Feature: Merge libraries from multiple servers

[BlazedMonkey 94]

26 minutes ago, Marijuana said:

People running illegal streaming sites do not want to use your emby server, they use free open source more secure options not emby. The PAYING emby customers want this feature whether we pay monthly or pay for the lifetime premium, please stop using excuses to why it takes 5 years to do something. I wasn't going to reply to this but come on dude get real with us. If we pay for emby it is up to you to get things done for us if you don't like a feature just simply say Nope Not Happening!

Thats not really their style: 

 

[Marijuana 12]

54 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

r/EmbyShares. So much for not using. 

What the  just looked , why would people use a 25 limit server for pirating looks like I was wrong.

[GrimReaper 4154]

5 minutes ago, Marijuana said:

why would people use a 25 limit server

They likely go for higher tiers, not the base 25-devices-limit ones. As they can also run multiple servers pointing to the same libraries.

[Marijuana 12]

Bottom line is you can't let what others do stop you from building an amazing platform in this world there's always thieves and crooks online fraud whatever the case may be. Don't let crooks deter from making great features like this one. It is frustrating wanting something that never happens 

[Marijuana 12]

1 minute ago, GrimReaper said:

They likely go for higher tiers, not the base 25-devices-limit ones. As they can also run multiple servers pointing to the same libraries.

I didn't know that, from googling it looks like a big thing to  People who exploit what others spend so much time perfecting they just ruin it for everyone.

[ebr 15670]

Again, what features we work on has everything to do with cost benefit and this particular feature - while still very intriguing - has an extremely high cost with a benefit to an extremely small audience of our users.  That is the real issue with any feature request.  How long a request has been out here really isn't an indicator for this cost/benefit analysis.

[Marijuana 12]

13 hours ago, ebr said:

Again, what features we work on has everything to do with cost benefit and this particular feature - while still very intriguing - has an extremely high cost with a benefit to an extremely small audience of our users.  That is the real issue with any feature request.  How long a request has been out here really isn't an indicator for this cost/benefit analysis.

Thank you for the explanation and sorry if I was a little snappy before, I understand time is money and I would also agree this feature would only be for a smaller group of users who want to share emby with friends family and from what I just learned even pirate. I have an idea it might not be a good one but who knows, maybe you can put a price on what it costs for features and people could donate towards it ? or even make the features work by paid plugin only that way you get your money for the time ? I mean look at all the apps out there with in app purchases.

Edited December 8, 2021 by Marijuana

[gene0915 40]

Would like to see this feature BUT, would like to see an A-Z jump bar on the Apple TV first.

[kbrawl 0]

has this feature been implemented or is it on standby. because i would like to do this

[Carlo 4552]

On 12/2/2022 at 1:58 AM, kbrawl said:

has this feature been implemented or is it on standby. because i would like to do this

No, it has not been implemented.

I'm not sure what you would gain from this that can't be done now. It wouldn't be exactly the same but 2 servers could map drives to each other so the mapping is the same between them with each server having it's own full copy of the libraries.  You could then manually setup users on one server or the other to distribute the load between them.

[TouchASpider 0]

10 hours ago, cayars said:

No, it has not been implemented.

I'm not sure what you would gain from this that can't be done now. It wouldn't be exactly the same but 2 servers could map drives to each other so the mapping is the same between them with each server having it's own full copy of the libraries.  You could then manually setup users on one server or the other to distribute the load between them.

I have 2 servers.  One hosted locally with some content and one hosted remotely sharing a friend's drive+content (server is owned by me).  I would LOVE to merge the libraries.  I don't see how I can do this now.  Switching Emby servers to browse content is a pain for the family.

[Carlo 4552]

You can setup a TailScale https://tailscale.com/ VPN that is used strictly by the two machines.

With the VPN in place you can access the files of the other computer  just as if it was a computer on your LAN (just slower). 

You can then map the other machines drives to your local machine and set those up on your main server.  You can do the reverse as well so files could be accessed from either server. You won't technically need two servers running at this point but it never hurts to have a spare up and running.

[gene0915 40]

On 12/4/2022 at 7:51 PM, Carlo said:

You can setup a TailScale https://tailscale.com/ VPN that is used strictly by the two machines.

With the VPN in place you can access the files of the other computer  just as if it was a computer on your LAN (just slower). 

You can then map the other machines drives to your local machine and set those up on your main server.  You can do the reverse as well so files could be accessed from either server. You won't technically need two servers running at this point but it never hurts to have a spare up and running.

Just wanted to revisit this thread and see what's up, thanks for the Tailscale idea!

Some other ideas I was kicking around to address this...... using something like UnionFS, OverlayFS or MergerFS to mount the remote drive. My fear with Tailscale (and other VPN solutions) is the overhead. VPN connections (due to encryption) usually take a speed hit. Will somebody streaming a high bit-rate video over a mapped drive have problems?

I have 1 gig up/down and the person I was going to merge media libraries with also has 1 gig up/down so maybe VPN usage will be fine?

Speaking of merging libraries.... example; I already have /mnt/md0/Movies added. If I use Tailscale and mount his movie folder and bring THAT into Emby (I know we have a lot of movies on both our drives) how does Emby handle that? CAN Emby handle that? (if the same movie is added from 2 different folders/libraries?) Will it present duplicates or just a little symbol in the poster indicating there are two versions?

