What's the highlight of 2020 in terms of feature?

[adrianwi 237]

When we say 'emby', just how many people are actively supporting/developing things?  More than a handful? 

When I switched from Plex due to their privacy changes, it felt for a little while that emby was closing the gap on Plex.  I can't say I've gone back and checked Plex out very often, but I still receive their e-mails and they seem to be adding lots of new features.  From experience, I suspect some won't fully work and users will be left with half-baked solutions, but at least there are adding new things.

It feels like the 'team' here are struggling just to keep the ever growing number of platforms up to date and simply don't have the bandwidth for even relatively small suggestions from the community or to keep pace with their competitors?

[adrianwi 237]

15 hours ago, cayars said:

It's a huge undertaking and rewrite, accounting for over half the code in the backend. It's not just TV features but the use or not of using ffmpeg and other things that lighten the IO and make Emby faster in this regard. Even the way ffmpeg is used is different.  It's still in development and will be a bit longer as this isn't a plugin or simple replacement, but a major update. What was previously like maybe half a dozen setup screens for Live TV is now closer to 6 dozen, so you can really fine tune all kinds of things (if you want/need to) but can also use a wizard like setup similar to before to set things up in just a few screens.  It's a completely different beast.

Is this where all the effort is focused?  I hope they are using more than your extreme use-case for Live TV when most people would probably be happy with some small improvements in this area, and more focus in others. 

[rbjtech 4260]

For me, the highlight was I did not get one call from my remote clients (family) for help with emby - it all just worked.  

Adding features is great and all - but for the core product to 'just work' for me is actually more important - so hopefully, in 2021, emby will start to add some of these new features, I'm not sure I will even use them - but emby does need to keep up, or it will lose it's reputation in the market very quickly. 

 

 

[Gilgamesh_48 943]

1 hour ago, adrianwi said:

When we say 'emby', just how many people are actively supporting/developing things?  More than a handful? 

When I switched from Plex due to their privacy changes, it felt for a little while that emby was closing the gap on Plex.  I can't say I've gone back and checked Plex out very often, but I still receive their e-mails and they seem to be adding lots of new features.  From experience, I suspect some won't fully work and users will be left with half-baked solutions, but at least there are adding new things.

It feels like the 'team' here are struggling just to keep the ever growing number of platforms up to date and simply don't have the bandwidth for even relatively small suggestions from the community or to keep pace with their competitors?

I have mostly kept up with Plex (and I keep a Plex server running but nearly unused) and what you should have said is "...they seem to be adding lots of new but nearly worthless features that are added primarily to feed their egos and monetize Plex."

Even their much touted "watch together" feature does not really enhance the experience of consuming media for the majority of their users. In fact, judging by the lack of questions about it in their forums it is almost unused.

In most cases Emby is functionally level or ahead of Plex and they pretty well beat Plex in that anything new pretty much works as intended. Emby sometimes make what, in my opinion, are poor choices but, even when that happens, the changes work well. Plex cannot say that and they are rapidly becoming more "content providers" than "content curators" and that is a move in the wrong direction.

Emby has not really added much of value in the last year but neither has Plex and Emby is not trying to jam content down out throats.

To be honest there is very little that Emby does not do that it needs to do. I do not like the idea of trying to shoehorn every possible function into Emby. Mostly that would just bloat Emby and not really do much to enhance my media consumption.

There is nothing wrong with having separate programs for separate functions.

One more thing: To me there is no "gap" with Plex that Emby needs to close. Emby does everything I need that Plex does and in almost all cases does it better with greater reliability. 

[MBSki 1016]

34 minutes ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

One more thing: To me there is no "gap" with Plex that Emby needs to close. Emby does everything I need that Plex does and in almost all cases does it better with greater reliability. 

it all depends on what you need. I need to be able to edit m3u playlist's and stream to DLNA. Emby provides this, and Plex never will. But Plex has better DVR capabilities including skip ads. So, I'm stuck using both for now. My only hope is that Emby adds things like better DVR capability, although this whole continue watching fiasco and frankly, the new music scanning capabilities have me a bit worried. 

