Watch Party

[jspanitz 7]

5 hours ago, bugz000 said:

and, yet, it appears you are also still here...

aww cute - glad you just got here
but really why wouldn't I be - i love emby except for this one huge, gaping hole in the feature set
thanks for chiming in though

[RafaG 16]

In my opinion, the main problem is that it seems that no one takes this characteristic into account and gives it a roadmap.

This post is two years old, but there are several posts in recent years on this topic, just as an example: 

 

 

[solidsnakex37 42]

On 3/2/2023 at 11:39 PM, Luke said:

Hi, it's planned for future updates, so stay tuned.

@bugz000

1 hour ago, bugz000 said:

now, how about a solution for emby?

Since you seem to not have read the entire thread, I will highlight the important note above for you. What else are you wanting? 

There is nothing else to be said here, we have confirmation from Luke it's being planned. The solution you're wanting will come in a future update. 

[bugz000 9]

13 minutes ago, RafaG said:

this post is two years old, but there are several posts in recent years on this topic

can you find other posts? it would be good to aggregate all these efforts into one area so it's clearer how much the community wants this, and to help stop any reposts as this thread is 90% jellyfin 

[bugz000 9]

19 minutes ago, solidsnakex37 said:

@bugz000

Since you seem to not have read the entire thread, I will highlight the important note above for you. What else are you wanting? 

There is nothing else to be said here, we have confirmation from Luke it's being planned. The solution you're wanting will come in a future update. 

i have read the entire thread, though it's clear you have nothing constructive to bring... which is specifically what i'm seeking, though it is closed source, there's no reason the community can't help bring ideas to the table which may assist in the creation of the feature in a shorter timeframe, i can see you're affinity for collaborative work however is... questionable...
apparently trying to coordinate this here however is harder than getting school children to stand in a line. no wonder the devs appear to be overlooking this.

We get it, jellyfin has it
We get it, everyone is impatient
We get it, it's "in the to-do list"
We get it, there's plugins that do it already but all have issues
We get it, everyone is annoyed
We get it, amazon has it
We get it, plex has it
We get it, discord has it
We get it.

now we're on the same page, can we stop this bull and actually do something constructive?

Edited February 13 by bugz000

[solidsnakex37 42]

6 minutes ago, bugz000 said:

there's no reason the community can't help bring ideas to the table which may assist in the creation of the feature in a shorter timeframe

This thread went silent on Oct 2022, I brought it back to life Feb 2023 and there was MUCH constructive conversation at that time, to which you were not a part of. 

At the time, nobody even knew that Jellyfin had a feature called "Sync Play" and the REASON I keep bringing this up, which you can't seem to understand is that JF forked from Emby. 

Why is that important? It allowed these 3rd party devs to go and see how that solution was implemented. If you're curious, you can read the repo here: https://github.com/Syncplay/syncplay

This is what was implemented into Jellyfin, yes, I am mentioning Jellyfin again because it's a fork from Emby. If it can be implemented into JF, the groundwork is there to be used in Emby. But we can't integrate this same solution without the Core team, it's already been discussed. 

Stop getting butthurt over the word Jellyfin. 

There is also a guide on adding support for a new media player: 
https://github.com/Syncplay/syncplay/wiki/Guide-to-adding-support-for-a-new-media-player-to-Syncplay

But all of this is already in this thread, the solutions, the half-ass solutions as some have said, it's all been discussed before. There is nothing new to add here and you've added nothing new yourself. 

There is youtube videos from someone here, I think it was @chef? No idea, but this video below even demonstrated some of the attempts that these guys worked on to see if it can work. 

Unless a miracle happens, we need the core team to step in man, I don't know what else to say. The proof is literally in this thread. 

There is some guy on Reddit called JediCoach on the Emby Reddit who is claiming to be the new marketing guy, but I have no idea who he is in the forum. It might be ideal if he were to develop a survey and gather information on features, then let the community vote. 
 

 

[solidsnakex37 42]

18 minutes ago, bugz000 said:

now we're on the same page, can we stop this bull and actually do something constructive?

Okay, are you a dev? What code do you know? 

You want to dig into all we know so far and develop our own solution? 

[roaku 797]

Not sure which stage of the grieving process all of this is.

[solidsnakex37 42]

1 minute ago, roaku said:

Not sure which stage of the grieving process all of this is.

