuned for separate announcements.

 

Improved Search

 

Search is now faster and now supports fuzzy search! This means you don't need to type your searches perfectly in order to see the matches you're looking for. For example, if you accidentally enter "Bad Breaking", instead of "Breaking Bad", you'll still be able to see Breaking Bad in the results.

 

Multi-Resolution TV Shows

 

Without requiring any changes to your file names, we now support having multiple versions of episodes. This doesn't require any special setup and you'll now see the friendly version selection on the episode screen:

 

5c3c295d0e325_Untitled.png

 

Revamped Grouping Into Collections

 

This has now been moved from a server setting to directly onto the Movies list screen where it can be easily toggled.

 

5c3cca069ddd1_Untitled.png

 

Expanded Filtering

 

You can now filter on more fields such as container, video codec, audio codec, subtitle codec, and more. This filters are also remembered !
5c3cca798cec4_Untitled.png

 

Expanded User Library Access

 

User library access can now be controlled for sub-folders, providing you with even greater flexibility than before.
5c3ccae074cef_Untitled.png

 


This more fine-grained access control replaces the previous user-preference-based "Merged" libraries that were supported before 4.0. If you have used merged libraries please see New Folder-based Access Control to learn how to setup the same basic functionality with this new feature.

 

Other Improvements

  • Update to .NET Core 2.2
  • Update to Sqlite 3.26.0
  • Improve library scan performance
  • Improve performance of live tv guide refresh
  • Improve subtitle delivery performance
  • Support Brotli http compression
  • Display video size on detail screens in Media Info
  • Significantly reduce dlna related network traffic
  • Add More Like This On Live TV section
  • Add tabbed layouts for music videos and home videos
  • Add network browsing to directory picker for Linux, Android and MacOS.
  • Change new indicators for programs to match guide data
  • Rework mobile context menus
  • Rework tv tabs to be consistent with Emby Theater
  • Downloaded subtitles are now saved using the two-character language code
  • Improve transcoding of low bit rate hevc
  • Add Moviedb season image provider
  • Show favorite people
  • Support tvg-chno with m3u tuners
  • Support tvg-shift with m3u tuners
  • Allow a library to be named "backdrops", a previously reserved name
  • Improve server dashboard display with blue radiance theme
  • Improve mobile server dashboard with bottom navigation
  • Added live tv channels to search feature
  • Improve layout of live tv channels tab under live tv
  • Add audio books content type
  • Use es-MX with MovieDb when Spanish language is selected along with Mexico as the country
  • Improve metadata with absolute episode ordering
  • Cloud sync upload improvements
  • Support launching android server on device startup
  • Add container, video codec, audio codec, and subtitle codec filters
  • Improve multi-resolution naming recognition
  • Improve automatic refreshing in the web app
  • Improve resiliency with iptv streams
  • Improve Windows sleep prevention while server is being used
  • Improve Chromecast volume control
  • Improve xmltv parsing of European characters
  • Support multiple images with xmltv
  • Use transcode=none profile for HD Homerun when appropriate
  • Support splitting musicbrainz id's on both slashes and semi-colons
  • Make alpha pickers dynamic based on content
  • Improve identify feature
  • Improve manual refreshing when replacing existing images
  • Improve database cleanup procedures of removed content
  • Improve automatic refreshing of recordings
  • Restore user permission to change password and profile image
  • Prevent syncing of in-progress recordings
  • Improve authentication failure logging for Fail2ban support
  • Add API to find item by provider id
  • Update new user defaults to not allow deleting media
  • Make news notifications configurable
  • Reduce size of Windows and MacOS installers by 30 MB
  • Support user subtitle download permissions
  • Defer collage image generation until images are needed
  • Move AudioDb and Omdb to pre-installed plugins
  • Move fanart.tv to pre-installed plugin
  • Move MusicBrainz to pre-installed plugin
  • Move MovieDb metadata provider to pre-installed plugin
  • Move nfo saver to pre-installed plugin
  • Move tvdb to pre-installed plugin
  • Support per-library resume settings