[Carlo 4330]

5 hours ago, ChoromPotro said:

@cayarsof course I do not have the telemetry but I wonder if more people uses Live TV than other feature for it to warrant such an extensive rework? I am not complaining, just wondering.

 

3 hours ago, mbarylski said:

Yea, I'm not sure about live TV, but I'm very interested in DVR. @cayars Do the improvements you're speaking of include DVR improvements? I've moved back to Plex for DVR since Emby doesn't have the ability to save recordings to specific libraries, record all games of a specific sports team, or skip ads. 

Live TV is a huge part of the Emby Echo System and with DVR built in is one of the best/easiest ways to build a legal collection of media besides your disc rips. A lot of careful planning and unit testing has been going into this in order to have great features and better performance.  It has a completely new pipeline for processing Live TV/streams. Some of the things being done with Live TV can be used with other playback as well. With reduced IO, new mechanism for accessing many new tuners and avoiding ffmpeg when possible on the input side make it faster processing with more internal control.  These changes should be very welcome on lower end NAS and devices like Shield TV as well as on PCs that occasionally stutter/pause due to IO issues. Besides the core pipeline changes there are also new features as well.

DVR is of course built on top of the Live TV part (foundation) so of course it benefits greatly from these changes.

[MBSki 1016]

3 minutes ago, cayars said:

DVR is of course built on top of the Live TV part (foundation) so of course it benefits greatly from these changes.

Right, in terms of playback, but I was speaking specifically to functionality like being able to record to a specific library. Are those the types of features getting added with this re-write?

[Carlo 4330]

1 hour ago, mbarylski said:

it all depends on what you need. I need to be able to edit m3u playlist's and stream to DLNA. Emby provides this, and Plex never will. But Plex has better DVR capabilities including skip ads. So, I'm stuck using both for now. My only hope is that Emby adds things like better DVR capability, although this whole continue watching fiasco and frankly, the new music scanning capabilities have me a bit worried. 

The new music scanning works really well with properly tagged music. If something is off on a album it's easy to fix with re-tagging then scanning again.  Should be nothing to fear here if you have good music tagging. The new Live TV will have configuration built in that can eliminate external programs presently used to manipulate M3U files.

You can work in Comskip processing (what Plex uses) right now in the current version of Emby using the post processing that can be run on each completed recording. With a little time setting up your post processing scripts, you can have it do mostly any type of post processing you want from cutting commercials to conversions to other formats.

[Carlo 4330]

1 minute ago, mbarylski said:

Right, in terms of playback, but I was speaking specifically to functionality like being able to record to a specific library. Are those the types of features getting added with this re-write?

Don't know if you are aware but you can presently set different recording paths for Movies and TV Shows.  You can setup very simple scripts and run this via DVR post process to move these files anywhere you want.  So essentially you can do this already.  While recording, the in progress recording would show up in the recording library but once complete could be moved to a movie or tv show library or wherever you wish them moved to.

[MBSki 1016]

3 minutes ago, cayars said:

Don't know if you are aware but you can presently set different recording paths for Movies and TV Shows.  You can setup very simple scripts and run this via DVR post process to move these files anywhere you want.  So essentially you can do this already.  While recording, the in progress recording would show up in the recording library but once complete could be moved to a movie or tv show library or wherever you wish them moved to.

I'm aware, and it isn't easy to use which is why I've switched to Plex. So, I guess that's a no.

[Carlo 4330]

3 hours ago, adrianwi said:

Is this where all the effort is focused?  I hope they are using more than your extreme use-case for Live TV when most people would probably be happy with some small improvements in this area, and more focus in others. 

No of course not, it's one part of the dev/test team. Many of the devs work only on specific platforms or other projects and not affected by this ongoing development work.  It's one of many things being worked on.