Denial 

[rbjtech 4301]

.. so the starting sync aspect is probably workable.   I have multi clients running near perfect sync - you just need to use the session id to gather the client type.   Android for example appears to start 1.75s after a web browser - so you simply advanced that session start to match the faster starting web browser.

curl -X "POST" "http://emby.rbjtech.lan:8096/emby/Sessions/7e2f75d246dc1ef13651893be1b4304d/Playing?ItemIds=3771839&StartPositionTicks=00000000&PlayCommand=PlayNow&api_key=*" -H "accept: */*" -d ""
curl -X "POST" "http://emby.rbjtech.lan:8096/emby/Sessions/b7157f63e7db1a5f388f6daad89c3a63/Playing?ItemIds=3771839&StartPositionTicks=17500000&PlayCommand=PlayNow&api_key=*" -H "accept: */*" -d ""

Pause and Messaging don't need the delay, they are instant in all sessions.  They all work fine via the API as does jumping to the film page that you are about to watch.

Each client probably has it's own set of 'delays' - so those just need working out vs the fastest one.  Transcoding clients will probably be a challange...

RemoteEndPoint will tell you if it's local or remote.   Remote for me (WAN) adds about 0.5 sec to the equation.   But that can easily be dynamically worked out all from the session id info.  I have a remote session in near perfect sync - on my phone over a vpn..

What we really need is a way for the CLIENT to send back that it has started play at time X. 

So by simply sending the above http/https POST commands to the emby web server - ANY external services can control the sessions.  All it needs is the session id's and the emby api key...

Any web developers out there .. ?

Edited February 13 by rbjtech

[solidsnakex37 42]

11 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

What we really need is a way for the CLIENT to send back that it has started play at time X. 

 

I wonder if the Remote Control API could be used? There is device name/ID, I wonder if just creating a "room" and whoever creates that room, can then select devices to add to the playback via a drop down or something. Just talking out my a** right now

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/wiki/Remote-control

but the above is an example session

Then the StartPositionTicks is something that can be supplied from here
https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/wiki/Web-Socket#play:~:text=StartPositionTicks - If supplied%2C this is the position in which the first title should start at.

Which could be used in a POST for the sessions API, wonder if this could just be a static value that the client will then receive 

https://swagger.emby.media/?staticview=true#/SessionsService/postSessionsByIdPlaying

[rbjtech 4301]

1 minute ago, solidsnakex37 said:

I wonder if the Remote Control API could be used? There is device name/ID, I wonder if just creating a "room" and whoever creates that room, can then select devices to add to the playback via a drop down or something. Just talking out my a** right now

https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/wiki/Remote-control

but the above is an example session

Then the StartPositionTicks is something that can be supplied from here
https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Emby/wiki/Web-Socket#play:~:text=StartPositionTicks - If supplied%2C this is the position in which the first title should start at.

Which could be used in a POST for the sessions API, wonder if this could just be a static value that the client will then receive 

https://swagger.emby.media/?staticview=true#/SessionsService/postSessionsByIdPlaying

That is exactly what my example above does .. and what @chefproof of concept did but via a plugin (effectively sending the API commands internally).

This has never been the hard bit - but I'm suggesting that you CAN get near perfect sync by using tricks in the start ticks. 

The major point here is it does not necessarily need to be EMBY itself which 'controls' the party - it can be any web service with a hook into emby via it's API.      

If THAT is easy for somebody to write - then sending the session id's and commands is the relatively easy bit ...

[solidsnakex37 42]

11 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

That is exactly what my example above does .. and what @chefproof of concept did but via a plugin (effectively sending the API commands internally).

This has never been the hard bit - but I'm suggesting that you CAN get near perfect sync by using tricks in the start ticks. 

The major point here is it does not necessarily need to be EMBY itself which 'controls' the party - it can be any web service with a hook into emby via it's API.      

If THAT is easy for somebody to write - then sending the session id's and commands is the relatively easy bit ...

I will have to play around with this more, the part I couldn't figure out is where to get the deviceIDs to add to the session, the X-Emby-Device-Id value 

[rbjtech 4301]

2 minutes ago, solidsnakex37 said:

I will have to play around with this more, the part I couldn't figure out is where to get the deviceIDs to add to the session, the X-Emby-Device-Id value 

curl -X 'GET' \
  'http://emby.rbjtech.lan:8096/emby/Sessions?api_key=<your_api_key>' \
  -H 'accept: application/json'

This gets all the session id's/devices etc all logged into emby.  It's all in the SessionsService in the emby API/Swagger.

[solidsnakex37 42]

Just now, rbjtech said:

curl -X 'GET' \
  'http://emby.rbjtech.lan:8096/emby/Sessions?api_key=<your_api_key>' \
  -H 'accept: application/json'

This gets all the session id's/devices etc all logged into emby.  It's all in the SessionsService in the emby API/Swagger.

