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Thank you to everyone who took the time to ask the Emby team questions across all of the different platforms including here on the forums. There were a lot of great questions that were thrown our way and we've been excited to get the answers out to you. While some of the questions we were not able to answer, we did our best to give you the most accurate and clear answers possible. Now without further ado, here is the first series of questions and answers for you to look over! Please keep in mind more questions and answers will be coming in additional blog posts in the coming days, so not all questions are being answered today. Who owns Emby? Emby LLC owns the Emby product and is a private entity. The owners are undisclosed but note that the development team has full control over the direction of the product. We are not beholden to or under the influence of any investor or investment group. What is the history of Emby? Emby grew out of an open source project called MediaBrowser. Emby's origin in concept came out of that project but there is actually none of that code base still within it. Emby ended up being completely built from the ground up to be a server-based ecosystem as opposed to just a single app as the old MediaBrowser was. Around 2011 what is now the core development team for Emby were contributors to MediaBrowser. We saw the opportunity to build something more flexible than the WMC environment would allow and embarked on creating what we then called MB 3. The core developers spent over a year furiously writing code before anything was released to the public. It was then probably another two years of dedicated development before anything was truly usable as a system. In 2015 it was decided that we had moved so far away from what MB originally was that we needed a new name. A few of the devs got together and came up with "Emby". There are a few reasons behind that name but one of the main ones was that you needed something that wasn't already trademarked and domained. Emby fit that bill and has the benefit of sounding like "MB" when you say it. With the new name, we needed a new logo and we actually held a contest in the forum taking contributions from users and that finally landed us on the logo you see now. Since 2015 we have expanded the team and worked diligently to try and continue to craft the best truly personal media server system we can. We still have a long way to go but have also come a long way to where we are. What are the most popular Emby clients? We do not have exact data on this, due to sideloading and the such, but through the app store platforms we can gain general ideas. Android is the most popular amongst our userbase (both mobile and TV) with iOS in second place as the most downloaded app. What Emby clients do the development team use most for personal use? Our development team uses a wide variety of apps just as our user base does. We have people on the team using Android on mobile and TV, iOS, Apple TV, Roku and Xbox as well. As you can see our dev team really is as diverse as our user base when it comes to how we use the server. These were just a few of the questions about Emby as a product and who we are. In the next blog post we will be covering a few different things such as some of the future goals of Emby as well as release schedules and more!

Hi Team, As many of you know, we are currently working hard on getting Emby Server 3.6 released. We would like to take this opportunity to give you some advance information on some of the changes that are coming. New Levels of Performance Emby Server, as well as all Emby apps will perform faster than ever. The server can now easily scale to massive libraries, and the faster speed and reduced loading times will probably be the first thing you'll notice after upgrading to 3.6. Live TV Guide Data Now Included with Premiere Emby will be gradually switching from Schedules Direct to Gracenote for Live TV guide data. What does this mean? This means if you're in the USA, Canada or UK, you'll no longer need to setup an account with another website nor pay someone else for this data. You'll simply enter your zip code into Emby, select your channel lineup, and we'll handle retrieving your guide data. We believe this will provide a better experience for Emby users with fewer setup steps. The data from Gracenote is also quite a bit richer, and we will be looking at how we can take advantage of that to bring new Live TV features to Emby. Going forward, Live TV will require Emby Premiere in the web app, where previously this was not the case. How to Migrate From Schedules Direct If you are setting up the server fresh, then you should use our new Emby guide provider, which will be the default. If you are already using Schedules Direct, then you can continue to use it through the remainder of your Schedules Direct subscription. Schedules Direct has pledged to continue to honor your subscriptions, and we thank them for that. New and Improved Hardware Acceleration We have revamped hardware acceleration on all supported platforms for Emby Server. This includes Windows, Linux, Android, NAS devices, and MacOS. We've added some sophisticated hardware detection that allows us to know exactly what your hardware supports, and with this information we can fine tune the transcoding processes to get the most out of your hardware. This has truly been a massive effort and will continue to be a massive effort going forward into the future. For this reason, hardware acceleration will now require Emby Premiere on most platforms. On some platforms such as Nvidia Shield and certain NAS devices, it will be included freely out of the box. A Long List of Improvements and Bug Fixes Stay tuned for the announcement of Emby Server 3.6. It is packed with new features, bug fixes, improvements to existing features, and more.

We're back for another go round and we have a pretty exciting beta headed your way. It's packed with features, bug fixes, security improvements, and more. Server Dashboard refreshed for 2015 The server management interface has been given some minor touchups to stay up to date with trends and make it easier than ever to find what you're looking for. And it's just as easy when mobile. Improved Mobile Details The mobile detail view has been simplified, making it prettier and easier than ever before. Introducing Media Browser Offline for Windows 8.1 Coming soon to Android, iOS and Windows Phone. We know that sometimes you'd like to have access to your content when you're offline, and we've been working hard to deliver that to our mobile apps. You'll notice sync buttons all througout the web interface: Sync from Categories: Sync from detail pages: Sync from context menus: These buttons will allow you to create sync jobs to move content to your mobile devices for offline viewing. Sync jobs have a number of options at your disposal, such as: Quality levels, to save space on the device Limits to the number of items being synced Ability to monitor folders and continuously sync newly added content Ability to remove watched content from the device automatically Note that the Offline Sync feature will require a supporter membership. As always we appreciate your donations as they help keep us running so that we can continue to pursue new projects. Your users can sync, and you can manage them As the administrator of your server, you'll have full control over who can sync and who can't. Users can even monitor their personal sync jobs using the web client: Offline even supports Parental Control The server now allows configuration of an easy pin code for offline access. If utilized this will allow user-specific content to remain protected even when offline, perfect for families and shared devices. Shorter URL's The API now supports url's without the /mediabrowser suffix. When you open the web interface from the tray icon you'll now have a shorter, easier to remember url. SSL now supported Thanks to the efforts of Jabbera, SSL is now supported by configuring an HTTPS port and certificate. Subtitle Encoding Improvements Thanks to the efforts of Somy and Serios, a number of new character encodings are now supported. We've adopted Mozilla's UniversalDetector library to try and make sure the right encoding is picked for each file. Roku Thumbnails! Thanks to the efforts of a new community member, a new plugin is available in the catalog to generate Roku seek thumbnails. This provides a nice visual experience when seeking on the device. In Roku language this is called Bif trick mode, and the thumbnail generation process creates a .bif file. It even has an option to save the .bif file alongside your media for easy archiving. Important Note: The process to create these thumbnails is slow and will affect your server's CPU. Please take this into consideration when installing the plugin. This will require an update to the Roku app and will take time to go through Roku's approval process. The update is already available in the beta channel. More information on that can be found at: http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/8001-media-browser-for-roku-channel/ Revamped web client search Searching is much faster and more accessible than ever. Just start typing to see visual results. Expect more improvements with this to come. Play All From Here This function is now available for episodes, allowing you to quickly queue up several at once for playback. These can be played locally or sent to another device. Improved Collection Management You'll now see the Add to Collection function in many more places throughout the web interface, making it easier than ever to manage them. New Download Button Now you can easily download your personal media directly from the web interface. You can even control which users are allowed access to it: Opt-In Access Permissions The permissions for library and channel access have been slightly re-worked. Previously you've been accustomed to having to opt-out, that is, new libraries become visible to users by default. You can now stop this from happening by unchecking the option to enable access to all. This means that if you add a new library or channel, your users may not be able to see it until you've granted them access. Supply your Personal Fanart.tv API Key At the request of both Fanart.tv and fans of Fanart, we now have a space where you can enter your fanart personal api key. This will get you access to new images faster as well as other benefits that fanart provides. http://mediabrowser.tv/community/uploads/inline/2/54d8ebaf399a3_Untitled.png Create your own custom CSS Now you can design your own CSS rules and apply them to the web interface. Let us know what you come up with! http://mediabrowser.tv/community/uploads/inline/2/54d8ea242706a_Untitled.png Bugs Resolved Fixed multi-disc folder recognition Artists tag in audio files is now read External subtitles in Dlna profiles not being used Fixed Tmdb foreign language fallback Unable to parse Nfo's containing only a single url Join the Community What makes this release so awesome is the number of people who stepped up to contribute to it. In fact, the goals of the release were even shifted as a result of input and contributions that were made. If you're looking for a project, say hello and we'll find a place for you

There may not have been a lot of public activity on the MBT development side for a while, but behind the scenes, there has been some significant movement. Media Browser Theater is currently going through a significant architectural re-write. Most of the changes are there to make the developer's lives easier, while also greatly improving the extensibility of the software (to support themes and more powerful plugins in the future). However, there are also major changes to the GUI incoming. This post is the first in what will be a series which will give you a preview of what is to come. It will be quite a while before this work is ready for release. New Item List Page Changes A new look Smooth scrolling Indexed skip list Home/End and Page Up/Page Down to skip through items Dark and Light themes Some of these were requested quite a lot, so hopefully a few of you will appreciate their inclusion. Video Preview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfFbX9Amq2g&feature=youtu.be

In keeping with our goal to be the best personal media server on the planet and, in order to avoid any confusion or apprehension for new users, we've decided to increase our base Emby Premiere license device limit from 15 to 25 devices. We know from the fact that not many people buy the larger licenses that 15 is usually enough, but there have been questions many times from new users because it may not appear that it was adequate for some households. We feel increasing the base license to 25 will alleviate this initial apprehension. This new limit is effective immediately and applies to all active Premiere subscriptions retroactively. For more information about what the device limit is and how it works, please see: Is there a limit to Premiere? As always, thanks for your support!

Android development has been a busy place these last few months. Behind the scenes a lot of work has been done to provide some great features. I'm going to do a series of blog posts showing off some of the progress leading up to the final availability this summer. So without further ado, here's some of the good stuff that's coming. Android in the living room The Android client will provide the mobile layout that everyone is used to. Users will be able to enable a new UI that is meant for TV's. The focus on this new UI is to make navigation as easy as possible using a remote control, rather than a touch-navigation-first design. In each view, you can press the menu button on your remote to display a list of relevant options for the current view. With a living room UI, the client will also be available for the FireTV and Ouya. Support for Live-TV A lot of people have asked for this one and I'm happy to oblige. If your Media Browser Server is configured to support live-tv, then you'll be able to enjoy a full-featured Live-TV experience. Watch last nights episode of Falling Skies, record a program, browse TV stations. All possible. Media Browser Channels Browsing and watching content from channels is now possible from your android device. Just add a channel to the Server and enjoy it on your device. And more... There have been lots of tweaks and fixes. The Android client now uses the same logic to play media as most other clients. This means the client is smarter with regards to choosing which audio track to play. The client is aware of more media types, no more transcoding for media types that Android natively supports. Support for Dolby Digital is also a feature of the improved internal media player. The device has to support Dolby and the media must contains dolby tracks.

If you guys haven't heard of the news yet, Chromecast SDK is public now. This means we are READY TO CAST! The devs have been working hard to bring Chromecast support to MB! We are currently in beta testing with the different platforms including Android, iOS and web. We worked very closely with the Google devs over the last few weeks to add Chromecast support to our existing client apps. Chromecast as a receiver device will seamlessly integrate with the other MB apps like MB Classic, MB-Web and MB-Roku and can support up to 1080p video playback. If you haven't gotten a Chromecast yet you can order it from Google or Amazon. Oh and this feature will be available to all our users Android: IOS: Casting:

Long Promised — Long Awaited — Finally Here! We are excited to announce the first release of our all-new range of Emby apps, starting today with Windows and Xbox. With a fully redeveloped native foundation, this update delivers improvements across the board: from remote control and gamepad support to background downloading (Windows), as well as refresh and HDR mode switching, and most importantly, enhanced video playback. The new app also comes with a name change from Emby Theater to simply Emby. The name is the only simplification though: On Windows it supersedes and replaces both current apps, "Emby Theater Desktop" and "Emby Theater" from the Windows store, combining the best of both in a single app. It provides enhanced video playback driven by MPV player under the hood, like and even better than "Emby Theater Desktop", and the Download features which were previously available in the Windows store app only. A primary design goal has been to ensure that users of either previous app encounter no drawbacks when moving to the new version. Video Playback (Windows) Video options in the previous ET Desktop app were not always straightforward. The new Emby app adopts a fundamentally different approach to video playback configuration, which accommodates to a range from least to most knowledgeable users by boiling quality options down to three simple and easy understandable presets alongside a custom mode which allows to control all the underlying options in detail. The main presets are: High Quality A no-compromise choice for the best possible quality, regardless of resource usage. Recommended for powerful PCs with high-end GPUs. Video decoding and filtering occur in software for optimal quality, and output scaling uses custom GPU shaders. Balanced The default and recommended choice for most users. Similar to ET Desktop and a standalone MPV player with default settings. Efficiency Mode MPV player is generally focused on quality rather than power saving, and even with the Balanced preset, you can get short of energy rather quickly when running on batteries. This mode is not built-in or available in the regular MPV player. All video operations are fully performed in hardware while scaling at the video output (no shaders/gpu kernels) gets disabled. Too simplistic for you? Enter the Customize mode where you can control all options in detail to find your perfect setup. Video Playback (Xbox) In the new Xbox app, we have a new playback implementation which is based on ffmpeg and takes place of the HTML video playbaback which which had limited codec and format support. By combining ffmpeg decoding with elements from Windows Media capabilities, it combines the best of both worlds: The rich format and codec support from ffmpeg and the built-in hardware acceleration of the Xbox for playing 4k and HDR videos in the best possible way Automatic Refresh and HDR Mode Switching (Windows & Xbox) Refresh rate switching is now as simple as enabling or disabling a single option. The new app can track its window position across multiple monitors and adapt the refresh rate accordingly. On both Windows and Xbox, it can also automatically toggle HDR mode based on the video content and the capabilities of your monitor and graphics hardware. Download Feature (Windows) With the download feature, you can transfer media from your Emby Server to your client device in a suitable format and size, so you can enjoy your media when you're on the road or without an online connection and even automatically synchronize items based on the watched status. The new Windows app implements this with a completely different approach. Instead of periodically polling and running in the background, it uses Windows Push Notifications for server-side activation and the Windows BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer) service for downloads. As a result, the app runs only briefly whenever the server notifies it about newly available items or when BITS reports a completed download. If you don't use this feature, nothing runs in the background at all. Enhanced Support for Remote Control and Gamepad Input (Windows & Xbox) Remote Control support has been extended to cover almost all functions defined in the Windows Media Center remote button schema. For game controllers, mapping has also been expanded to assign functions to all available controls. New options pages provide a reference for button assignments and allow you to test inputs to ensure everything works as intended. Windows Theme (Windows) As a visual highlight, the Windows app features a new and exclusive Windows theme with Mica material background (Win 11) and seamless integration with your Windows desktop appearance, matching theme colors and dark/light switching accordingly. High Contrast Themes (Windows) As part of the Windows theme, the new Emby app also supports the Windows High Contrast settings. Fonts adjust in size and weight for better visibility, and fewer — but thicker—lines are drawn to enhance readability for those who need it.

We have some exciting news. Over the next couple of months, Media Browser will become Emby. Our new home will be http://emby.media Why are we changing the name? Media Browser has been a great name over the past several years but we feel we have outgrown it. It is no longer descriptive of what we really are and carries with it some preconceptions in the minds of both people who may have heard about or used us in the past and new people who have never heard of us. We want to change that. So, introducing our new, short, catchy name that still pays homage to our origins (it sounds like "MB" when you say it) but lets us break free and continue to grow into the entire ecosystem that we are becoming. Given our broad presence in all the app stores, and future potential, we wanted to come up with a short and fun name that everybody's wives, kids and grandmothers will be able to remember. We were not looking for a name that describes the project, because that's very difficult to do and, undoubtedly, will end up meaning different things to different people. Short, catchy and unique were really the top requirements. Why something so odd? Think "Google" or "Skype" before you knew what they were. That's what we're going for. We don't want someone to hear the name and think they know what it is based on a connotation of that particular word. We want them to hear the name and say "What's that...?". Then, as time goes on, we become the name and the name becomes a synonym for "Awesome Media Server Ecosystem". Please know that this change has not happened overnight. The process of finding a new name has been going on for months and has been very, very difficult but, we are happy with where we have finally landed and believe it will accomplish the goals we set out when we started thinking about a new name for the project. What about the website? The new website address will be emby.media. Securing a domain name was one of the largest constraints in this whole process but we feel emby.media describes what we are and will be a fine home for us going forward. We hope maybe to also get emby.tv but that is currently in use. We are working on it though. In the end, the actual domain name isn't as important as the other goals because people will find us via search engines, not by typing in a web address. What about the logo? This is where we are going to want to enlist your help. Watch the forums for a call for submissions on ideas for a new logo to fit with our new name. We will open it up to everyone and consider all ideas. I know you guys can help us come up with a great new look for our new name. When is all of this going to happen? The whole process will take some time as a lot of things will need to change. It won't be a single, coordinated date where you see everything change. It will trickle out over all of the different components over a period of weeks and maybe even a few months. We'll take our time and allow developers adequate time to make all of the branding changes necessary. So, that's it. We on the dev team are very excited about this new direction and the possibilities it opens up for us for the future. Nothing is changing but the branding. The product is still going to be the best darned media solution out there. Welcome to the new ride.

MaxCDN (http://www.maxcdn.com) has graciously offered to provide space and bandwidth for Media Browser on their content delivery network. MaxCDN has a history of supporting FOSS (Free Open Source Software) projects and we are thankful to join the list of beneficiaries of this generous company. Their own software infrastructure makes use of FOSS, and this is their way of giving back to the open source community. For more information on FOSS projects supported by MaxCDN, visit http://www.maxcdn.com/company/open-source/ MaxCDN's support allows us to get updates to you quickly and reliably without putting undue stress on our limited online resources. If you and/or your employer find yourselves in need of CDN services, please give MaxCDN your consideration.

Today we're pleased to announce immediate availability of an all-new version of our Android app. Live TV Live TV has been a hotly requested feature for Android. Now you can manage and watch Live TV directly from the Android app. Among the features are: View listings per channel Manage and delete recordings both per show and per series Watch live TV Supports the Latest Server Features Your user profile audio & language preference settings WebP image delivery for faster navigation The latest transcoding API Efficient text-based delivery of subtitles Channels Channels are now fully supported, bringing Podcasts, Vimeo, and the rest of the channel lineup to Android. New Music Layouts Music has been revamped from the ground up. Some of the highlights are: A new background audio player Artist views Album views Music genre views Play all features Instant mix playback Visual Improvements Nearly every screen has been revamped. Thumbs are now used to provide an extra splash of color and character. Latest media items on the home screen are grouped appropriately by series or albums. Remote Control Now Chromecast and other Media Browser apps are managed through a common layout. Whether you play to Chromecast, DLNA, or another Media Browser app, the look and feel is the same. At the bottom you'll have a nice mini controller so the remote control is never out of reach. Playlists Server playlist support is also included in this new version. Also local media queuing has been revamped. The play queue is fully interactive, and you can drag to reorganize what's playing, or drag-right to remove items. Users will need to re-enter their connection values. Apologies, but necessary due to the changes in connectivity The app will be available on Google Play in the next few hours, and in the next few days on the Amazon store.

At long last we're pleased to announce Emby Server 4.0. This new release will begin rolling out over the next 24 hours, so please be patient. This has been our longest release period ever, and going forward we intend to get back to a more frequent release schedule. This release is packed with improved performance, updates to existing features, as well as several brand new features. Important Upgrade Information After installing the update, the server will begin a database upgrade operation. If you attempt to open the web app during this time, you'll be given a friendly message informing you about this. This operation could take a little time, so please be patient with it. After this is complete, any plugins you may have installed will require updates, so please check the status of this on your server dashboard. If any plugins are updated, remember that Emby Server will need to be restarted. After all updates have been applied, we recommend that you run a library scan. The first scan following the update could take longer than usual, so please be patient. With that out of the way, let's go over the highlights of this release. No Telemetry or Anonymous Usage Reporting If you're wondering why the anonymous usage reporting setting has been removed, it's because not only have we removed the setting, but we've removed the function altogether. We know our audience pretty well thanks to this community, and because of that we've decided we no longed need any data reporting. New Emby Live TV Guide Data As previously announced, Live TV Guide Data is Now Included with Emby Premiere, if you're in the USA, Canada, or the UK. What does this mean? This means if you're in the USA, Canada or UK, you'll no longer need to setup an account with another website nor pay someone else for this data. You'll simply enter your zip code into Emby, select your channel lineup, and we'll handle retrieving your guide data. We believe this will provide a better experience for Emby users with fewer setup steps. The new data is also quite a bit richer, and we will be looking at how we can take advantage of that to bring new Live TV features to Emby. Going forward, Live TV will require Emby Premiere in the web app, where previously this was not the case. How to Migrate From Schedules Direct If you are setting up the server fresh, then you should use our new Emby guide provider, which will be the default. If you are already using Schedules Direct, then you can continue to use it through the remainder of your Schedules Direct subscription. Schedules Direct has pledged to continue to honor your subscriptions, and we thank them for that. New Levels of Performance A database re-structuring brings your Emby Server and apps to new levels of performance that were previously not possible. Screens will load faster, videos will start quicker, and more. This will also manifest itself in other areas, such as improved library scan performance, and faster live tv guide refreshes. Please Note: The first scan after the update may take quite a while depending on your library contents and exactly what features you have enabled. Please be patient as subsequent scans will be much faster. New and Improved Hardware Acceleration This has been rebuilt from the ground up and is better than ever. We now have sophisticated hardware detection that runs on server startup to determine what your system can support. This allows us to provide you with an "easy mode" setting: And if you enable advanced control, you'll be able to see what was detected: Our hardware transcoding has been rewritten to take better advantage of each of the major GPU platforms, whether it be QuickSync, Nvidia, DXVA, VAAPI, MediaCodec, or others. This will allow hardware transcoding performance to perform better than ever. Best of all, you can now monitor this on the server dashboard. The green bar indicates the current playback position while the orange bar designates the range that has been transcoded so far. Important: Hardware acceleration has been truly a major effort for us, and because of this, it will now require Emby Premiere on all platforms except for Nvidia Shield and Western Digital. Transcoding Throttling is Back This feature has returned after a two year hiatus and is better than ever. What is transcoding throttling? Sometimes your server can transcode content much quicker than you're actually watching it. When the transcoding process gets a big enough lead on your watching position, we can slow it down on the fly in order to reduce the load on your server. Then as you're watching, if we need to speed it back up, we can do that too. And best of all, your server dashboard will show you when transcoding is being throttled: Emby Server Now Available for Android and Nvidia Shield Stay tuned for separate announcements. Improved Search Search is now faster and now supports fuzzy search! This means you don't need to type your searches perfectly in order to see the matches you're looking for. For example, if you accidentally enter "Bad Breaking", instead of "Breaking Bad", you'll still be able to see Breaking Bad in the results. Multi-Resolution TV Shows Without requiring any changes to your file names, we now support having multiple versions of episodes. This doesn't require any special setup and you'll now see the friendly version selection on the episode screen: Revamped Grouping Into Collections This has now been moved from a server setting to directly onto the Movies list screen where it can be easily toggled. Expanded Filtering You can now filter on more fields such as container, video codec, audio codec, subtitle codec, and more. This filters are also remembered ! Expanded User Library Access User library access can now be controlled for sub-folders, providing you with even greater flexibility than before. This more fine-grained access control replaces the previous user-preference-based "Merged" libraries that were supported before 4.0. If you have used merged libraries please see New Folder-based Access Control to learn how to setup the same basic functionality with this new feature. Other Improvements Update to .NET Core 2.2 Update to Sqlite 3.26.0 Improve library scan performance Improve performance of live tv guide refresh Improve subtitle delivery performance Support Brotli http compression Display video size on detail screens in Media Info Significantly reduce dlna related network traffic Add More Like This On Live TV section Add tabbed layouts for music videos and home videos Add network browsing to directory picker for Linux, Android and MacOS. Change new indicators for programs to match guide data Rework mobile context menus Rework tv tabs to be consistent with Emby Theater Downloaded subtitles are now saved using the two-character language code Improve transcoding of low bit rate hevc Add Moviedb season image provider Show favorite people Support tvg-chno with m3u tuners Support tvg-shift with m3u tuners Allow a library to be named "backdrops", a previously reserved name Improve server dashboard display with blue radiance theme Improve mobile server dashboard with bottom navigation Added live tv channels to search feature Improve layout of live tv channels tab under live tv Add audio books content type Use es-MX with MovieDb when Spanish language is selected along with Mexico as the country Improve metadata with absolute episode ordering Cloud sync upload improvements Support launching android server on device startup Add container, video codec, audio codec, and subtitle codec filters Improve multi-resolution naming recognition Improve automatic refreshing in the web app Improve resiliency with iptv streams Improve Windows sleep prevention while server is being used Improve Chromecast volume control Improve xmltv parsing of European characters Support multiple images with xmltv Use transcode=none profile for HD Homerun when appropriate Support splitting musicbrainz id's on both slashes and semi-colons Make alpha pickers dynamic based on content Improve identify feature Improve manual refreshing when replacing existing images Improve database cleanup procedures of removed content Improve automatic refreshing of recordings Restore user permission to change password and profile image Prevent syncing of in-progress recordings Improve authentication failure logging for Fail2ban support Add API to find item by provider id Update new user defaults to not allow deleting media Make news notifications configurable Reduce size of Windows and MacOS installers by 30 MB Support user subtitle download permissions Defer collage image generation until images are needed Move AudioDb and Omdb to pre-installed plugins Move fanart.tv to pre-installed plugin Move MusicBrainz to pre-installed plugin Move MovieDb metadata provider to pre-installed plugin Move nfo saver to pre-installed plugin Move tvdb to pre-installed plugin Support per-library resume settings Bug Fixes Fix issue of changing password in Firefox when Firefox password manager is used Fix repeated Visual Studio C++ install prompts when VS2017 is already present Fix favorite artists page showing empty list Fix search by accent characters Fix web access by ipv6 ip address Fix More Like This for artists always showing same content Fix xmltv programs not being marked as new when they are also a Premiere Fix recording image file names for shows containing a period in the name Workaround .net core crashes on network availability changes Fix collection and playlist separation per library Fix hardware transcoding options being reverted to defaults Fix cloud sync upload throttle not being applied Fix xmltv failures with SMB paths Fix audio books getting immediately marked as watched Fix intermittent crash associated with log file rotation Fix windows task scheduler entries not getting cleaned up Fix typo in Exynos spelling Fix remote URL showing with remote access disabled Various DLNA bug fixes