[Carlo 4330]

3 hours ago, rbjtech said:

For me, the highlight was I did not get one call from my remote clients (family) for help with emby - it all just worked.  

Adding features is great and all - but for the core product to 'just work' for me is actually more important - so hopefully, in 2021, emby will start to add some of these new features, I'm not sure I will even use them - but emby does need to keep up, or it will lose it's reputation in the market very quickly. 

Couldn't agree more @rbjtech!  If you look at the release notes for the server for the last year you see fix after fix and enhancements that make using Emby easier and more reliable (same with many clients).  This last year a lot of time and effort has obviously went into making Emby work smoother and strengthen the core.

15 minutes ago, mbarylski said:

I'm aware, and it isn't easy to use which is why I've switched to Plex. So, I guess that's a no.

If you open a thread asking how to do this and provide a tad bit of info like the platform you run Emby on, types of discs (local, NAS, etc), where you want the info moved to,  we can help you with this as it's pretty easy to do.

On Windows for example it can be as simple as calling a batch file that uses the DOS MOVE command.

[clarkss12 295]

Server setup can't be any simpler.  I already have Emby recordings being made by the SiliconDust DVR and another  by the Emby server running on a Windows 10 miniPC.

Wanted to do some more testing of the DVR running on an Android box (Beelink GS King X), using internal hard drive.  It took less than 15 minutes to completely setup the server and schedule the recordings of 4 NFL games being broadcast today.

Can't get no simpler than that.

[MBSki 1016]

45 minutes ago, cayars said:

If you open a thread asking how to do this and provide a tad bit of info like the platform you run Emby on, types of discs (local, NAS, etc), where you want the info moved to,  we can help you with this as it's pretty easy to do.

On Windows for example it can be as simple as calling a batch file that uses the DOS MOVE command.

It's like you aren't even listening. Is Emby built to require batch files? WTH!? I'm saying that the GUI should have more DVR functionality built in. I don't want to waste my time with scripts. This is what I get with Plex. If I can do this in Plex, why would I waste my time fussing with batch files and scripts in Emby? 

 

[clarkss12 295]

3 minutes ago, mbarylski said:

It's like you aren't even listening. Is Emby built to require batch files? WTH!? I'm saying that the GUI should have more DVR functionality built in. I don't want to waste my time with scripts. This is what I get with Plex. If I can do this in Plex, why would I waste my time fussing with batch files and scripts in Emby? 

 

The first item is OK, but the second item is for select people with more powerful hardware....... 

[ChoromPotro 5]

Funny how you guys write about the necessity of live tv change and also express your extreme happiness with bugfixes but fail to answer the question I posted in the title.

 

What has been the standout feature of 2020 in Emby? Compared to Skip Intro for Plex and Watch Together for Jellyfin. No I do not care if you think it's unnecessary (watch together for me is super necessary to review videos with people) or if you think Emby is the gift from Zeus that de-stresses you (in that case, good for you).

 

Please answer the question I posted in the title.

Edited December 27, 2020 by ChoromPotro
typo

[ChoromPotro 5]

3 minutes ago, clarkss12 said:

The first item is OK, but the second item is for select people with more powerful hardware....... 

A lot of people have very powerful hardware.

[MBSki 1016]

6 minutes ago, clarkss12 said:

The first item is OK, but the second item is for select people with more powerful hardware....... 

Actually, I don't think the skip ads feature in Plex consumes much processing power at all. Sure, comskip needs to run, but once it finds the ads it just inserts a start and end time to the Plex database. It isn't adding the chapter marks directly to the file. That's good, in that it doesn't require much processing power, but bad, because it's locked to Plex. That said, it does run on ALL videos so theoretically Emby could do the same exact thing and just store the data in the Emby database.

[MBSki 1016]

7 minutes ago, ChoromPotro said:

Please answer the question I posted in the title.

