Jump to content

Emby Blog

A group blog by Developers in General

  • entries
    540
  • comments
    4761
  • views
    3351643

Contributors to this blog

  • Luke 341
  • ebr 68
  • Carlo 31
  • 7illusions 15
  • ScottIsAFool 12
  • Abobader 11
  • xnappo 8
  • radeon 8
  • darwindeeds 7
  • Redshirt 6
  • Cheesegeezer 5
  • Aphid 3
  • techywarrior 3
  • bigjohn 3
  • snazy2000 3
  • sross44 3
  • leedavies 3
  • gcw07 2
  • softworkz 2
  • Soultaker 2
  • chef 2
  • marcelveldt 1
  • hurricanehrndz 1

Announcing Emby Server 4.0

Luke

Entry posted by Luke

28676 views

 Share

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

  • Like 22
 Share

90 Comments

Recommended Comments



Luke

Bonjour

I am premiere user for 2 years and some issues never solved ,that why i don't renew.Purchase ap for tv and android mobile and deal with it.

Emby Team disable hardware acceleration for V4. xxxx.

Disappointed.

 

Hi there, can you please open a topic in the community? We're happy to help you resolve these. Thanks !

Link to comment
Luke

I'm confused so does the new update to 4.0 disable all transcoding such as with the CPU ? 

 

I have been a premiere member in the past but am not currently. 

 

I am still on version 3.5.3.0 and have blocked the update for now. 

 

I am not currently using the Hardware Acceleration Trascoding, I've check that setting and its set to None currently. 

 

Also my Live TV guide data seems to have stopped working / appearing its all empty. I am using the DVBLink plugin for Emby. Why don't I have any guide data now on version 3.5.3.0 and I assume if updating to 4.0 I also won't have any guide data as a current none premiere member  ?

 

The DVBLink Server is pulling all the guide data in from the actual DVB-T stream of the TV tuner card. I am not using any other external guide data service. Looking in the DVBLink Server software the guide data is present in there OK, it now just not appearing in any of the Emby GUI's. I can run the Refresh Guide task process in Emby that seems to work and go through the motions OK. 

 

Thanks

 

Please open a topic in the community and we're happy to help. Thanks.

Link to comment
breezytm

I still have not received the update. I do not know why. My server is on version 3.2.36.0 and shows no available update/upgrade. 

Link to comment
Info1

Hi, is this a mixed content library?

sorry, I know a lot of work went into this but I can not navigate with the remote on my media PC..

 

Disregard, will follow V4 thread in forum. Seeing other user with mix content issues. 

 

This is very frustrating. Sorry

 

m

Link to comment
greasy

This release is awesome for me so far.  The upgrade was fast, and everything is really snappy now.  I also love the new guide data.  Great job on this one guys!

Link to comment
ferk

Seems like a very good update overall... But one that will prevent me from using it unfortunately. I've been with Plex for the past couple of years with a cheap tv box as server, and I was looking to upgrade it for a similarly power consumption server (in which gpu transcode is key since they tend to be quite weak cpu wise to keep power low). Since Plex requires subscription for it I was starting to get along with Emby and the free transcode, luckily the change has been made before I purchase a new server, so I guess now I'll have to look for something more powerful for standard cpu transcode and Plex has worked a bit better for me in terms of media recognition and apps so I don't think I have a reason to change anymore.

 

I get why this has been changed, it had to be quite a hard job to do, but it's a big turn off for me :/

Link to comment
tillithz

Guess this was a bust. Personally, it would have been better to stay on a stale version of 3.5 then update to 4 considering all the issues. It boggles the mind that this version is so poor and obviously rushed yet released. I can expect this comment to be deleted since its not positive towards emby, but how can I be positive when a system is build around this software that breaks when the wind blows?

Link to comment
bardmaster

bardmaster 17

Posted

Hi - very excited, still trying out v4.  How much can can hardware acceleration improve performance and is there any kind of guide or hardware dictionary which might help us know what can do what?  I have an old AMD Radeon HD6850 card lying around and will willingly stick it in my home server if it improves Emby playback performance.  My rig has an i7-4790 processor - I don't get any hw acceleration options when I click on Advanced.

Link to comment
troyhough

Guess this was a bust. Personally, it would have been better to stay on a stale version of 3.5 then update to 4 considering all the issues. It boggles the mind that this version is so poor and obviously rushed yet released. I can expect this comment to be deleted since its not positive towards emby, but how can I be positive when a system is build around this software that breaks when the wind blows?

 

"All the issues". Ok whatever. Emby rocks. If you don't like it, go somewhere else and don't come back.

Link to comment
dsmithp233

The feature that I'm really waiting for is the capability to sort my music library with multiple filters. For example, first by artist name and second by release date.

Link to comment
bobaldis

hi there, can you open a topic about this in the community? We're happy to help. Thanks !

Hi Luke,

 

I did as requested but no acknowledgement yet?

 

regards,

 

Bob

Link to comment
StealthDefender

StealthDefender 29

Posted

Good job so far, but with the new version my collections are gone! I have my collections tagged with the [boxSet] stringh and they always appear

unter my collections. Now they are gone. I loved that the collection infos are stored in the folder itself.

Now i must recreate all my collections with the emby onboard function and the infos are stored elsewhere.

Other options?

Greetz Stealth

Link to comment
ShoutingMan

ShoutingMan 95

Posted

Thanks for the blog post! Quite handy to walk through the updates and check and update settings that affect me. Especially the Collections; I had to reenable that after the update and this blog post showed me how to do it! Thanks for the hard work!

Link to comment
KOBEY

just pulled the trigger on the new update. so far so good. seams to be alot faster. but the new playlist tile...any way to remove this? for all users. it shows playlist for all usrs. we dont like this and not seeing any options to remove, or even edit. even metadata mgr has no options to remove

Link to comment
earthtorob

earthtorob 5

Posted

Great update guys.  I'm running on an AMD A4 and I'm getting great performance. 

Link to comment

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...