Emby Server 4.7 is Released with Many New Features, Improvements and Fixes Emby Server 4.7 is starting to rollout to different platforms. It's packed with new features, improvements and fixes. We wanted to give you a Preview of some new functionality and changes to Live TV as well as bring to your attention possible post installation configuration changes that might be required. If you currently use one of the following Live TV Plugins (NextPVR, MediaPortal, ServerWMC, TVHeadEnd, TVMosaic, Vu+, DVBLink or DVBViewer) you will need to reconfigure the plugin after it is updated following the 4.7 installation (the server checks for new plugins after a new install). As part of this process the guide will refresh. Please let it completely finish before going to the next step. Once the guide refresh is complete please go to Live TV menu and add a new tuner. You will see an entry for the plugin you are using. See Below: Live TV has many new features as well as a new plugin framework. Our own internal tuners and guide have been moved into plugins using this new framework as well. Setting up a tuner for use in Emby thanks to the new framework allows for a unified architecture, simplifying tuner/source setup. Here's an example of the Add TV Source dialog showing a few of the different choices using the new plugins. Whenever you install a new Live TV Plugin an entry will appear on this dialog. All available tuner types are now managed from one central place simplifying setup and configuration. All tuner types now share a common set of features. This allows 3rd party plugins to work exactly the same as Emby provided sources. This is now possible thanks to a new TV framework Emby uses debuting in this release. This new framework allows for simpler TV plugin creation as the server takes over responsibility of many functions previously needed at the plugin level. This helps to prevent issues related to specific plugin code as Emby server can now handle streams in a very consistent manner regardless of source. This is a WIN/WIN for developers as well as users! Emby Server 4.7 along with it's new TV plugin Framework includes new features and expanded functionality. Some of the highlights are: Support for OTA ATSC 3.0 & 4K Live TV If you have an ATSC 3.0 compatible tuner and live in a TV market currently broadcasting ATSC 3.0, Emby has everything you need to embrace this new technology. This includes new support for the proprietary AC-4 coded needed to decode audio streams. Not only will you get a beautiful picture especially on 4K HDR channels, but awesome sound as well! Cable Support for 4K Channels Emby supports receiving 4K digital cable channels. All you need is a compatible tuner like the ever popular HDHomeRun Prime. Of course your provider needs to support 4K channel transmission and have this turned on for you account. Check your providers website for 4K support as many providers have this available, often at no additional cost. 4K Channel support is not limited to built in OTA and Cable tuners but is fully supported through all tuner types if the source itself support 4K. Here's a great screenshot of a 4K SDR broadcast captured from an HDHomeRun Prime tuner: Universal Closed Caption Support In All Emby Clients Every Emby Client including web browsers fully support Closed Captions, not to be confused with subtitles. The Emby Transcoder is fully Closed Caption aware, so it doesn't matter how or where you play Live TV in Emby, it's now available if you require it. Manual Recordings Support Another new addition to Emby is support for manual recordings regardless if you have guide information or not. You can setup these recordings to use specific channels, set the starting start and end times, you can set the frequency of recordings (one and done or Recurring) as well as specific days of the week. Of course you can personalize the title of the recording(s) as well. You can setup a manual recording easily by clicking the the Create Recording button followed by choosing the Channel and Time option on the popup window. You can then setup the manual recording criteria that will be used. Here you see the custom recording already scheduled to record. Multiple Channel Support for Series Recordings You can now setup a single recording that can be used across specific multiple channels you choose. Emby also has adds new options to allow: Support Negative Recording Padding Values Enter a negative Number in the Start or End Options Max Recording Length for Series Recordings You can now set as a precaution a maximum duration that any recording can have. This shouldn't be needed but is there if you need it should you have a "fringe" reception channel that sometimes causes you grief with recordings. All New Views in Live TV Recordings Tab Emby now supports viewing your recordings just like other Movies or TV Shows libraries. Explore this option on your own and you should feel right at home with it. Server Dashboard Changes The server dashboard has been reorganized a little to make it easy to quickly find information. It also adds additional information. Here you can quickly see 2 Active Recordings taking place on the Server. Now Playing Dashboard The Now Playing section on the Dashboard sports a lot of new information but is easier to view as well. In the above picture you can quickly see Apollo 13 is Direct Playing the content as well as see additional information about the streams. My Cousin Vinny on the other hand is Transcoding the Video while leaving the Audio untouched, but is sending this to the client using HLS. The little graphics in the Video section following HEVC tell you it's using Hardware Transcoding. You can see the transcoder is Throttling (waiting) as it's producing 53fps which is more than what's needed at the time. The new Now playing also sports new features such as being able to click on the video name (ie Apollo 13) and be taking directly to it's detail page. Same with clicking on the username or device type. It's very cool! Improved Tab Design Used at the Top of Pages Emby now uses an improved design for tabs whenever show on a page. It's much easier to quickly see there are multiple tabs on the page with options and features. It's also much easier to see which tab your currently using. The new tab interface look follows your choice of theme information as well. New Theme Options Emby Server 4.7 gives you more control than ever over the look of your pages by allowing you more control over the theme options. You now have separate theme and accent color options. Want a strong all blue theme? How about and easy to see dark theme with Pick Highlights? You can also use a bit of imagination mixing different Theme, Setting Theme and Accent colors to achieve interesting results not possible previously. Embedded Lyrics Support for Music Files Emby now supports display of musical lyrics you provide. This doesn't require modifying your actual music tracks but is done using a text file residing next to the track! You can quickly and easily use a tool such as MediaHumon Lyrics Finder that makes quick work of adding Lyrics to your existing content. Rescan your music library and have this: This is a great new feature that's easy to implement, uses hardly any storage space (text files) and gives you great results! (first icon bottom left) Audio now playing screen The above picture shows one view of our new audio Now Playing Screens. Here's another version of the same screen without the lyrics showing your current queue: This view uses the middle button at the bottom between Lyrics and the cog/settings icon. Clicking the last icon (cog/settings) brings up a mini menu allowing you to change playback speed, Stats for Nerds or the ability to save your current queue as a playlist. Without any of the options selected you can have a simpler viewer centered on the page like this: You can get to these screens clicking the far right icon on the audio playback toolbar at the bottom of the screen. This new audio toolbar put everything you need right at your fingertips. See the artist, album and song. Change volume, set repeat mode, pause, stop, change tracks or switch views as shown above. The toolbar stays at the bottom of the screen for music while allowing you to explore other parts of the system. Very Nice! Audio Book Continue Listening Emby supports continue listening to Audio Books. The above screen shot shows the docked toolbar at the bottom of the screen while the top portion show a new option being set to display on the home screen to be able to quickly access and continue listening to audio files. New On Screen Display (OSD) Features Some of the new 4.7 OSD features have been shown recently in a couple Emby client blog posts using a preview release of 4.7. Some of the functionality of visual timelines and thumbnail graphics have been available in some form the past but now are fully unified in a cohesive manner that's very easy to use from a keyboard, mouse or remote. It's very slick, adds new navigational functionality as well as additional information you had to quick playing in the past to access. You can see how much thought and care went into this design allowing it to work effortlessly across the different cleints. Visual Timeline Showing Overlayed Chapter Information Done Through Keyboard Navigation Info - Bottom-Left Menu Option This will bring up information about the movies, show episode or TV channel you happen to be watching. Chapters Menu This shows the next menu option displaying a list of embedded chapters including the Chapter name, the timeline it starts as well as of thumbnail from the start of the scene. Cast & Crews How often have you watched something and wanted to know the actor or actresses name playing a part? Previously you had to exit playback to look this information up but now it's right here always available a click or two away. What a non-intrusive time saver this option is! On Now You can quickly and easily see what's on TV using the two new views added to the OSD. The On Now view above uses the programs graphics if available (Emby Guide supports this) to show what's currently on each channel in your lineup. You can easily scroll the list sideways to get a good look at everything currently being broadcast. The Guide showed below allows you to quickly see what's on a currently as well as what's coming on later. It's not limited to what's shown but allows scrolling up and down channels as well as the timeline so you can see what's coming on 12 hours from now. It's a fully functional Mini-Guide built right into the OSD. All of the OSD functions shown above work right over top the currently playing media allowing you access to a lot of new information with the least amount of disruption possible. Previously you probably got gripes and complaints from family members if you exited the media playback to get a look at the cast list to see the name of the actor. Now instead of having to wait to the end of the movie to see the cast list or catching wrath from the family, you can quickly view this information in a non-disruptive manner. Having all this new information as well as new tools for easier navigation right at your fingertips during playback shows how much thought and design went into this new version. Emby sets the bar high for OSD functionality that others can't compare to. More To Come! We're excited to share how awesome Emby Server 4.7 release is. We plan to following up this blog post with additional posts in the coming days expanding on it's new features. A special thank you goes out to all the people that helped test the many beta versions along the way! Inevitably with a monster release of this size there will likely be some issues we'll address with quick to follow maintenance releases. Please make sure to let us know in the community forum what you think of our new 4.7 release and any issues or questions you might have. Post Questions, Comments and Issues Here. Other Improvements Update to .NET Core 6.0 Update to ffmpeg 5.0 id3v2 parsing: Read full null separated list for text info frames Add Log anonymization feature Add now playing screen style options Reduce port mapper network traffic Add library option to control importing of playlist files Add log file rotation option Clean HLS segments during playback when disk space is low Reduce sizes of server log files when debug logging is not enabled Add subtitle download max age option Add subtitle download option for forced subtitles only Support comment tag as description for audio files Preserve subtitle track language with conversion and download features Safeguard against junk year values when probing audio files Save writers as composers when probing audio files Support a-z picker in descending order Support a-z picker when sorting by album artist or album Support reading roontracktag for music Clear episode external ids when changing series display order in metadata editor Improve deriving hw devices Support Audio Book resume Adjust for QSV changes in ffmpeg Support HW Acceleration for (graphical) subtitle burn-in Add subtitle background color and opacity options Add logo as title display option Add resume rewind playback option Make context menu header texts clickable Update TVDB plugin to newer TVDB API Update multi-episode metadata fetching to work with all metadata providers Add South African ratings Improve camera upload error handling Support convert feature with multi-select tool Improve multi-version display names Don't show video OSD on double tap skipping Reworked Active Devices display into Now Playing Improve audio book detail screen Improve audio OSD Improve efficiency of real-time monitor Improve DSD audio support over DLNA Minor adjustment of detail screen buttons Display chapter name in seek thumbnail previews Add channel name and channel number as DVR post processing command line arguments Improve scan metadata folder scheduled task progress reporting Improve performance of playlist detail screen Add sort by track number option to folder views Add Copy to Clipboard support in API Keys screen Enable chapters for audio books Update decision making for periodic refreshes Support TCM as composer Show full Chinese display name in track languages Update top tab design to be more discoverable Improve layouts with docked sidebar Set DLNA Server to off by default Allow for higher audio stream copy bitrate Support subs and subtitles folder case-insensitive Update album/song links with Included In section Make DVR wake server optional on supported platforms Set subtitle filename when downloading subtitle files to the browser Always display sort title in the metadata editor Make sort title lockable in the metadata editor Add Italian ratings Always record episodes when the option to check existing library is not selected Adjust recording image save behavior for series episodes that are sports Don't convert really large images to webp Improve album Identify search results display Support audio description and studio from copyright tag Support wm/year and original year tags Improve same subnet detection Improve episode parsing with episode titles contain numbers Add paths to log file for reference Allow deleting albums and artists Update folder queries to fix metadata manager sorting for albums Log DX detection into main log if debug logging is enabled Avoid resetting real-time monitor to parent folder when possible Adjust continue watching query Improve series grouping in mixed content Remove rejection of large camera uploads to allow any file size Support .mid audio files Support sort_with embedded sort title for videos Update sort by date last episode added to not be impacted by virtual episodes Prevent split button on missing episode detail screen Resolve performance issues associated with having large numbers of devices in the server database Bug Fixes Fix android database errors on deletion Fix year not being parsed from movie folder name Fix QuickSync HW overlay with tone mapping Fix display of incorrect video format names Fix Avoid detection of duplicate DX11VA devices Fix regression bug with ASF when reading image attachments Fix search displaying previously aired programs Fix incorrect photo orientation in slideshows Fix Roku playback failures with very long recordings Fix Windows: restart scheduled task and DVR times when system time changes (daylight savings) Fix QuickSync HW overlay with tone mapping Fix CBR books sending wrong mime type Fix DVD & Bluray folders not being hidden via .ignore files Fix transcoding throttling not occurring with Chromecast Fix classic image series extraction Fix music album parsing error when album name is () Fix folder images getting replaced when not saving images in media folders Fix identify feature with music videos Fix episodes with season numbers greater than 200 Fix photo scanning getting stuck in a loop with certain files Fix edge case closing of streams being left opened after stopping playback Fix occasional display of incorrect video format names Fix occasional duplicated Sign Out entry Fix list view multi-select in FireFox Fix hide from resume getting unhidden after adding a new episode Fix local NFO ignoring date added value in certain cases Fix for graphic subs burn-in with tone mapping on QSV Fix scaling of wrong-sized graphical subtitles Fix incorrect hw context indication for D3D11VA decoders Fix av1 direct play Fix album items being added to playlist alphabetically Fix transcoding audio channel count with convert function Fix artists inheriting genres from albums when they shouldn't Fix sporadic cases of burned in subtitles not appearing Fix detection of video stream vs. embedded image Fix web app playback failures in cases of videos that played successfully with Emby Server 4.5 Various fixes with manual subtitle downloading for multi-version videos Various fixes for Apple TV top shelf content Various transcoding fixes