[Carlo 4552]

There are a few ways to do this, so I would experiment to see what works best performance wise as well as maintenace wise with Emby.

I would check out and learn Rclone as it's quite powerful.

Carlo

[Museum9929 0]

 Just wanted to say my "want this feature as well" Loved it at plex but moved away from them because of recent decisions.

Would just be great to be able to add 2 Servers to your account and you can decide what library's you see on your home screen or not same for continue watching.

Just want everyone to be open minded about this

[PuffyToesToo 341]

So basically, this has been my situation and why I wanted to do this. My partner and I have been in a LDR for like, 7 years. I spend a great amount of time at their place and vice versa. We both run our own servers, but because we are in different countries, we wanted to simplify our usage. That is all, nothing more. It doesn't matter anymore as our approval to marry came through at the end of last year and I will be relocating there in April. I just wanted to chime in because there ARE perfectly legitimate reasons to want this, albeit a rather niche one.

[MagicDoubleM 116]

On 7/17/2023 at 10:38 PM, gene0915 said:

Just wanted to revisit this thread and see what's up, thanks for the Tailscale idea!

Some other ideas I was kicking around to address this...... using something like UnionFS, OverlayFS or MergerFS to mount the remote drive. My fear with Tailscale (and other VPN solutions) is the overhead. VPN connections (due to encryption) usually take a speed hit. Will somebody streaming a high bit-rate video over a mapped drive have problems?

I have 1 gig up/down and the person I was going to merge media libraries with also has 1 gig up/down so maybe VPN usage will be fine?

Speaking of merging libraries.... example; I already have /mnt/md0/Movies added. If I use Tailscale and mount his movie folder and bring THAT into Emby (I know we have a lot of movies on both our drives) how does Emby handle that? CAN Emby handle that? (if the same movie is added from 2 different folders/libraries?) Will it present duplicates or just a little symbol in the poster indicating there are two versions?

May I ask you how you plan to establish a connection between two computers on the internet? I'd very highly suggest using a VPN as base layer, for privacy and security reasons.

With your kind of line, I'd just give it a shot.

Tailscale is based on Wireguard, which is capable of doing pretty good speeds. In my scenario it wasn't the limiting factor, be it Tailscale for client2client or Wireguard for router2router connections, here it's just the 40mbit/s upstream thats capping me. Depending on your hardware you're probably not going to saturate the full 1gbit/s, but you should have plenty enough headroom for streaming media, including high bitrate 4k-stuff. 

So, mounting a NFS-share to your lib, installing the "auto group versions" plugin should do the trick. Meta-data should be considered carefully, also the process of generating thumbnails is something to keep an eye on. But as I said, with 1gibt/s I'd just start testing.

If you are on windwos, there is also wireguard-nt which pushes the speed a bit further.

[ebr 15670]

18 hours ago, PuffyToesToo said:

So basically, this has been my situation and why I wanted to do this. My partner and I have been in a LDR for like, 7 years. I spend a great amount of time at their place and vice versa. We both run our own servers, but because we are in different countries, we wanted to simplify our usage. That is all, nothing more. It doesn't matter anymore as our approval to marry came through at the end of last year and I will be relocating there in April. I just wanted to chime in because there ARE perfectly legitimate reasons to want this, albeit a rather niche one.

Congratulations!

[PuffyToesToo 341]

2 hours ago, ebr said:

Congratulations!

Well thank you!

[18star 1]

I hope we can follow up on this project, it's a very excellent idea. This way, he won't have to switch servers frequently while sharing with his friends.

[18star 1]

On 8/1/2023 at 11:11 PM, Carlo said:

There are a few ways to do this, so I would experiment to see what works best performance wise as well as maintenace wise with Emby.

I would check out and learn Rclone as it's quite powerful.

Carlo

Is there a plan to implement this feature now or in the future, or what conditions need to be met before it can be considered?

Edited May 28, 2024 by 18star

[ebr 15670]

9 hours ago, 18star said:

Is there a plan to implement this feature now or in the future, or what conditions need to be met before it can be considered?

It is not a part of our current development plans but is on our "like to have" list.  It is a very large task that I doubt a majority of our users would benefit from so I would not say it is imminent.

[18star 1]

On 5/28/2024 at 8:35 PM, ebr said:

It is not a part of our current development plans but is on our "like to have" list.  It is a very large task that I doubt a majority of our users would benefit from so I would not say it is imminent.

Limiting the device to 25 will impose significant restrictions on commercial activities. The reason I am aware of and appreciate this feature is due to my previous experience with Plex, where I found it to be very practical. I hope the official team will consider incorporating this feature in the next major release. Moreover, the implementation of this feature is not particularly complex; it simply requires linking to an authorized media library after authenticating between two servers.

[SDUGoten 1]

Just recently moved from Plex to Emby.  The only thing that I miss Plex is the ability to login to one account and see all the servers installed and all the libraries/IPTV from different servers in one single page.  I have 2 servers and they are sited in different country, thousands of miles apart.  Each Plex server connects to it's local TV (emby would be via NextPVR plugin) so I can watch TV from another part of the world.   It works pretty good with Plex.

However, I will have to switch between account with Emby.

Edited August 2, 2024 by SDUGoten

[Neminem 892]

Well that also means BIG Brother is looking over your shoulder.

To know all your connections.

Emby is 1 server ( your own ) and no other to rule it. 

Edited August 2, 2024 by jaycedk