I can't get the interactive swagger to work for some reason so I'm just testing using postman

 

I'll test what you linked, I think I misunderstood what the sessions endpoint did I thought that was active playback sessions (not logged in users)

[sross44 243]

3 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

There is some guy on Reddit called JediCoach on the Emby Reddit who is claiming to be the new marketing guy, but I have no idea who he is in the forum. It might be ideal if he were to develop a survey and gather information on features, then let the community vote. 
 

Hi... I'm one and the same. We know the desire for this feature and I can tell you that it is planned for a feature release just as others have shared. Beyond that, there's no more information as of yet.

As for your suggestion of a poll, while we 100% value our users and what their interests are, please keep in mind we are closed source. You don't see Microsoft or Apple or any other proprietary software company polling their users as to what they want next in their suite of software and then making that the focus of the next update or for that matter sharing software development roadmaps. We do keep track of feature requests and the such, so when @Lukesays that it is in the plan for future development, rest assured that it is. 

With all of that being said, we 100% value all of our user's opinions. Both the good and the bad and everything in between. It's that knowledge that helps us put together a roadmap and continued path to success moving forward.

Edited February 14 by sross44

[solidsnakex37 42]

2 minutes ago, sross44 said:

Hi... I'm one and the same. We know the desire for this feature and I can tell you that it is planned for a feature release just as others have shared. Beyond that, there's no more information as of yet.

As for your suggestion of of a poll, while we 100% value our users and what their interests are, please keep in mind we are closed source. You don't see Microsoft or Apple or any other proprietary software company polling their users as to what they want next in their suite of software and then making that the focus of the next update or for that matter sharing software development roadmaps. We do keep track of feature requests and the such, so when @Lukesays that it is in the plan for future development, rest assured that it is. 

With all of that being said, we 100% value all of our user's opinions. Both the good and the bad and everything in between. It's that knowledge that helps us put together a roadmap and continued path to success moving forward.

I had a feeling it was you based on the Star Wars profile picture 

I think you may have misinterpreted the user poll idea, I don't mean use polls as the entire development roadmap. 

For example, while yes it's closed source, imagine the positive feedback users if it was formatted like this:

After each major release, you come out with a survey with the top feature requests (I assume you use something like Jira/confluence and track user demand?). Of those top feature requests, you can gather information on what the community wants in the next release. Then you take that internally and compare those against your internal roadmap. 

What features were voted on that align with our road map?

Can we implement at least one of these with the next major release?

What you decide to implement will always be up to Core, and you're of course not inclinded to implement anything we ask for, ever. 

Though for the devs to get feedback from users I don't think is a bad thing. If the community votes and can maybe rest assured maybe one of those features would be implemented, I think it would be well received. 

Microsoft and other conglomerates don't need to rely on surveys to align with their customer base because they are literally billion dollar companies with multiple departments, who also have Customer Experience and Success teams. They also use products for data analytics and likely come up with products and features based on that. So I get what you're saying but not a fair comparison IMO. 

[sross44 243]

36 minutes ago, solidsnakex37 said:

Microsoft and other conglomerates don't need to rely on surveys to align with their customer base because they are literally billion dollar companies with multiple departments, who also have Customer Experience and Success teams. 

Think of me as your personal customer experience and success team! Lol

All joking aside though, I the ideas you mentioned definitely have merit. It's something to definitely take under advisement and talk about internally. 

[solidsnakex37 42]

16 minutes ago, sross44 said:

Think of me as your personal customer experience and success team! Lol

Hell yeah! I do love what you've been doing over on the Emby Reddit, survey idea aside I think the main point is to gather feedback from the community which you've been actively doing, so kudos there 

 

I am a bit biased as I've worked for large survey companies and now work as a support engineer at a large data analytics company, so data/feedback is something I constantly think about and am surrounded by lol

[bugz000 9]

the irony of all these growing pains yet these people comply anyway, people are fkin wierd man, regardless, thankyou all for your contributions, anyone else have something to bring too?

Edited February 14 by bugz000

[bugz000 9]

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

This thread went silent on Oct 2022, I brought it back to life Feb 2023 and there was MUCH constructive conversation at that time, to which you were not a part of. 
 

i was there. literally go back?