We are very excited to announce our brand new, fully searchable and organized, Knowledge Base! It is available now at https://support.emby.media Just start typing what you are looking for in the search box and related articles will be suggested immediately. Or just navigate the sections to find what you are looking for. We really think this will be a major improvement to helping you find answers to your questions and issues. If you find problems, incorrect information or any other issues with the new KB, please create a post on the support forums and we'll get it addressed. Thanks as always for your support.

A new beta has gone out to address a few issues and bring a few improvements. Here are the changes. Dlna Improvements Thanks to the help of a few community members, the following Dlna improvements have been made: Resolved Play To issue with Xbox One that would revert to the default Dlna profile if using a custom device name Resolved transcoding failures with Sony Bravia's Resolved missing images with Sony Bravia's Resolved transcoding failures with Panasonic Viera Significantly reduced network footprint when discovering devices on the network New DLNA profiles added for VLC and Bubble UPnp, to direct stream all content (subject to bitrate setting) Xbox One Improvements Resolved Play To issue with Xbox One that would revert to the default Dlna profile if using a custom device name Resolved issue of missing header when using the web client on Xbox One Material Design Coming We are incorporating more of the design elements and you'll notice it with the header. The header will hide and show as your scroll up and down, thus affording you a pleasant full-screen experience. The desktop layouts will be getting the same treatment. Redesigned Now Playing Bar The now playing bar of the web client has been redesigned with bigger, prettier buttons and a little transparency. We think you'll enjoy it when playing audio or remote controlling other apps. Others Resolved incorrect aspect ratio when transcoding anamorphic content with Android TV & Fire TV Resolved issue of file handles being left open in Linux when extracting chapter images. This was the primary cause of the Unbutu crashing being reported. Resolved issue of backdrop images not being downloaded in certain situations Reduced CPU usage caused by dynamically created images Stay Tuned for More Live TV News We are committed to bringing you an unmatched multi-device Live TV experience. Be on the lookout for more blog announcements. In the meantime, enjoy these teasers.

We've been pretty busy over the past few weeks and have added quite a bit thanks to the help of some new contributors. Let's run through the highlights: Beginning to localize Media Browser Server DLNA Play To improvements DLNA Profile editing Multi-version movie grouping Anime TV fixes More efficient transcoding The web client now has a 'selected player' Live TV news - Next Pvr launching Beginning to Localize We are working hard to translate all of our apps into as many languages as possible. Thanks to the help of 30+ translators, that's becoming a reality. Please be aware the server is only about 33% localized. We'll need a couple more release cycles to finish the job. We're giving you guys a taste of it in hopes you'll join us and help out. Please send me a message if you would like to help translate. Ultimately, you'll have default server settings, for the server, and then connected users will be able to have their own language settings. DLNA Improvements In preparation for our upcoming DLNA server, we're launching a profile editing system. If your device is being fussy you can fix it right from your web browser. No need to hunt down configuration files. Perfecting these profiles and adding new ones will be a great community project. Right now our DLNA features support just a small number of devices, but with the community's help we can easily expand that and support quite a bit more. Multi-Version Video Grouping If you keep multiple encodings of videos, we now have easy ways to group them together. Movies can be grouped together in your movie folder: \300 300 - 1080p.mkv 300 - 3D.mkv But if you don't want to bother changing folders, you can also do it right from the editing interface: Movies and Episodes both support this feature. Once videos are grouped, you'll see all the versions listed on the detail page: So what does this mean? Clients that transcode will automatically choose the version that is most optimal for them, in order to reduce the load on your server and your bandwidth. Clients that do not transcode will automatically choose the highest quality version, or present a selection screen when the choice is not obvious. Please note this is intended for multiple encodings of the same content, and not grouping together editions like theatrical and director's cut. This feature is intended to be a performance optimization, but we may consider expanding it later. Transcoding Improvements You'll see it with Android, Roku, iOS, Windows 8/RT, Windows Phone and Chromecast. More direct streaming when possible to prevent transcoding. Web Client Selected Player Instead of having to use a separate remote control player, now you just click the friendly icon in the top-right hand corner and you'll get a nice slide out menu to choose your selected player. Then all plays will be sent to the selected player. Anime TV Fixes As promised, the server is becoming more friendly to Anime. Once you have the new server you'll be able to get Aphid's update to his Anime metadata plugin. Next PVR Launch Thanks to Sven we'll have a Next PVR plugin launching this week to provide an alternate data source for Live TV. Odds and Ends TV Shows in the web client now have a slick new banner view: And it now remembers your sorting settings. Also, if you're not comfortable with the presence of Delete buttons, now you can control who can delete content. Don't Forget The web client is built to be used on any size screen. Use it on the sofa with your tablet, or your smartphone while you're on the go. It's your view and control of your media, wherever you are. And it will still be just as easy to use as if you had a mouse and keyboard.

This is a big one, and it's all about giving you finely grained control of what your server is doing. Let's get to the changes: First, the warning: This release will re-scan your library. Please be patient. Also review your user library sharing because you may need to reconfigure some of them. Finely grained control over metadata settings. Choose where your metadata comes from, prioritize internet fetchers, and choose what formats your metadata gets saved to. Local metadata is king. If we see local metadata for an item, we will not go out to the internet. Period. This means as new features are added you may have to manually re-scan, but having predictability is better for everyone involved. Bottom up scanning for music means all data is based off of the media files, e.g. embedded artwork comes first at the album level, and we can read musicbrainz id's from id3 tags, which @steve1977 I'm sure will be happy with. New audio fetcher added - TheAudioDB.com New TV fetcher added - TheMovieDB.org (Currently only at the series level. No season or episode data yet, but it will come with time). There's also a new nifty auto-organize feature for episodes that can monitor a download folder and move episodes to your series folder. It also includes the ability to manually correct when we can't determine the series it belongs to. More user permissions - enable/disable live tv per user, as well as enable/disable any kind of media playback per user. Path substitution features More improvements in regards to lowering cpu usage when transcoding Easier setup and sharing of libaries Status monitoring of live tv tuners, and the ability to reset a tuner Choose from all languages when downloading images manually

This is primarily a maintenance release but does have a few important additions and changes. Check out the new Wiki: https://github.com/MediaBrowser/Wiki/wiki We've been working hard on a new wiki to help document all of the features of Media Browser. So to that end... In App Help: You'll now see conveniently placed, context-sensitive help buttons through the web interface. When you click a help button you'll be taken to the corresponding wiki page that will help walk you through the feature. Be patient with us if some of the wiki pages aren't yet complete, they will be soon. User Device Access Now you can configure the devices a user is able to utilize to connect to your server. This setting will affect everything from logging into that device, to remote controlling it, and to the users that are displayed publicly on that device's login screen. Identification Options Now when you use the identification feature of the metadata manager, you can choose whether or not to replace images as part of the operation. Sharper than Ever on Your Retina Devices A number of icons have been upgraded and now the web client looks nice and sharp no matter what resolution or browser you're running. Expanded TV Naming Support Our parsing of episode file names has significantly improved and is now based on Kodi's engine and rules. This will dramatically improve our ability to find internet metadata. In a future release, look for the rules to become configurable similar to Kodi's advancedsettings.xml. Bugs Resolved PGS subtitles not working in the web client Search was returning missing & unaired episodes Stay tuned for something awesome Whenever we have a release as light as this you can be sure, we've got something big up our sleeves. Stay tuned.

After much delay, here is the 2nd preview of the work being done behind the scenes on Media Browser Theater. In this post, we'll be showing the new home screen and item detail page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW5oR6KX5LU&feature=youtu.be Home The new home page now contains all home page sections on one continous smooth-scrolling page. You can scroll straight from one section on to the next, or use the shortcuts at the top to skip to a section, or use home/end to navigate to the begining or end of the screen. Item Details The new item details page differs quite significantly from the current release. Like the home page, all content can be found on a single continuous page. The new item details page is designed to surface the content and actions that you are most likely to take, and present them to you without requiring that you dive through multiple menus to get there. Join the Team Media Browser Theater is built with c#, WPF, and other .NET technologies. If you have experience with any of these please drop us a line. We can find a place for anyone who would like to contribute.

Download for Windows: https://emby.media/emby-theater.html Try the online web app: http://tv.emby.media and https://tv.emby.media - supports the latest versions of Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. This app has been a long journey and we're finally pleased to announce availability for Emby Premiere subscribers. On Windows, the Same Great Video Player in a Brand New App The app retains the same great Direct Show audio and video player that you're accustomed to, including all of it's bells and whistles with Madvr and other perks. Andrew Van Til from Missing Remote has been helping us and we can't thank him enough. This app has been truly a massive team effort. You might be wondering what took you guys so long? This is essentially our third major design of the app. You're all familiar with the original. We then began an overhaul built with C# and WPF, and by overhaul, we mean a re-write from the ground up. Then in early 2015, I began scheming about the idea of a full-featured HTPC app built with HTML. It is my belief that Web API's have evolved to the point where they are now truly the best option, and that led to another fresh start building the app from the ground up. Make no mistake, this is not a Smart TV app ported to the HTPC, this is a new app designed to support all the bells and whistles you've come to expect. So what's different about this new app? Read on! A Modern App for Modern Times The interface for this app has been built with HTML, but this is nothing like the web apps you're accustomed to. This has been built purely with modern features that bring a level of performance that wasn't even possible a year ago at this time. For the nerds out there, that means WebAnimations, WebComponents, Service Workers, Polymer, and on and on. To run this app on Windows, we've utilized Chromium, Electron, and NodeJS. Then we replaced the web audio and video player with a player built specifically for Windows (mentioned above). With HTML and JavaScript as the basis, the possibilities are going to be endless. To release the app on other platforms such as Linux, Mac or Android, we would follow the same process and provide you with the best audio and video players that the platforms have to offer. Pretty soon we'll have additional announcements on how you can build skins with HTML, and we can't wait to unveil that. Designed for 10ft, but Works Great With a Mouse and Touch Input We've put a lot of effort into all three input mechanisms. We want this app to work well however you'd like to use it. We think the best way is a remote, but if you'd like to scroll with the mouse or swipe with your finger, that works great too. Note: Although the app supports touch input, it does not currently have any mobile designs, therefore it is not ideal for small screens. Sharper and Crisper Than Ever Before The first thing you'll notice when playing with the new app is just how much crisper it is. How has this been achieved? Unlike the previous version of the app (and Emby for WMC), the new Emby Theater renders at resolution without any form of UI scaling. This will create more work for the theme developer to design for different resolutions (720p, 1080p, 4k, etc), but the results are worth it. We love the old Emby Theater, but this is going to make it look like an old tube TV. Silky Smooth Animation The next thing you'll notice is just how fluidly the interface navigates. Dramatic performance improvements have been made over the previous app. Almost everything on-screen is animated and it really helps make the app more pleasant to use. Emby Theater Going Multi-Platform We want to bring this app to as many platforms as we can, including Smart TV's, Android, and others. With HTML as the basis we have a foundation that will allow this app to run on just about anything. 6-Button Control There will be no more fumbling around trying to figure out what button does what. The new app will be easy for anyone to pick up and use without any learning curve. All functions are being designed around 6 buttons - up, down, left, right, ok, and back. Your family members and guests will have no trouble controlling the new Emby Theater. If You Can Do HTML and CSS, You can Build Themes for Emby Theater Many of you have probably worked with HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Building themes and plugins is as simple as forking existing samples on Github and creating your own versions. We're excited to see what you come up with. We'll have more info on this coming soon. Rediscover your Content with Recommendations A popular feature from other Emby apps is finally making it's way to Emby Theater. New Music Interface The app finally has a design that makes sense for music. Live TV Watch Live TV, browse the guide, and manage your recordings. Details Gone Vertical A common complaint over the detail screen of the current Emby Theater is that it's pretty but slow to navigate. We went back to the drawing board and decided to take a little inspiration from Android TV. It is now much, much faster to browse through detail screens. Wait, if This is HTML... Does that mean the built-in web app could be made to animate as smoothly as Emby Theater? Yes! It can, and it will. But the built-in web app has to support older browsers such as Internet Explorer, so it will take a little longer to get there. So Which Version Should I Use? It really depends. For most users, we suggest that if you need HD Audio Bitsreaming, External Players, or MadVR, you'll want to use the native windows app. For everyone else, the web app with Chrome running in full-screen is a great option. Download for Windows: https://emby.media/emby-theater.html Try the online web app: http://tv.emby.media and https://tv.emby.media (supports the latest versions of Chrome, Opera, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge)