I scanned through the release notes and I'm struggling to find the 2020 highlight feature. The best I can come up with is maybe having Favorite channels added to all the apps. Other than that, I've really enjoyed the ATV app. The biggest improvement in the ATV app that I can remember during 2020 is the update to the Video Display. I know there were a lot of tweaks, but that's all I can recall at the moment.

[Carlo 4330]

29 minutes ago, mbarylski said:

It's like you aren't even listening. Is Emby built to require batch files? WTH!? I'm saying that the GUI should have more DVR functionality built in. I don't want to waste my time with scripts. This is what I get with Plex. If I can do this in Plex, why would I waste my time fussing with batch files and scripts in Emby? 

 

Sure we're listening, which is why there is a NEW DEV BUILD for Live TV and DVR in progress.  All I said was that using simple scripts this can be done already, not that it's optimal or the best way, but if you want these features now in Emby you CAN HAVE THEM but it's not point and click (not hard either).

People do all kinds of things with their recordings from marking commercials as chapters, to cutting the commercials out, to converting the TS files to mp4 or mkv with h.264 or h.265 and doing this via scripts is very powerful. It's a one time setup/tuning for YOUR ENVIRONMENT but then just works.

You could also use a 3rd party tool such as MCEBuddy if on Windows that can do all this as well via GUI setup and it's dedicated to marking/cutting commercials, conversions and pushing the files where ever you want them to go.

22 minutes ago, ChoromPotro said:

What has been the standout feature of 2020 in Emby? Compared to Skip Intro for Plex and Watch Together for Jellyfin. No I do not care if you think it's unnecessary (watch together for me is super necessary to review videos with people) or if you think Emby is the gift from Zeus that de-stresses you (in that case, good for you).

Below are my person comments.

Emby doesn't live by a calendar year, nor feel compelled to release something based on the month of the year so it's a meaningless question to me personally. Besides what I know in the dev pipeline, the standout IMHO is the listening to users as a whole of issues and enhancements they wanted in the software, then spending roughly a year making the software better with these hundreds of enhancements and fixes while also working on some other big ticket items for the near future.

Emby has spent a lot of time taking things that worked 95 to 98% correctly and brought them up to 100%.  Existing features are only as good as the individual parts so putting effort into enhancing them is a very good thing as it strengthens the core. Some of these enhancement are strictly behind the scene things like forking software like Exoplayer and ffmpeg to add enhancements to them that Emby can take advantage of or to add feature that would likely never come otherwise. to adding new GPU processing methods and improving transcoding. Then their are forward facing enhancements like the new killer search functionality (still being improved) to being able to handle very high bitrate files. Then there is the long requested Music enhancement to use tagged info for near perfect music library setup.  It's all these little things added up that make "2020" a good year in my book for Emby. While I'm sure you'll disagree as a user, but to me 2020 is the year of Live TV regardless that it'll be released in 2021 as all the hard work was done in 2020. Same with some other stuff in the pipeline.

What there hasn't been is any big new SPLASHY feature if that's what you're asking for, but Emby already does most of what people need or with a bit of personal touch can be made to do, so enhancing these things to streamline and make them better is a good thing and makes the product that much better. This is just me talking but I'd take another year of this type of thing with incremental changes and enhancements then something flashy like "Watch Together" that sounds nice but would get little overall use.

Emby as a whole is working a lot better than it did a year ago and it was already very good then and TO ME that is major because it cuts down on user issues and questions (I'm referring to my own personal users).  My Emby system runs butter smooth and just works given a bit of TLC.  It does nearly everything I need it to as a Media server.  Could some things be better, yep and some of these things are in the works by user request. There are more enhancement on the way for some highly requested changes as well that likely will just miss 2020 but again Emby doesn't live by or release based on a calendar which is pointless.