 

  

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

At the time, nobody even knew that Jellyfin had a feature called "Sync Play" and the REASON I keep bringing this up, which you can't seem to understand is that JF forked from Emby. 
 

literally i brought this up a couple times, i am very, very well aware
 

  

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

Why is that important? It allowed these 3rd party devs to go and see how that solution was implemented. If you're curious, you can read the repo here: https://github.com/Syncplay/syncplay
 

man doesn't understand what GPL is

 

  

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

This is what was implemented into Jellyfin, yes, I am mentioning Jellyfin again because it's a fork from Emby. If it can be implemented into JF, the groundwork is there to be used in Emby. But we can't integrate this same solution without the Core team, it's already been discussed. 
 

still doesn't ... *sigh* are you literally dense?

 

  

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

Stop getting butthurt over the word Jellyfin. 
 

constructive.


 

  

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

There is also a guide on adding support for a new media player: 
https://github.com/Syncplay/syncplay/wiki/Guide-to-adding-support-for-a-new-media-player-to-Syncplay
 

i realy don't see how this is revlevant to the actual implementation of something that isn't remotely related to syncplay....
  

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

But all of this is already in this thread, the solutions, the half-ass solutions as some have said, it's all been discussed before. There is nothing new to add here and you've added nothing new yourself. 
 

thanks, and i suppose you are also being constructive... given the above? shut your mouth
 

  

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

There is youtube videos from someone here, I think it was @chef? No idea, but this video below even demonstrated some of the attempts that these guys worked on to see if it can work. 
 

yes, i literally linked it a couple pages back, you are not paying attention, keep up dude ffs

 

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

Unless a miracle happens, we need the core team to step in man, I don't know what else to say. The proof is literally in this thread. 
 

literally what im trying to achieve, shut up

 

  

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

There is some guy on Reddit called JediCoach on the Emby Reddit who is claiming to be the new marketing guy, but I have no idea who he is in the forum. It might be ideal if he were to develop a survey and gather information on features, then let the community vote. 
 

what?

then a couple youtube links, which i've already posted

dude just stop, you are being intentionally obstructive, go take some elocution lessons or something and let the actual motivated people do something useful for everyone else, you are not achieving anything here and spouting complete bull
i can tell you're a reddit user, take your autistic screeching elsewhere or at least learn some core interpersonal skills, you are abhorrent to be around.

Edited February 14 by bugz000

[bugz000 9]

10 hours ago, solidsnakex37 said:

Okay, are you a dev? What code do you know? 

You want to dig into all we know so far and develop our own solution? 

i have a programming degree.  there are several existing plugin solutions but it is not possible within emby core without developer intervention. again, something we have already covered.

Edited February 14 by bugz000

[bugz000 9]

On 7/31/2022 at 1:49 AM, Raelone said:

I am sure you get tied of hearing things like this, but Plex's Watch together feature has no such limitation in Roku.  Watch together works just fine with people on different LAN (I have watched together from GA with someone in the UK before and out in CA all the time).

On 7/31/2022 at 2:31 PM, ebr said:

That's because they know about (and can control) your entire user session through their central server and they have developed their app to be aware of this feature.  With them, the users aren't yours - they are theirs. 

These guys are trying to do this as a 3rd party plug-in with the app completely un-aware of it so that will have some limitations.

On 8/1/2022 at 11:29 PM, gihayes said:

Just throwing things out there, what about WatchSync, SyncWatch, or SyncViewing.

On 8/1/2022 at 11:29 PM, gihayes said:

Just throwing things out there, what about WatchSync, SyncWatch, or SyncViewing.

On 8/5/2022 at 10:37 PM, chef said:

I've come a realization while trying out different ways to produce this.

If you use custom intros on your server, they will play when you are adding your self to the watch party. There isn't much at this time I can see to change that from happening.

Not a deal breaker.

On 8/7/2022 at 5:04 PM, BillOatman said:

Looks like Amazon Prime beat us to Watch Party   Interesting user interface for it.  The button at the very bottom says "Create Watch Party".  Things typed in the chat appear in the lower right of the screen.

On 8/8/2022 at 5:46 PM, BillOatman said:

I've had a look at the code and followed comments in this thread by both @chef and @ebr and unfortunately I have to agree, core is the place for this feature and not a plugin.  Also, trying to bolt on a external web app, which I think at one time there was working being done on that approach in this forum that seems to have died off, or other such things just won't accomplish what needs to be accomplished. 

For those that really want or even need this feature, maybe look at Plex and/or JellyFin for "parties" at least until the Emby core team can do a proper implementation.

On 8/8/2022 at 6:53 PM, BillOatman said:

Given the latency I've seen in ComSkipper and PottyMouth I would agree.

On 2/3/2023 at 10:44 PM, chef said:

Sync-Play. 