One year ago, I sent Luke a PM asking him to look into a Media Browser add-on for Xbmc. I really didn't know Luke at the time - otherwise I would have known that he would push me to do it myself. Luke is good at that! At the time: I didn't know Python I didn't know anything about working with web APIs, XBMC API or MB3 API I didn't know how to use GitHub I made a little progress - got lists to display and files to play. I thought I was about done... And then users and other developers started to get involved. @null_pointer came on board in January, offering *much* more programming experience. @im85288 came on shortly after, an expert in skinning. @elcabong joined, and contributed mods to his skins. More recently we have been joined by @gelsner, @marcelveldt, @azeos and @cgrey000. We have devs from the world over: Argentina, Australia, England, Germany, The Netherlands and The USA. Our users have continuously provided new ideas, and had the patience to work through and test the implementation of those ideas. We now have TEN beautiful skins modified just for MediaBrowser. The next year will bring more changes - with the release of Kodi coming, we will be re-branding simply as MediaBrowser for Kodi. With Kodi branding itself as more of an Open Source Roku - the idea of using MediaBrowser as a local media database back end makes more sense than ever. In short - this has been the most fun I have had with an online community since my old BBS days. Thank You! xnappo http://imgur.com/a/jzCr3

Finally!! I'm very pleased to announce that the Android MediaBrowser client now supports Chromecast. Everyone who has a device running Google Play Services 4.2 should see it in the coming days. Chromecast will behave like it does in most other clients. Select a route using the route selector and then the play actions will play on the selected Chromecast device. HAPPY CASTING! In the near future I'll be merging the Remote play and CC functionality so that it's the same interface for both.

The wait is over! We are excited to announce public availability of the new Emby Linux app beta program. Why a Native Linux App? While Emby’s web app works well across platforms, there are limits to what a browser-based player can achieve, especially when it comes to modern video and audio playback. The Linux app was created to go beyond those limits. At the core of this decision is one simple goal: BEST IN CLASS VIDEO PLAYBACK. Browsers continue to improve, but they inevitably lag behind native applications when it comes to advanced video technologies, hardware acceleration, and reliable fullscreen playback. Emby users expect smooth, high-quality playback — and delivering that consistently requires a native application. Benefits Over the Web Player The new Linux app provides several advantages over watching through a browser: More reliable video playback with fewer browser-related limitations Better performance and lower system overhead Improved full screen behavior across Linux desktop environments Direct integration with native video playback technologies A cleaner, distraction free viewing experience By separating video playback from the browser entirely, the app is able to take full advantage of the system and deliver a smoother experience. Designed for Linux Desktops The Emby Linux app is built to feel at home on Linux. It works across major Linux environments . The result is a modern Emby experience that’s faster, more consistent, and purpose built for Linux users. Available Now The new Emby Linux Beta app is now available and we are waiting for your feedback! Want to get started right away? Head on over to the beta instructions page for more! Please provide feedback in this forum: Linux Beta

A new server release is available which features significant improvements to our transcoder in terms of performance, reliability and features. Without much further ado, here are the highlights: Improved reliability and quality of video transcoding A new transcoding throttling feature which can dramatically reduce cpu usage in certain situations Improved support for Advanced SubStation Alpha and SRT subtitles Improved DLNA reliability Added DLNA special folders Added resume progress bars with DLNA images Support webp image output for faster browsing Support for additional photo metadata Support for album disc sub-folders Display mirror setting now remembered Added an option to save metadata and images as hidden files Added an option to control when chapter images are extracted New Transcoding Features Our transcoding has improved significantly. Not only is it faster and more reliable than ever, but it will also throttle itself when it gets far enough ahead of the player. Let's take a look at how that works. Simply start playing something and monitor the cpu usage from ffmpeg: As you can see it starts out pretty high, but depending on the content being played the transcoder may be able to move at a faster rate than you're actually watching. Let's monitor that from the server dashboard: As you can see the transcoder position (in red), is a few minutes ahead of your current position. Media Browser Server is able to identify this and throttle the transcoder in order to reduce cpu usage: The throttling is smart and will speed up and slow down as needed in order to maintain smooth playback. Now the reduced load on your server will allow more devices to stream simultaneously without putting too much pressure on your system. But these are not the only transcoding improvements. Our handling of SRT and Advanced SubStation Alpha subtitles has improved and is now more efficient and reliable than ever. Improved DLNA Support This release also brings a number of DLNA enhancements. For starters, device compatibility has increased significantly thanks to pull requests submitted by 7Illusions. In addition, we now display special folders throughout your library. Click into your TV, Movie, or Music sections and you'll see some nice categories like Resume, Next Up, Latest, Favorites, etc. In addition, you'll now see progress bars for titles that can be resumed, just like you're accustomed to with our other apps: WebP Image Output Support This is a technology feature for the developers. WebP is an open source image format designed by Google that achieves as much as a 34% reduction in file size from JPG/PNG at the same level of quality. This is going to allow faster browsing with apps that are capable of supporting them. Look for WebP support soon in the following apps: Web Client with Chrome and Chrome Android browsers All Android apps Chromecast New Photo Metadata Support With this release we are now capturing more robust photo metadata, with stats such as Aperture, Shutter Speed, Latitude, Longitude, and a long list of others. This is only the beginning of our photo revamp and you can expect robust filtering as well as slideshows and galleries in future updates. Album Disc Sub-Folder Support A long requested feature, we now support numbered disc sub-folders. Please see the music section of the knowledge base for details: http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/674-media-files-folders-structure/?p=21480 Join the Media Browser Team As always, we're looking to grow the team with new developers, testers, designers, or any skill set you bring that you feel can help us. In particular we are looking for more Android and iOS developers to help bring us onto new devices and form factors that are rapidly becoming popular, such as living room set top boxes and wearables. Drop us a line!

Introducing Media Browser Connect As many of you know, we have a lot of really smart people here in our community, and great things happen when we put our minds together. We've been longing for a way to make it easier to access your server when you're away from home, and we're pleased to announce our solution. It's Media Browser Connect. Now you can use your forum username and password to sign into any Media Browser app from any location, and it will know how to locate your server in the most efficient way possible. This means you no longer have to fumble with IP addresses. Not only does this make it easier to access your server, it also makes it easier to mange multiple servers and share with your friends. So how does it work? It's very easy. For existing users that you've already setup, simply edit their user profile and enter their forum username or email address. The local server account will then be linked to the forum account. Once they accept the invitation email, they'll then be able to use their forum credentials to sign in to your server, without having to know the server's IP address. In the user list, you'll see a cloud to indicate the user has a Connect account. Invite Your Friends You'll notice a new Guests section on the user management page. What are guests? Guests are forum users that you've invited to use your server. Simply click the plus button next to Guests, and you'll be presented with a popup to invite a forum user. You can even choose which libraries they'll have access to. By default guests have very limited permissions, and you'll have full control over what they'll have access to. Local Accounts, Cloud Accounts - You Decide While we expect this feature to be very popular, we know that many prefer local accounts and we're pleased to say they're not going anywhere. Both of the features work very well together and we expect to continue to improve on this. App Support This has been a large team effort and you can expect to see updates for all of our apps soon. Here's a few teasers to wet your appetite. Try the Hosted Web Client We now have a hosted version of the web client at: http://app.mediabrowser.tv Simply use your Connect (forum) login, and then you can access any of your servers (owned or shared). Once you sign in, you'll see the very same web client you've come to know and love. Switching servers is easy: As you can see the layout is currently limited to one server at a time, but this is only the beginning. We know that many of you are clamoring for multi-server presentations, and we intend to deliver that in future releases. The hosted web client has one unique advantage over the local version. It features automatic network switching from LAN to WAN and vice versa, on the fly as needed. You might login initially within your home network, and then leave the house and transition to mobile. The app will handle it for you, all on the fly. The hosted web client is truly one url, any time, any location. Important Note: The hosted web client is served via static HTML and JavaScript. All communication occurs directly from your browser to your Media Browser Server, just like the regular web client. We do not have any external servers that send requests to your home server, and we do not collect any information about your media library. New Devices Section There is a new Devices section in the server dashboard. Many of you have asked for device-specific settings and we now have a place to put those. For starters, you can configure a friendly name for each device, to override the name reported by it. Automatic Camera Image Uploading You'll notice the Devices section has a Camera Upload tab. Camera upload allows automatic uploading of images from your smartphones and tablets. It's easy! Just enable the devices you'd like to use it for, and voila! Then go out and take some pictures, and when you come home the images will begin uploading. It's a fully automated feature. All of our mobile apps will be updated soon to support this. If you like, you can even specify a custom upload path for each device to keep albums separated. Here is a preview of image uploading on windows phone: New Parental Control Features Now you can define access schedules for users to control when they have access to your server. It's very easy and only takes a few clicks to setup. When users try to use the server during restricted hours, they'll see a friendly message indicating that they'll need to come back later. Expect to see more parental control features in upcoming releases. New Trailer Features We know that trailers is a big part of movie watching. The Movies section of the web client now has a Trailers tab, which will pull trailers from all available sources (channels, files, etc). There's even a new nifty Trailer Reel button. What is the trailer reel? It's the ability to create a long running playlist of random movie trailers. This makes for great background video while you do the dishes. The best part about the trailer reel feature is that remote control is fully supported. You can send a trailer reel to any Media Browser app that accepts remote control commands. DLNA Improvements You'll notice better dynamic category images that are based on the content within your library. Movies that have trailers or extras are now displayed as folders, allowing you to play the main feature or any of the extras from within the DLNA client interface. Also, big thanks to FuFa for his work in helping improve our Panasonic device profile, and Happy2Play for lending some of his expertise. Live TV Improvements We've been working hard with Krustyreturns and SiliconDust, and ServerWMC users are in for a treat. If you have an HDHomerun that supports Dlna, we now use the SiliconDust api to stream directly from the tuner hardware, thereby bypassing Windows Media Center's wtv conversion process. You will notice faster video start times, increased reliability, decreased resource consumption, and improved video quality. Big thanks to krustyreturns for his efforts on this! New Argus Live TV Plugin We're happy to welcome Argus to the community, giving you yet another choice of Live TV providers. Thanks to Sven for his work on this. Check it out in the plugin catalog. Latest Item Settings Some users have reported that they'd prefer not to have photos or music showing up in their latest items lists. This is now easily configured in your user preferences and will take effect within any Media Browser app that displays a global Latest Media section. Web Client Photo Slideshow: Click on any image within a photo album and you'll be treated to a visual slideshow. Best of all, it works great when you're mobile just by swiping your fingers left and right. http://mediabrowser.tv/community/uploads/inline/2/54526e1af41ca_Untitled.png Support for .STRM files: These are a longtime favorite of Xbmc users. Now you can create stub files in your library containing a single media url, and the content will be displayed like any other video. Clients will then stream the content from the remote url. Usage is simple. Create a normal text-file and rename the .txt extension to .strm then open it up with a text-editor (like Notepad in Microsoft Windows) and input the the direct url link of the stream. For example: http://host/path/stream Other Improvements: Upgraded to fanart v3 api Support Imdb url's within NFO's that appear after the closing xml tag Bugs Resolved: Music videos not showing up on artist page Artists with & in their name not displayed correctly Upcoming TV not displaying certain content "set" tag not getting saved in NFO's in certain situations Fully Open and Community Built As you all know we're committed to open source. We have developer libraries for Media Browser Connect ready to go for a number of platforms. We want to make it easy as possible for new developers to integrate or interact with our API. Expect to see more information about this soon. Join the Community Help us build new channels and apps. We're looking for more developers for all software platforms. Just drop us a line.