"Skip Intro" to me is OK but nothing I need personally.  I've got a remote I can use to quickly bypass the intros. Now if I could per show enter an intro skip in seconds, I'd use that on some series I watch a lot.  If I could enter 40 seconds for a particular show one time and this was passed to the client and auto skipped for all episode that would work, but I don't need/want anything more automated then that because a lot of shows start with the episode for a minute or so then go to credits then back to show and an Intro Skip wouldn't work ideally for these so it's something of a double edge sword. But this is just me and I'm sure other might really like something like that.  This kind of 'flash" is ok but nothing I'd personally be excited to have. For me personally this Intro Skip feature would be about as exciting as custom or codec intros which I don't use.

 

[pwhodges 1529]

In many respects Emby works better for me now than it did a year ago.  That is more important to me than any flashy "stand-out" feature.  

If at times it irritates me (and I say so!), that is nearly always down to my running beta versions, which I know are not the final thing.

Paul

[Carlo 4330]

Same here Paul, I myself get irritated at times with test versions as featured are developed but that's the way it sometimes goes with test/beta versions.  It's more on the rare side however and I usually enjoy living on the edge even on my production system as I get new features quicker to play with.

[softworkz 3335]

My personal highlight in 2020 was that the number of transcoding issues that have been reported and that I had to investigate, decreased by 80-90% compared to previous years.

There might not have been that many "headline features", but there have been a huge number of quality and reliability improvements across all areas.

Live TV took a little longer than expected, but it's coming very soon and for tone-mapping, we're still investigating different options.

[Oceanus 6]

@cayars a completely rewritten Live TV backend sounds promising and definitely worth some effort. I think emby could easily silende their critics if they would be a little more transparent about what they are working on. Why not make a section somewhere on your website named "currently working on" with all the topics, the current status, like "finished to 89%", and the release it is expected to be in?  

[Carlo 4330]

LOL, Not worried about critics now, as they'll at least be happy critics later. 

Communication on things done early is a double edge sword.  Take a look at one small feature that we asked users to test on the beta/test build. Page upon page of comments how it won't work for them, will cause issues in the future, users won't like it when it was made clear we just need a test of merge feature AS IS but it's not the compete feature.  That point was iterated multiple times, yet the "comments" go on.  So some users ruin this for most of the masses when they can't take part in doing what's asked but want to debate the design when they don't know the design or what's in store for the feature(s) as it progresses.

I'm likely the team member who's commented most about Live TV but have watched what I say and not gone into specific detail on features (only high level) because I don't want to go down this rabbit hole.  But at the same time want you guys to know we have been listening to the issues you have with Live TV or what you would want/need enhanced. With most things you can add/build on what's already in the code but with Live TV/DVR the devs felt it better to start with a clean state and use the knowledge they have now to build a better mouse trap so to speak while knowing all the things it NOW need to do and handle.  It was a good solid decision but takes longer of course and because of this we wanted to at least let you guys know it's in the works and is active development.

The problem with a list of upcoming items or things being worked on is all the PM we get wanting more info.  I've gotten lots of PMs from users wanting more info on Live TV for example  which takes time to answer nicely that we can't give more info at this time other than what's been stated.  If a user had a specific question about something and I could tell them from my testing if it's fixed then I'd let them know that of course without going into detail.  Things can get pushed back. We had one thing being worked on last year that had to get pushed and if it were on a list would likely make people mad or upset if it's something they wanted or would have used.  That's always a downside if you have to push something for a bit. There of course are other reasons as well but in general pre-announcements tends to cost time and effort that could be used for development or support and doesn't get the product out to the masses any faster.

For the most part the devs have been working to fix little things in the core or adding enhancements asked for by people and systematically going through and replacing the way somethings were done with better ways that help with performance and or allow enhancements that would have been hard to do otherwise.  There are a couple of these efforts underway at present for example.  I think anyone using Emby Connect knows that this is being reworked as I think that's pretty obvious that it had to change.  Emby Connect is sort of a work in progress at the moment as stated by Luke.  There of course is the new music rewrite that recently hit beta and is open for testing.