Bug Fixes

  • Fix issue of changing password in Firefox when Firefox password manager is used
  • Fix repeated Visual Studio C++ install prompts when VS2017 is already present
  • Fix favorite artists page showing empty list
  • Fix search by accent characters
  • Fix web access by ipv6 ip address
  • Fix More Like This for artists always showing same content
  • Fix xmltv programs not being marked as new when they are also a Premiere
  • Fix recording image file names for shows containing a period in the name
  • Workaround .net core crashes on network availability changes
  • Fix collection and playlist separation per library
  • Fix hardware transcoding options being reverted to defaults
  • Fix cloud sync upload throttle not being applied
  • Fix xmltv failures with SMB paths
  • Fix audio books getting immediately marked as watched
  • Fix intermittent crash associated with log file rotation
  • Fix windows task scheduler entries not getting cleaned up
  • Fix typo in Exynos spelling
  • Fix remote URL showing with remote access disabled
  • Various DLNA bug fixes

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90 Comments

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dranderson402

dranderson402 30

Posted

Just upgraded to 4.0.2. Went smooth as a baby's butt. Running the library scan now but did update my guide data to emby from schedules direct. All flagged series to record are there.

 

Thanks for the hard work.

  • Like 1
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moonlightmedia

moonlightmedia 0

Posted

Is the docker version out yet? Been clicking refresh all day lol. Thanks for the hard work!

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moonlightmedia

moonlightmedia 0

Posted

Just finished updating the Docker version on unRAID. Thanks!

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sector327

wow, wow and more wow.....you guys are amazing!  great job!  (I'll upgrade as soon as I have time)

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neik

Sweet stuff over here. Looking forward to it. :-)

 

Thanks Luke and all other guys who work on improving Emby every day.

You guys do an amazing job.

 

 

I hope android TV emby client also gets new stable with new server release?

 

Just out of curiosity: Do you say that because your AndroidTV is unstable?

Link to comment
Jägs

"Hardware acceleration has been truly a major effort for us, and because of this, it will now require Emby Premiere on all platforms except for Nvidia Shield and Western Digital."

 

Can one of the admins/devs clarify this statement, namely, does this mean that if we migrate from 3.x to 4.x, we will lose hardware acceleration altogether if we do not have Emby Premiere?

 

If that is the case, will there be any sort of trial version so that we can see if the improvement is significant enough to warrant purchasing Emby Premiere?  I'm planning on doing so--bummed I missed the Cyber Monday deal--and this may be enough to make me jump in, but it'd be nice to kick the tires first, so to speak.

Link to comment
Happy2Play

Happy2Play 8275

Posted

"Hardware acceleration has been truly a major effort for us, and because of this, it will now require Emby Premiere on all platforms except for Nvidia Shield and Western Digital."

 

Can one of the admins/devs clarify this statement, namely, does this mean that if we migrate from 3.x to 4.x, we will lose hardware acceleration altogether if we do not have Emby Premiere?

 

If that is the case, will there be any sort of trial version so that we can see if the improvement is significant enough to warrant purchasing Emby Premiere?  I'm planning on doing so--bummed I missed the Cyber Monday deal--and this may be enough to make me jump in, but it'd be nice to kick the tires first, so to speak.

@Luke @ebr

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CBers

Just so people know, but the Restart/Shutdown option has been moved to the top of the page in the Dashboard page, next to the server name.

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Mobius

Greatly appreciate the efforts of the EMBY team and those who actively contribute to its development. This update will go very nicely with my recent hardware upgrade.

 

Cheers and all the best. :)

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nanuk

In Emby Server 3.x there was an option to bring several libraries with the same content type (e.g. movies or tvseries) together and handle it like one.

 

This option is missing in Emby Server 4.0. Will this be fixed?

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snl1

can someone tell me how i can remove the playlists button in the main menu? it wasn't there before..

