Emby Q&A Answers Part Three

[Luke 37252]

The Emby team wanted to say thank you again to everyone that took the time to ask various questions during our Q&A session. Here are a few more answers to questions that a lot of our users were asking about. 

1) How is beta functionality success measured? 

Often times people are curious about the process we use internally here at Emby as we go through the Beta process. We do rely heavily on the forum feedback and beta-tester feedback relating to open issues. It is also important that we take into account the overall experience of the beta release compared to the current stable release, especially when we are making large changes as we did from 4.7 to 4.8. We may be perfectionists at heart but we also understand that we can't spend forever chasing perfection on the release so we do our best to balance stability and functionality throughout the whole process. 

To reiterate what we shared in previous blog posts, we also understand that a tighter release window with smaller goals allows us to hone in on the stability of the beta and get releases out to the public. It is something that we here at Emby are striving to get to.

2) What is the split of time between actual development and forum duties? 

We get this question asked often so we thought we would give a little run down on this. Some of our developers such as @Lukeand @ebrand others split their time between development and the forums as things demand. Other developers we have on staff actually do not even engage in the forums at all as to solely focus on the development of Emby moving forward. This allows us to offer quick and prompt customer service and also focus on development at the same time. We thought it was important to answer this one at this point in time, because we do want people to know that there is more to the development team than simply what you see here on the forums. 

3) What would help the Emby team the most to improve the overall product from the community?

This is another question that gets asked often and it's something that a lot of you are already doing. Keep up the feedback! The more the better! Everything that's posted on these forums is invaluable to us. From pain points, feature requests, how you're using the server, what apps you prefer and anything else that people share with us about how they utilize Emby. Everything that you share is heard and taken into account by the developers. That doesn't always mean that things can get implemented right away or worked on immediately, but the value of your feedback is paramount to our work. We know that it doesn't always seem like it to everyone, but we 100% listen to everything people say and value the thoughts and opinions of our user base! 

4) What are some of the biggest obstacles that the Emby team faces throughout development? 

A lot of the challenges we face throughout development are based on resource allocation from the sheer amount of hardware and software options that Emby runs on. Keeping in mind that Emby runs on everything from an old windows laptop, to Linux distros, NAS, server systems and more, we have to make sure that the program works on all of these systems. Also development of the apps falls under that same category. With so many options for our users to choose from dedicated media players such as Roku, Amazon Fire Sticks, Nvidia Shields, Apple TV Smart TV's, mobile devices such as Android and iOS, there are a lot of different platforms that we need to develop on and do our best to make sure everything is up to the standard that our users expect from Emby. 

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