 

Welp jelly-fish pride themselves on being open source, so where is the repo for this SyncPlay, and I'll add it to Emby without blinking an eye.

They had no issues taking Emby source code, so I have absolutely not issues implementing this SyncPlay from them into Emby.

Anyone have the open source SyncPlay url?

 

On 2/3/2023 at 10:49 PM, LazyMonday91 said:

On 2/3/2023 at 11:10 PM, pünktchen said:

Jellyfin has build it into its server:

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/blob/master/Jellyfin.Api/Controllers/SyncPlayController.cs

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/tree/master/MediaBrowser.Controller/SyncPlay

https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/tree/master/MediaBrowser.Model/SyncPlay

On 2/4/2023 at 12:05 AM, solidsnakex37 said:

It was my favorite feature of Jellyfin, I have friends who live in Switzerland and we always watch movies together. I would love if Emby brought this to their platform, and I'd gladly pay money for it. 

On 2/4/2023 at 12:49 AM, chef said:

We'll, we won't be able to implement it directly, but... Maybe we can learn sone lessons from that and figure out something.

On 2/4/2023 at 1:11 AM, Cheesegeezer said:

Chef almost had this working, but required a wee bit of help from the emby team for implementation.

so the long and short is… Chef has the code… and it works.. check his YouTube channel. (BenjaminAnderson) Emby won’t shift resources to accommodate it. 

 

On 2/8/2023 at 10:51 PM, MBSki said:

Yes, it is absolutely incredible work, completely agree.

So can Emby core team take advantage of Jellyfin code or no, as @roaku said... technical and legal reasons in the way.

 

On 2/8/2023 at 11:13 PM, arrbee99 said:

I'd imagine you can't take stuff from open source and put it into something you charge for. I could probably look this up, but I'm not that desperate...

On 2/8/2023 at 11:17 PM, BillOatman said:

JF came from a old version of Emby when it was open source.  But they changed the core architecture and I don't know what else since I have not looked at it closely.  So just dropping the code directly into Emby is probably not an option.  I suspect they could look at that code and do the equivalent in Emby.  

JF is also released under the GNU GPL.  Closed source, commercial projects like Emby need to tread lightly when even looking at GPL code.  That's the legal reason people have mentioned.

On 2/13/2023 at 7:56 AM, Cheesegeezer said:

Am i correct in thinking kodi is python based. @samuelqwe may be able to help here.. he’s good with that code for sure! 

On 2/14/2023 at 5:47 AM, quickmic said:

As mentioned, clients must support the custom "API" I'm using. Only Emby for Kodi next gen 8.X is currently supporting that.

I'll post the "APIs" as soon as they are final. They could be implemented in Emby (would be more nicely) OR kept them as they are.

Currently I use regular Emby's text messages with commands included and must be parsed by the client.

On 8/10/2023 at 6:20 PM, e123enitan said:

Setup kodi in windows with emby4kodi version 8 plus, once that is completed use emby for kodi to control other clients on your server to process watch together very simple it works perfectly for me.  

On 10/24/2023 at 9:19 PM, Luke said:

Hi, it is planned for future updates. Thanks.

On 12/5/2023 at 2:11 AM, Luke said:

Hi, this feature is planned for future updates. Thanks.

On 11/28/2023 at 4:52 PM, BillOatman said:

Plex and Jellyfin both have had this feature for some time.  I haven't tried on either yet but I have heard good things about both.  It's an option until Emby catches up.

On 12/26/2023 at 3:01 AM, Luke said:

Hi, not yet, but this is planned for future updates. Thanks.

On 2/12/2024 at 9:50 PM, drait said:

I really wish Emby had a bounty program that those that can and want to incentivize specific feature development, could. 

Maybe one or more of the plugin devs would be interested in this sort of pay-for-functionality arrangements? 

https://github.com/Quadrubo/emby-sync-watch

 

 

there, now can we PLEASE ... move on to more constructive things?

Edited February 14 by bugz000

[Mookdog 90]

What I dont understand how it seems like its impossible to do. @quickmicimplemented it in Emby For Kodi Next Gen and it works fairly well but not everyone wants to rely on Kodi to watch together. If quickmic could implement it how come the developers cant ?

 

Mook

[Luke 37151]

13 minutes ago, Mookdog said:

What I dont understand how it seems like its impossible to do. @quickmicimplemented it in Emby For Kodi Next Gen and it works fairly well but not everyone wants to rely on Kodi to watch together. If quickmic could implement it how come the developers cant ?

 

Mook

Nobody has said that we can't. It just hasn't been done yet.