MB Classic Version 127 has been released to beta. This version includes several small fixes and tweaks to both the core and the default Chocolate theme but the biggest new feature, by far, is the ability to now manage your connection information and all plug-ins within MBC itself. Administrative-level users will now have both a Plug-ins and Advanced tab in configuration. The configurator should now only be needed for external player setup.

Here is the next round of answers from our Emby Q&A session. The feedback from our previous blog post was exciting to see from all of you, and we are excited to share even more answers. The next round of questions and answers will be released next week as well! 1) What are some of the future goals of Emby? Emby wants to continue to grow and be the best media server option available for our users. We hope to move to a quicker release schedule than in previous iterations that is both more efficient from a development standpoint and exciting for our users. We love what we do here at Emby and we want our users and potential users to see that! 2) Would the Emby team ever consider moniterary "bounties" to help offset the development cost. We have actually seen this question a lot lately. We do not believe that this is the best way to decide what goes into development for a few reasons. First and foremost, we do not want people who have more money than others to decide what goes into production while others who may not be able to afford to donate or contribute go unheard. 3) How does the Emby team decide on what's next for Emby? The answer to this is deeper than most people probably think. Feature requests is one place that we look at to form our roadmap of future goals. Sometimes it's as simple as user feedback that something is not working as intended or could be implemented in an easier way to use etc. Other times our development staff has ideas based on industry trends as well as their own experience that they believe should be implemented. We take all of that and as a team decide what should be added and when. 4) In what areas can Emby improve? We as a team are always seeking to improve. We fully acknowledge that as a small company we are sometimes stretched "thin" but we do our best to always be both proactive and reactive with all of you. As mentioned above we hope to move to a quicker release schedule with a more agile methodology that allows us do so. We think we do a pretty great job at communication with everyone here on the forums, but we continue to strive to be even better here as well. Being able to give more flushed out answers and as much information as we can. Our goal is to always continue improving.

Have you tried CoverArt? It is just one of the additional features you get with Emby Premiere. Cover Art is available in the Server Plug-in Catalog Cover Art is an "Image Processor" for Emby Server. It does not download any artwork. What it does is take the artwork you have (either downloaded with the normal MB providers or supplied by you) and apply different specialized treatments to those images. So, it can take a plain movie poster and make it look like a Blu-Ray case, or a beveled glass case - or take your episode images and put TV frames around them so that they look obviously like TV episodes. It can also do some very interesting things with Collections (box sets) or other folder types by creating images that represent the actual content that is within them. Cover Art does not modify any of your original artwork. It does its magic on the server before the images are delivered to the clients so you can easily switch between different styles and rest assured your original posters will remain intact. You can select different treatments for different types of media. For example, movies can have a case style treatment while TV Series, Seasons and Episodes all have different styles. Additionally, these selections can be grouped into different Profiles which allow you to define different sets of options for different physical locations within your library. Cover Art can also make it easy to tell more about your media with just a glance at the cover. It has the ability to put indicator icons on the covers to show the audio or video format as well as subtitle language and if the item is 3D or not. All of this together makes Cover Art an extremely powerful and flexible way to customize your media artwork into something much more exciting than just movie posters. Install Cover Art now from the server plug-in catalog and add some polish to your MB apps. You can trial it for 14 days from the time of first install. For complete information on what CoverArt can do, see here.

New Look Our Android TV and Fire TV apps have a new release rolling out over the next few days that will give you a nice new, much cleaner look to the overall interface. We think this new look makes the app more modern and easier on the eyes - allowing you to take in the information better. And the new detail layout really allows your background artwork to shine. Pre-playback Media Selection This release implements optional fields to allow you to select the version (if you have multi-version items) as well as audio and subtitle tracks before beginning playback. These controls are optional for all content other than mult-version items (where they will always show so you can select the version). If you would like them to show for all content, simply enable that option in the Playback Settings. Google Assistant Integration (Android TV Only) This version now integrates with the built-in Google Assistant search on Android TV 8.0+ devices. Now when you search from the home screen (or anywhere else) with the Assistant or voice search, you will see content from your Emby library along with other apps on the device. And More... In addition to those great new features, we've added many other improvements and fixes in several areas: Add basic folder browsing to library tabs Improved letter jump for 4.0 Play options in grids Rearrange buttons on Server not Available dialog Use all thumbs on Continue Watching row on home Fix erroneous colon when connecting with no port Display message on error connecting Support refresh rate/display mode switching on Gen 2 Fire (and any "L" device) Use random content backdrop for people Fix episode not resuming when requested remotely Fix no stop notification in dash Fix 24bit FLAC not playing properly Add skip amount options Support HEVC in Android 5.1.1 Remove limits on "Also On" quick channel changer Update translations Fix audio switching with MP2 tracks Up key show chapters during playback Rewrite list view to properly handle large lists Closed Caption support (USA) for live and recorded TV

We've got another great release for you. Here are the highlights: DLNA Play To Create collections using the web interface Identification Feature added to editor Redesigned video player in web client Support Xbmc .disc media stubs Reports Copy-only option added to Auto-Organize DLNA Play To Thanks to help from @7Illusions Now we can detect devices on your network and offer the ability to remote control them. Try it! Please note this is a brand new feature and will take us some time to perfect. If it doesn't work with your device, let us know. We will be adding a new DLNA section to the community to handle support. Create Collections using Web Interface Now you can create your collections using the web interface. No more messing with shortcuts or [boxset] tags. This is now the preferred way to create collections. Identification Feature Now if something fails to identify, you no longer have to fumble with IMDB Id's. Just click the Identify button from the edit page. Redesigned Video Player Thanks to @TimHobbs we've got a newly designed video player in the web client Reports We now have reports you can run. This is a very new feature that currently only has a small number of reports. Expect to see more added with more features New Auto-Organize Setting Thanks to @MisterPanky, you can now change the transfer method to Copy only. Support for Xbmc Media Stubs Do you keep a few movies on your shelf but not in your Media Browser library? Great! Now you can create dummy library entries for them using the .disc file extension. When you attempt to play them in your favorite app, it will tell you to get up off the couch and insert the disc. Brilliant!

This is an exciting server release that brings numerous new enhancements, including live tv to our web client and api. All of our app developers have committed to supporting live tv, so look forward to seeing it in all of your apps. Live TV We now support live tv through the use of a modular service provider system. You'll need to install a service provider plugin, and at launch we have one, ServerWMC. We'd like to thank krustyreturns for being a part of this. A next pvr plugin is also in development, and we also have a few more on our wish list - Argus TV, DVBViewer and DVBLink. If you would like to get involved and help develop one of these plugins, please let us know. So let's get down to live tv. You have the ability to view the guide, watch a channel, and full recording management capabilities. And the web client design is responsive so that you can use it on your smartphone to schedule a recording when you're not home. Transcoding Engine Improvements Perhaps just as exciting as live tv, we've made significant improvements to our transcoding service that will really help reduce server cpu usage. Everyone should thank Tikuf for all of the research that he's put into this. We couldn't have done it without him. There are new configuration settings in the advanced area to fine tune this: Please note that for now there is not a dramatic difference between these settings. As we continue to evolve and gather more data, we'll keep refining them. Web Client Direct Streaming The web client now has additional quality settings along with direct streaming options to allow you to play files directly without transcoding. This will allow some mp4's and m4v's to be direct streamed. Please note you will only see the option when we've determined the browser is capable of playing the file directly. The web client will also remember your quality setting, and apply it to all content played. Other enhancements: Web client view is remembered (e.g. poster, thumb, etc). Added nifty new flyouts with quick access to commonly used functions Support automatic de-interlacing when transcoding To be consistent with metabrowser, movie plot keywords are now saved into a new PlotKeywords field. Tags are now intended to be user-defined only. Added an advanced option to automatically restart the server when needed. It will only auto-restart once all users have idled for at least 30 minutes. Defects Fixed: Fixed pgs subtitles scaling incorrectly when transcoding Fixed text subtitle delivery when transcoding Fixed dvd runtime probing Stay tuned for more. Great things are happening with Media Browser Theater. We've assembled a really strong team and there's several great enhancements in progress. Linux and OS X server releases are getting closer. Please join us and be a part of the testing effort: http://mediabrowser.tv/community/index.php?/topic/3634-mono-server-linux-os-x/

EmbyWatch - A brilliant app built by a community user! One of the best things about the Emby community is the creativity that comes from it. Every so often, one of our users takes their love for media servers to the next level and builds something that makes life easier for the rest of us. Today, we’re excited to share EmbyWatch, a brand-new Android app developed by community member @asgard25It is an an incredible example of what happens when passion and innovation meet. A User-Built Tool, Made for Admins What makes this story special is that EmbyWatch wasn’t created by a company or a professional app studio. It was created by one of YOU! — just someone who wanted to make managing a server more intuitive and accessible from anywhere. Want to be even more impressed? This is only the second Android app that asgard25 has developed! EmbyWatch is designed to help server admins and advanced users keep track of what’s happening on their Emby setup in real time. It’s not about playback or browsing media, it’s about giving you the tools to monitor, manage, and control your server, all from your phone. Powerful Features at a Glance EmbyWatch brings a surprising amount of functionality for such a young app. Here’s what it can do: Real-time monitoring: See who’s watching what, where they’re streaming from, and how much bandwidth they’re using — all live. User management: View your users, check activity history, and even send messages directly to connected users. Device overview: Identify every connected client, from smart TVs to mobile apps, with connection times and device info. Library insights: Quickly review all your media libraries with detailed counts and metadata. Task control: Run or schedule maintenance tasks like library scans and metadata updates remotely. Plugin visibility: See your installed plugins and available updates. Logs and server details: Access logs, CPU load, uptime, and more — wherever you are. Notifications and widgets: Stay informed with live alerts and optional Android widgets for quick monitoring. For anyone managing a shared server, EmbyWatch feels like having a live dashboard in your pocket. A True Example of Community Ingenuity We love seeing users like asgard25 take their experience with Emby and turn it into something that benefits everyone. EmbyWatch really is a reflection of how open and flexible the Emby ecosystem can be when people put their ideas into action. This project shows exactly what makes our community special, a shared passion for improving and creating! So whether you’re managing your own home setup or running a multi-user server, EmbyWatch offers a simple, powerful way to stay connected to your system. Huge thanks to asgard25 for sharing EmbyWatch with the community and for showing what’s possible when creativity meets passion. We’re proud to see our users building tools like this that make Emby not just a media server, but a thriving ecosystem shaped by its fans. If you’re an admin or an advanced user, check out EmbyWatch on Google Play and see how it can make managing your server easier than ever. We can’t wait to see what asgard25 — and others in our amazing community — build next.

Great news. Emby for Samsung is now available in the Samsung app store for more countries. If you're in any of the following countries, you can now install the Emby app using the Samsung app store: Angola Argentina Australia Austria Bahamas Belarus Belgium Bermuda Bulgaria Canada Chile Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Czech Republic Denmark Dominica Dominican Republic Ecuador Egypt Fiji Finland France France-Dom Georgia Germany Greece Greenland Hungary Iceland India Ireland Israel Italy Jamaica Lithuania Luxembourg Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Norway Panama Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russian Federation Saudi Arabia Serbia Slovakia (Slovak Republic) Slovenia Spain Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Türkiye Turks and Caicos Islands Ukraine United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland United States of America Venezuela Virgin Islands, British Virgin Islands, U.S. We are working on adding more countries so stay tuned!

The Emby team hopes you and yours are enjoying a Happy Holiday Season. We would like to announce a couple of changes that will hopefully increase the value of Emby in all of your households. First, to aid in the transition from our old TV-only Android TV app to the new Standard Android app on that platform, we will be eliminating the need for the app unlock by allowing free playback for up to five TV devices per Emby Server. Devices beyond that limit will require Emby Premiere. Previously purchased unlocks will still be honored. This should allow most households to move to the new app more easily. Second, recognizing that today's households have more and more devices, we are increasing our standard Emby Premiere License device limit from 25 to 30. We will then also increase the extended premiere plans from 45 to 50 and 75 to 80. Existing extended subscriptions will remain the same but new ones will be at these new levels. All standard licenses will be automatically updated to the new 30 device limit immediately. You should see all of these changes rolling out over the next week or so. Happy Holidays from the Emby Team!

