Emby needs to improve its communication to users.

[Pejamas 45]

I am positive I'm not the only one who thinks this, but for a product that has a paid subscription the communication to end users is severely lacking.

Beta Updates, Road Maps, Lack of Community Managers, More in depth responses to feature requests to name a few areas that honestly, are very average or non-existent. The fact that community members that make plugins have better engagement and responses to updates/requests/planned changes is pretty average tbh.

When it comes to beta updates, it seems we get this string of updates then shit breaks and we get no communication on what's being done to fix it. How hard would it be to have a dedicated thread that communicates what's being worked on for the next update, an eta, issues that are known and what's being focused on, and what's currently a struggle to diagnose and fix?

I think the same goes for literally any feature request. The token "Yes we can look into this in the future" response is a joke tbh. It literally reminds me of my mum saying Maybe to me as a kid.

Don't get me wrong I love Emby as a product, I just think it's about time the communication gets an over hall.

 

[sebasmiles 8]

This is a small team man, as far as I understand much more like a passion project than anything else. Although planning and communications is great, its harder in that kind of environment. They are learning stuff all the time, and they implement some of it as they are more comfortable with it which I suspect makes any kind of long term or even mid term planning very difficult.

The feature request is to give them ideas, some become features, others stay as ideas for the future as others have priority. I think you are being a bit stringent but to each their own I guess.

[Pejamas 45]

8 minutes ago, sebasmiles said:

This is a small team man, as far as I understand much more like a passion project than anything else. Although planning and communications is great, its harder in that kind of environment. They are learning stuff all the time, and they implement some of it as they are more comfortable with it which I suspect makes any kind of long term or even mid term planning very difficult.

The feature request is to give them ideas, some become features, others stay as ideas for the future as others have priority. I think you are being a bit stringent but to each their own I guess.

There's absolutely no reason they can't expand the team, from a purely community engaging point of view. Plugin developers are the definition of "passion projects" yet as above, communicate far better with the user base of a free service vs a service provider that has an income flow from their users.

[ebr 14913]

Hi.  There is always room for improvement and we continually strive to do better.  We are a small team but that is actually what makes us much more responsive than a lot of larger ones IMO.

At times I feel we are kinda between a rock and a hard place here...because we grew out of the open-source environment we have a very strong sense of "community" with this product.  That is a good thing but it also seems to set an expectation with our users that they should have detailed insights into our internal operations.  There are a lot of reasons why this isn't practical with us no longer being such a project.  You don't have these types of insights into any major product from a large company - and you don't have direct contact with the actual people behind the scenes with those companies either.

The last two server beta cycles have been very long - way too long - and that has exacerbated things.  That is not how we planned them but stuff happens and here we are.  One of our primary goals for the future will be to get back to much shorter release cycles of the server.

So, thanks for the feedback and we will strive to do the best we can on the communication front but do realize that our internal operations are not intended to be public.  We want to keep the sense of community we have built and Luke and I are still committed to direct communications with our users instead of building layers of isolation that would only obfuscate things further. 

In the end, what we really want to do is build, deliver and support the best damned personal media server there is and that will continue to be our top priority.

Thanks.

[wordlover 103]

So when will 4.8 be released? [wink]