Emby DVR Features

[bman212121 1]

HI everyone, I'm new to Emby and was playing around with the DVR software. I was wondering if anyone knew if these feature exist or were even on the roadmap.

 

 

1. Stop a recording that is in progress

 

 

2. Fast forward / skip through an in progress recording

 

 

3. Resume where you left off on a in progress recording

 

 

Any DVR software I've used in the past 10 years has had these features, so it seems like they should be a fairly common scenario people run into. If you're recording a 30 minute show these might not be a big deal, but if you're recording a sporting event, you might not be able to sit down right when it starts. So being able to sit down late and fast forward through parts to catch back up is very useful. I always have to pad any series recordings for sports with an extra hour or two to make sure it gets recorded, so if I start the recording and catch up and watch the end, I can just end the recording so it doesn't go for another hour.

 

I did notice that if you watch the recording from the start, it will pad out the slider to accommodate the growing file size. So it seems like the functionality exists to be able to hop into a recording and have it generate a full progress bar of whatever is already recorded (So if it's 45 minutes into a recording you get a 45 minute slider) and then continue to grow from there. That way you can skip to 5, 10 or whatever mark you wish to start watching from as opposed to having to watch from the beginning each time to go into the active recording.

[Luke 37118]

hi @@bman212121, yes your observations are correct and your suggestions are spot on. We are working hard to get the DVR features to that point in all of the Emby apps. Thanks !

[bman212121 1]

So I'm going to bump this thread from around a year ago I created. Between now and then Emby is able to stop recordings that are in progress, and fast forward works somewhat. Resume during a recording does not work still.

 

I'd like to use this, but it doesn't seem like it's going to work like a normal DVR does. The DVR starts the recording, and if you see that recording, you can launch it. Once in the recording you can play from the beginning, and skip anywhere on the timeline between the start of the recording and the current recording time. Once you get to real time you obviously can't go past that, but you can pause, rewind, and exit. When you go back into the recording it will remember where you left off and let you continue playing from that point.

 

What it currently seems to do right now is start at the beginning of the recording, and then has to transcode the data. This means skips are only 20 - 30 seconds in advance at any point in time, and it takes time for it to process the skip. So it's incredibly hard to skip forward 30 minutes into a recording if say you were watching the superbowl and wanted to skip the pre game stuff. Then if you were to exit out at any point, you're back to square one and it would take you 30 minutes just to try to get back to 1 hour into your recording.

 

I've tried to figure out if maybe there is an option I'm missing but haven't been able to find one. I keep seeing people say to use directplay so it doesn't try to transcode the file, but it doesn't look like that works in browsers or Emby theater so I'm guessing there is no way to do directplay in Windows. I'm not sure if you had directplay if it would allow you to skip around a recording like I had mentioned, but it sure would be nice if it could. Windows Media Player by itself can get 90% of the way there. If you open up a .TS recording in WMP, it will give you a bar for the recording from the start of the TS to the amount of time that was recorded when you opened it. You can freely skip anywhere in that file and it will play instantly. Once you reach the end of the time the recording will continue to play, but you just won't have access to the slider anymore. But if you close out WMP and reopen it, it will reload that bar again to the current progress in the recording, so you can easy skip right back to where you were, or even go right up to real time if you wanted.

 

I'd really like to transition to Emby from WMC, but this is still kind of a roadblock before I do. Before using WMC I was doing the same things in some of the other DVR software that used to be around, so it's always been a feature that I've used.