EMBY SERVER 4.8.1 IS NOW LIVE WITH LOTS OF NEW FEATURES AND IMPROVEMENTS Emby Server 4.8 has been rolling out to various platforms over the past week or so. This upgrade in particular is packed with a lot of new features, improvements and fixes. Over the next few weeks, we will be sharing multiple blog posts to share some of the exciting new functionality that 4.8 brings to Emby and give you a more in-depth look into the features. Today’s blog will focus on two new features: PROFILE PINS With Emby 4.8 you now have the ability to set individual profile PINs. This new PIN replaces the old local network only PIN that existed prior to this release. It is more flexible (works both locally and remotely) and more secure. This new PIN is very useful if you have devices in your home that are shared by multiple users. As an example you may want to put a PIN on your profile so kids in your home can’t just click on your profile and view all of the same media but still allow your kids to freely switch between their profiles on the same device. NOTE: All users (local and remote) must authenticate ONCE per device. Once this initial authentication is done, that user will be remembered on that device and won't require password entry again unless signed out. PLAYLIST SHARING CONTROL Another great feature of 4.8 is the ability to designate exactly what other Emby users you share playlists with. Prior to 4.8, any playlist that was created was available to everyone on your Emby server. Now they’re set up for individual users. When you first create a playlist, that playlist is private to just you. If you wish you can then share it with any user that you would like via the "Modify Collaboration" option. You are able to set it up so that different users have read only access or have view and edit access to the playlist. Please keep in mind that this is only for playlists that were created after the upgrade to 4.8. Playlists created prior to this release will not have this functionality. They would have to be re-created to gain it. NOTE: In order to utilize this feature, you must first grant each user that you want to be able to create shared playlists the ability to share content from the user settings on the dashboard. You can see from the image below that it is simply a checkmark on the settings page. Once that is checked, it is as simple as creating a new playlist and then either right clicking on the playlist or clicking on the “...” menu and clicking on manage collaboration. From there you can easily choose which user you want to share the playlist with and what level of access they have. Stay tuned for a new blog post in the coming days that highlights some of the other awesome and new features of Emby 4.8! For now, we have listed below all the improvements and fixes that were included in 4.8. We as a team are excited to share all of these great new additions with you and hope you’re enjoying the update to Emby just as much as we are! ADDITIONS AND IMPROVEMENTS Add new profile pin feature. Useful for devices shared by multiple users. Add new table view option Add more fields for selection in poster views Add new theme options Various database performance improvements Merge webhooks into notifications Support keyword-based recordings Display all episodes directly under series without using season layer (with user display option to control behavior) Update Intel Media Driver Minor database performance improvements Support extras for seasons and episodes Revamp backup plugin to be a more complete backup Support saving images locally for extras Add FR-TP content rating Import hearing impaired attribute for both internal and external subtitles Add hidden config switch to disable ssl renegotiation Add library option to cache images in server data folder to reduce disk access to original media folder Remember audio and subtitles across a tv series Improve support for audio-only live streams Add View Missing Episodes context menu option for series and seasons Add option when creating a user to copy data from an existing user Support random sorting on list screens Improve country and language list sorting Improve program dialog in live tv guide to show complete information Add subtitle position settings Improve user interface of Play On menu Add sample file ignore size to library options Added New Episodes section under Live TV suggestions Add new indicator on Live TV program posters Add options to hide played media from More Like This and Suggestions Add user locked out notification to Notifications and Webhooks Support more conventions with provider id values in folder names (moviedb, imdb, etc) Improve series name detection by getting the series name from episode file names, in some cases Support multiple languages with user audio and subtitle preferences Improve performance of server activity viewer Improve support for folders being used in multiple libraries of same content types Clear external ids for episodes when using Identify feature on Series Improve search for single title movies Add camera upload user permission Add new configurable home screen sections - Playlists, Collections, and Recently Released Movies Add more fields for display in User and Device management Add HDR filters to video list screens Add sorting controls to user and device management screens Add additional subtitle color options Support swipe down to close all dialogs that slide up Add Remove Identification feature to reset metadata Improve searching titles containing quotes and periods (e.g. Agents of S.h.i.e.l.d or Shield) Anonymize manifest.json Add warning for duplicates when adding items to playlists Support both nb and no Norwegian language options Add automatic metadata refresh option for episodes with placeholder titles such as TBA Rework Trakt plugin to be an option that each user can configure, rather than server settings Rework Notifications to be an option that each user can configure, rather than server settings Add guide display options to control visibility of channel names, images and numbers Improve automatic reconnection for live streams Display preview of matched items when setting up a keyword recording Reduce database queries in audio fingerprint process Add HK ratings Add user option to hide media info from detail screens Improve support for "subs" and "subtitles" folders Don't allow local network addresses to be specified in x-forwarded-for and x-real-ip Add media deleted notification and webhook event Support multi-select drag and drop add to playlist Support multi-select operations on downloads and conversions lists Update default subtitle font Add option to limit the number of genres displayed at the top of detail screens Rework playlists to be saved as m3u and deprecate the previous xml format Support extras in Collections Improve episode number parsing when episode file name is gibberish and parent folder name is readable Support sorting for playlists and collections Revamp webhooks plugin, supporting new events and configuration options Include activity log database file when vacuuming databases Rework scanning of extras, allowing more flexible usage of video extras Improve the use of internet metadata with recordings Support shift to multi-select Use tone mapping for image extraction Allow separate images for audio book tracks Stop scanning at the top of a library when it's unreachable Add image size display option Add lock screen function to video player on mobile devices Add three way toggle nav menu to web app Add option to control display of rating information at the start of video playback Change wording of transcoding reasons to be more user friendly Improve filter menu indicator Add Select None to multi-select lists Initial RTL support in web interface Make tagline field lockable Make overview field lockable Rework Live TV recording options to be based on selected folders, rather than raw paths Support .actors folder for people images Nfo plugin: Stop saving nfo files for additional parts Improve photo loading performance Remember subtitle selections even when user option is set to None Improve support for musicbrainz illegal character replacement Improve drag and drop scrolling Sanitize new playlist and collection names Add intro detection library options Improve automatic channel mapping with xml tv Support sort by composer FIXES Fix songs not being grouped into album when the album title contains an emoji Fix empty genre filters on playlists Fix anamorphic image extraction Various fixes for iOS 17 Various image processing fixes Fix transcode temp path in startup logging Fix 172.X addresses always being considered private Fix swagger docs with reverse proxies Fix restricting by tag hiding the tag itself Fix multi-episode file titles not using series display order Fix hide from Continue Listening only hiding a single track and not the entire album Fix live tv recordings being stopped in rare cases when the limit to keep is set to 1 Resolve issue of multi-part and multi-version not being able to be used together Fix green bottom line with QSV+OpenCL tone mapping Fix single image extraction with MPEGTS Fix support for simultaneous music and photo playback Fix sort by sort title being case sensitive in some views Fixes for multi-part and multi-version videos being used together Fixes for movies having file names starting with years Fix Intro Detection scheduled task not being visible Fix a/v sync regressions with live tv and recordings Resolve long-standing metadata quirks when removing data from nfo files and having it not get cleared in Emby Fix changes to url-only nfo files not being recognized Fixes for downloads automatically redownloading Fix graphic subtitle position when burning in subtitles with transcoding Fix unnecessary ffmpeg dependency on Windows Media Foundation Fix sporadic cases of errors when reordering live tv channels

Team, Today, we're going to show you how you can be the master of your domain with Emby Users. Why create separate user accounts for each member of your household? Because users can have their own personalized media libraries, user data, recommendations, parental controls, security settings, and more. Users are managed by opening the server dashboard and navigating to Users. Users Users are generally intended to be people who don't already have an online Emby Connect account. This is where most people will add the members of their household: A user will be displayed with a cloud if they're linked to Emby Connect. Why link to Emby Connect? Connect allows easy sign in away from home, where nothing more is needed than a username and password. Guests Guests are fundamentally the same as Users, but they provide an easy way to invite someone who already has an Emby Connect account. This will easily import their display name and image into your server. Feature Access To manage user feature access, start by visiting the Users page and clicking on a user account. Features can easily be granted or denied, such as the ability to sync media, view live tv, manage live tv, etc. The "Allow media playback" option determines if the user is able to play media or not. This option is handy if you'd like to setup a guest user who can browse the library but not play anything. Content Access Content access allows you to configure the libraries a user is allowed to access. Channel access also provides the same ability to control what your users can view and what they can't: Device Access Device access allows you to configure the devices a user is allowed to sign in from. By default, users can use any device. Parental Controls by Rating Easily block content from users based on their official rating: But sometimes it's also handy to control blocking of unrated content: Parental Controls by Tags Content can also be restricted based on the presence of tags: Tags are treated recursively, meaning you can easily block an entire TV series just adding a tag at the series level. Parental Controls by Access Scheduling Easily block access during certain hours by creating access schedules. Now you'll never have to worry about your kids streaming videos during their biology lectures. Advanced Controls Need to quickly disable user accounts? Would you like to hide certain accounts from app login screens? Easily do that with advanced controls. You can even take away a user's ability to edit their own profile settings. Maybe you don't want your kids accidentally changing their preferred subtitle language. Or maybe you have all your kids on one shared kids account and you'd like to manage the profile preferences yourself. Passwords Easily create passwords to keep your accounts secure and safe. But we all know that passwords can be cumbersome in the living room, so that's why we offer an Easy Pin Code feature for in-home use: Activity Log Follow what your users are doing. Just about everything appears in the activity log, from signing in to signing out, playing or pausing content, changing passwords, settings, and more. See What They're Watching, in Real-time The server dashboard also gives you real-time access to monitor what your users are currently watching. Easy Remote Control Need to quickly remote control a user's app? This is easily done with the remote control functions built into the web interface. Stop, pause, rewind, change audio, subtitles, and more with the tap of a finger. The over-sized buttons make them very easy to tap on a smartphone or tablet, which makes it quite fun to flick through the scene selection menu: You can even send directional input just like a real remote: We hope this gives you a little more information on what Emby Users can do. If you still have your whole family on one shared account, try creating user profiles. We think you'll enjoy them

The update for the Android TV and Fire TV apps rolling out now is a biggie. Lots of improvements in design, consistency and features so let's get right to it... New Home Screen The home screen is now much more consistent with the rest of the app and makes it much easier to get to features like search, settings, and switching between users as these are now at the top instead of all the way on the last row. Also, there is a new option in Display Settings called "Enhanced Home Screen". This is actually the old "Show Info Panel" option re-named because it now transforms the home screen into the same interface you've had in the library views - where you can easily see all the details for the selected item without having to navigate into its detail page. Global Favorites Long requested and finally available with this home screen design - a global favorites view for all your favorite items across all your libraries. New Audio Player Design The audio player interface has been totally re-vamped to be just like the new improvements on the other platforms. Bigger, simpler, more elegant. More Filtering in Grid Views The Movie and TV Show grid views now offer much more filtering capability. The quick toggles for favorite and unwatched are still there but you can also bring up a filter dialog with more of the options you are accustomed to in the web app (and more to come in later releases). Notice - you can also select multiple values from each of the filter categories. Edit/Download Subtitles Just sat down to watch something and realize it doesn't have the subs you need? Now edit, search for and download subtitles right from your couch (requires proper setup of Subtitle Downloaders). Other Fixes and Improvements In addition to all those great enhancements, the following items were added or addressed: Add "included In" row on detail screen showing collections, playlists, etc. Improve song display Search for Artists instead of Album Artists in search Update Exoplayer Improve image loading Fix collections limited to certain number of items Implement "play from here" on video grid Implement "add to playlist" for most items Allow letter jump list to scroll Option to show labels or not on all grid views Fix some views not reacting to deleted items Fix a number of possible "black screen on start" issues Implement standard genre grid for music Improve "On Now" row to show more relevant channels Implement ability to edit padding on individual scheduled recordings Fix unable to play item when audio cannot be mixed down locally Implement seeking in audio player Fix chapter OSD display issue Add support for direct play of m4a Add 4K indicator to guide Implement "My Media Small" display Add separate resolution switching option (in addition to frame rate) Fix display of very long album/song names in list view

A new release of Emby Server is currently rolling out. This new release has a lot of important bug fixes, as well as new features. It's also much faster than ever before and we think you're going to enjoy that. Let's go over the highlights. New Levels of Performance This release of Emby Server is faster than you've ever seen it. All areas will be improved including the following: Faster browsing performance in all apps Faster library scans Faster scheduled tasks For those running the Kodi sync plugin, the sync process will be faster as well Faster playback start time IPv6 now Supported on All Operating Systems On Linux, this will require the mono 4.6 run time, which our Linux packages now ship with. This also requires that IPv6 be supported by the host operating system (Unraid for example does not support IPv6). Subtitle Encoding Improvements Several issues have been resolved related to subtitle encoding and display of special characters. Separate Latest Media By Library On the web app home screen, you'll now see separate rows of latest media for each library. On touch devices these rows can be swiped horizontally. This puts more content right at your fingertips. Refreshed Detail Screen It's now more consistent with our other apps, and makes better use of screen real estate. More Live TV Seeking Support Seeking Live TV is now supported in the web app in mobile Edge and Safari for Mac. This now brings the roster of supported browsers to: Chrome Firefox Opera Edge on all Windows 10 devices All other Chromium based browsers (like Vivaldi). Safari on Mac Better Recording Schedule Images The recording schedule screens will now make better use of images, making your DVR more fun than ever before. New Recording Options You now have the option to preserve original video when recording. Recording Post-Processing You now have the ability to run a post-processing application after completing a recording. Redesigned Series Recording Management The same great features, but now they look better than ever before. Xml TV Movie Prefix Support If your xml tv data applies prefixes to your movies, you can now specify this on the xml tv setup screen. This will allow Emby to better handle the prefix in relation to displaying the content and searching for internet metadata. Other Improvements New web app design for movies and tv by genre Update tv guide presentation Automatically adjust scheduled recordings to program changes Reduce resource consumption used by device discovery Remove audio channel count from web app transcoding conditions Improve image & subtitle extraction Update to 3.15.2 Update dlna music views Improve m3u channel name parsing Add guide auto-refresh Display series images on episode detail screen when episodes have no images Improve consistency of web app detail screen with Emby Theater Improve automatic network switching from mobile web app Move book support into Emby core Support resuming audio books Add per-library series pooling setting Shorten episode display numbers Improve Dlna Play To device detection Bug Fixes Resolve vaapi mpeg4 transcoding failure Remove condition preventing video stream copy with Apple TV Resolve display issue on dlna profile screen Resolve music brainz provider issue causing the library scan to get stuck in certain situations