 

i dont want and need it..

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thelostjuice

thelostjuice 1

Posted

can someone tell me how i can remove the playlists button in the main menu? it wasn't there before..

 

i dont want and need it..

 

Click the 3 dot button next to "My Media", scroll down the display options page and uncheck "Display on home screen" under Playlists.

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paddl82

great version guys!

 

I'm looking for the video-counter? In the previous release, is under the movie-categorie an counter visible. can i activate this in release 4?

 

br!

  • Like 1
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thianin

great work guys! congratz.

 

but i'm feeling a little bit sad. i bought the android TV app and supported the devs. but nowadays im watching occasionally a movie and most of the time transcoding is needed (i hate movies with subs, hw transcoding starting at synology ds918+ to often i think). and for this rarely usage i should buy now a premiere license? although i not needing any other features beside hardware transcoding.

For me (yeah i know my movies have bad codecs, subs, so emby needs to transcode) a montly fee is not worth one feature.. 

 

glad i read it first (in the updatelogs) and didnt make the update.

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bobaldis

Hi,

 

Thanks for the update, sounds like lots of interesting new features/improvements to what was already a great product.

 

One thing that seems to have gone amiss (it could be a setting changed in the update, if so please point me in the right direction) but I was watching a series of training video's, each topic had a folder with multiple videos in it and as well as displaying the number of unwatched videos on the folder thumbnail, I could filter out the watched folders, this made watching the next video/topic so simple. Now the the unwatched filter is not working and the folders do not show the number of unwatched videos left.

 

In case it's platform relevant, I'm running Emby Server (Premiere) on a Synology NAS, I'm using the FireTV App to watch the content, but notice the Web page also doesn't indicate watched/unwatched status until you go into each folder (I'm not sure if this was there or before as I use the FireTV predominantly).

 

Any help in resolving this would be appreciated as it made picking up on the next video so easy and intuitive.

 

Update - Just noticed "VTS.." files appearing on the Dashboard and Movies page after update rather than the film itself?

 

The above aside nice looking upgrade.

 

Thanks,

 

Bob

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eskador

Just in case anyone else runs across this issue with LiveTV using ServerWMC. For LiveTV to appear in the Home Screen, I had to manually go into scheduled tasks and refresh the guide data. After that it appeared on the home screen, and I was able to play LiveTV.

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knight2024

I just purchased a Lifetime Emby a few days ago. I had believed that for the past few years of running Plex that it was the best out there, but Plex with Alexa + Firestick or Roku sucks for voice control, then I stumbled upon Emby, because i was searching for anything out there that would work with voice control of my media database, I am very impressed so far. I absolutely love the customization that a person can do. I highly Recommend Emby over anything else on the market thus far. Blows Plex out of the water!!!

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wizardbuilder2017

wizardbuilder2017 0

Posted

Have anybody noticed a bug or problems with the new update? i want to be shore to safely do the update

(im on docker)

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Uroth

In this new update, how can I bunch up new episodes like it was before? I don't want every new episode to be announced, just that the show that it has new episodes.

6CPutyP.png

Link to comment
ottoii

I did the upadte from 3.5.3.0 to 4.0.0.2 auf debian amd64 server. First i did a backup. Then I installed 4.00.2. After i updated Autobox etc, did the restart and media scan.

Now ich have a real mess! all of ovver 6k Movies have no metadata anymore! A lot of them were linked manualy, My Series still got showhn, even the Season, but there arent any episode left.

So i made all back to 3.5.3.0. Unlocked ALL serises/movies and then did again the updrade to 4.0.0.2.

First look was great! All was there with metadata and so on! Push the *mediascan" button. All fucked up terrible. I sill all the dir movies. no metadata enywehre.

I hope you guys cant tell me what im doing wrong or what do to.

I will send every log which could be needed.

If I cant fix this, i have to stop with emby asap.

Thanky for every help ot tip.

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