This is a small release that brings a few important improvements. Here are the highlights. Dramatically Reduced Transcoding CPU Usage New "just in time" HLS transcoding will dramatically reduce cpu utilization after the initial client buffering period. You'll now be able to enjoy more simultaneous streams and have more peace of mind about your server's resource consumption. The apps that will benefit from this are the mobile web client, Android, Android TV, Fire TV, Chromecast, Windows 8.1, and iOS (coming soon). Faster Video Start and Seek Response Times You'll notice this in almost every app, with faster, more accurate seeking. Improved Transcoding Image Quality We've cleaned up our HLS streams further by eliminating the first few seconds of artifacts that have been previously visible at the start of the video, as well as after seeking. New Video Player OSD The OSD for the web client video player has been revamped, allowing in-playback access to important information, scene selection, and more. Improved Internet Explorer Playback The web client in IE will now finally enjoy the full feature set that users have been accustomed to with other browsers. That means the new OSD, improved seeking, and more. New Slide Down Menus The web client also has new slide down menus will give you quick access to the most important features without having to navigate and switch context. Mac Server Improvements Mac users can now finally restart the server using the web interface. Others Server crash when probing certain kinds of audio files Support VIDEO_TS.nfo Fixed DLNA resume with Panasonic and Samsung TV's

Give me my playlists! With this new release we've added the ability to create playlists in the web client, but it also brings some other improvements and fixes. Here's the rundown: Create playlists in the web client Improved DLNA compatibility and image support Increased server localization Chrome will now direct stream compatible mkv's New People metadata settings New channel downloading settings New folder view setting New local password setting There are also some new features for developers: TTML subtitle output VTT segmentation within m3u8 playlists And a few important fixes: Fixed open subtitle password issue (Windows users will need to reconfigure their passwords) Fixed auto-organize not running on a schedule Live TV recording paths not updating Playlists The highlight of this release is the ability to create playlists from the web client. In the coming weeks you'll see this feature rolled out to all of our clients. How do you create a playlist? Easy! Right click any song, album, artist, genre, movie, tv series, season or episode: Mobile users can also accomplish this via the tap-hold menus. Then you'll see a nifty slideout menu: Once added, you'll have a new Playlists section on your home page. You'll then see your list of playlists. Click into any playlist to manage or play it: But that's not the only way you can do it. Detail pages now have a more button containing this as well as the Edit function: And it can also be done in bulk using the selection tool: Expect the playlist feature to evolve significantly in upcoming releases. Be sure to leave feedback and be a part of the process. DLNA Improvements Persistence pays off, and thanks to the efforts of a few community members our DLNA device support has improved significantly with this release. Even devices that were already functioning should see improved image support. Users with custom profiles will need to rebuild them using the new system profiles as a base. DLNA also has a couple new features - Live TV support, as well as a new device profile setting to control music transcoding bitrate. People Metadata Do your actor biographies take a long time to download? We feel your pain. Now you can limit this with new fine tuning controls. New Channel Settings Now you can easily control the size of your downloaded channel content. New Folder View Setting Now there is an option to display a plain folder view as part of your customizable user views. If enabled this will show up in any client that supports user views, including the web client, DLNA, MBT, and soon Roku. Local Password Setting Now you can configure easy login ability when users are inside your home network. Join the Team As always we're recruiting and looking for new developers to step up and join us. Our focus is starting to turn to the Android platform. If you have Android or Java experience, there are multiple projects available so please drop us a line.

We are happy to announce that Media Browser for iPad has been approved in the Apple App Store. Appstore Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/media-browser-client/id879475585?ls=1&mt=8 We know this has been a long time coming and we are glad the community has been so patient with us while we worked on it. There is still a lot of work to come. We plan to make this a universal app so that you can also use it on the iPhone. We also have a slew of features that we plan to implement in the coming months. If you have any suggestions for features please add them to our user voice site: https://mbios.uservoice.com/. Existing iPhone app Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/media-browser-for-ios/id705058087?ls=1&mt=8 Don't forget to leave a review!

We are very excited to introduce you to the new iPad app that we have been working on for the last few months. We wanted to create an app that goes beyond just basic functionality and also has a great user experience. The central theme that we focused on for this application was speed, speed, speed. Media Caching All media information is cached using a combination of both disk and memory caches. On startup we prime our memory caches with our disk cached media list information for a given server. This allows lightening fast loading of our media lists across tabs. Scrolling This makes or breaks the app; we have users with 1000s of movies and scrolling through them should be lighting fast. Jaggedness or choppiness will kill the user experience. Besides caching the media list we also aggressively cache all images into memory mapped files for the fastest retrieval was can possibly achieve. This results in a silky smooth scrolling experience. Navigation This is a subtle thing that can make for awful experience: opening a page and being stuck at a spinner. When you navigate between pages in our app we try avoid blocking the user. If data is required for a given view we try really hard to show what data we have available and then load the additional data in the background. Search and Sort The client has all the metadata that are required to sort or filter you list so we eliminate the need to make server calls and perform them locally. This results in almost instantaneous searching and sorting. Usability (UI/UX): Raw performance isn't the only way to create a faster experience. We worked with our designer, developers and testers to find ways we can make typical actions with the app fast. Here are some examples: Shallow Navigation: We want you to get to you media with minimum number of taps. To do this we designed a new "detail" screen for TV Shows. The user used to have to tap on tv shows > series > seasons > episodes > episodes detail before he can play his media. This can become tedious if you have to do it often. So we created a solution where you go from TV Shows > Detail page and everything that you need to access your TV Shows is designed into a single page. Perspective Design: We also wanted the main pages to be in focus all the time -- we have found excessive navigation can become tiring for a user. Example: You are checking out the movie Star Trek into the Darkness and you wanted to read about Chris Pine and check out what other movies he is in. We don't want to show a detail page, a cast page, related movie page. We wanted to keep you in the movie detail page while you access all the information that you are looking for. Trailers: Chapters: Same design applies to remote as well, the idea is to keep the key item in perspective. Home page is both stylish and functional. Just take a look. (Oh man, simulator and gif don't do just to home design) Solid Core Features: We know that Media Browser is a very feature rich server. We had to make a decision to either launch sooner or delay launching so we could continue to build out this long tail of features. We have decided to focus on a core set of features we think will be most used and do them as well as we can. We will re-evaluate this set of features after the app has been released for awhile and we collect feedback from our users. Some of the features that won't make it into our release: music playback, ebooks, internationalization, etc. We are very excited about this app and I hope you feel the same way when you get to try this app. We are targeting end of next week (before 5/10/2014) for the App Store submission and it will be available in all countries once we get through the approval process. Our Team: Simucal - Developer Darwindeeds - Developer ErgoProxy - Design Ninja I also wanted to give a special shout out to our beta testers sfnetwork, cheesegeezer, spaceboy and im85288. They have really helped us iron out a lot of bugs and design issues in our beta.

Highlights: Updated web interface design More metadata fine tuning Out of the box studio & genre images Updated Web Client & Dashboard Design The web interface has embraced flat UI. Large rounded elements have been replaced in favor of a new smaller, sharper design. New Mobile & Tablet Layouts You'll find it much easier to navigate now. Redesigned Search The new slide out panel removes clutter from the header and is mobile & tablet friendly. Out of the Box Genre & Studio thumbs Now everyone can enjoy the artwork without having to hunt down images. These can always be replaced and will not replace your existing images. New Design for Watched & Progress Indicators We've created a new design for these. Our intention is to standardize them amongst all of our clients in upcoming releases. More Metadata Fine Tuning Customize settings for different types of media More Control Over Language Settings Specify preferred metadata language on a per-title basis New Parental Control Settings You now have more control over blocking of unrated content. Collections vs Box Sets Going forward we will now be utilizing industry standard terminology. The term "collections" will be interchangeable with "boxsets". We will now use "Media Folders" to denote what were previously called "Media Collections". Other issues that have been fixed: thumbs are now saved as landscape.ext when using compatible image saving Fixed duplicated day titles in upcoming tv view Added genre splitting by comma for metadata embedded within video files Fixed issues renaming and removing media folders with # in the name

A new server beta has been released. This is primarily a bug fix release, but does bring some new features. Among the new features are: Support for episodes directly in series folders Added movie/series management filters Added natural numeric sorting capabilities Added server-side series display settings Exposed new fields in episode editor Important Note: This release will trigger a re-scan of your library, and it will update almost every plugin. So please be patient. The release will also regenerate chapter images the next time the chapter image scheduled task is run. Our chapter image extraction has been significantly improved and will result in much better images. Movie/Series Management filters Series Level Display Settings New Episode Fields in Editor

Today I'm pleased to announce that the MediaBrowser client for Android has been released to the Google Play store. The app is available for all devices running Android OS 4.0 (ICS) or newer. Application Features: Browse your entire MediaBrowser library Stream Music, movies and TV from your library Remote play to other MediaBrowser clients Open Books (Requires MB Bookshelf server plugin and document readers installed)

This is a small maintenance release that adds a few new features and lays the groundwork for some bigger and better things to come. New Cinema Mode Feature Many of you are familiar with Ebr's Intros plugin, which allows you to play trailers and custom intros before movies. This is a great plugin but we've decided to implement a small subset of the features as a core server feature. With cinema mode you can choose to play trailers before movies or episodes, as well as your own custom intro video files. It's very simple and easy to configure. Note that playback of trailers within cinema mode requires installation of the Trailer channel plugin. The following apps support cinema mode: Media Browser Classic Media Browser Theater Roku XBMB3C Web Client (Desktop only) Windows 8.1 Others soon to follow After setting it up, it will be enabled for all users by default. But we realize not all of your users are going to want cinema mode. Users can disable it on an individual basis within their own user preferences: Note for Intro Users: The intro plugin will completely replace the server's cinema mode feature, as it has the same feature set along with some additional advanced options. Trailers within recommendations Now you'll see trailers blended into your movie recommendation lists. It's a great way to open yourself up to new content you may not normally be exposed to. But we realize some users may not want this, so it is easily disabled in user preferences. Support for reading watched states from Nfo's We now support reading your watched state from Nfo's. This makes Nfo metadata a great way to backup play state for a single user. You'll need to make sure to select which user to apply this to: Support VLC as an external player in the web client This is available if you're running the web client on iOS or Android. It's very easy. Simpy enable it in your web client preferences. Then when you play, you'll see an option to play with an external player: Then select the external player you want: Then launch the player with VLC. Please note this will come with some limitations, such as not being able to report progress to the server. But fear not, you can still keep track of your progress by manually indicating where you've stopped: Linux Server downloads now on the website The website now has instructions for Linux: http://mediabrowser.tv/download The instructions come in two flavors - manual install and Docker install. An Ubuntu package is a third option that is coming soon. Check back for that later this week. OSX Server downloads now on the website The website now has instructions for installing the server on OSX: http://mediabrowser.tv/download Join the Media Browser Developer Team As you know we have a lot of exciting things going on here and we're looking for new developers who would like to be a part of it. We've got all sorts of secret projects being worked on and new ones in the pipeline. Whatever your skill set is, we can find a place for you. If you're experienced with Html5, JavaScript, C#, iOS, or Android, we really want you. Looking for other contributors - User Experience and Tech Writers Continuing with the above, we are looking for professional tech writers or user experience designers who might be willing to donate some occasional free time to the project. We promise it will be fun, and everybody wins when we can find new ways to make Media Browser easier to use.

The wait is over, the new version of Media Browser for Windows 8.1 is here. http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/media-browser/ad55a2f0-9897-47bd-8944-bed3aefd5d06 Even though the app has a lot of cosmetic improvements such as rotating backdrops, more artwork used etc etc, the biggest changes are under the hood. Playback is vastly improved and performance is even better. Here's a list of the biggest changes Playback Support for HLS streams, providing a more reliable transcoding solution with less playback errors. Support for external subtitles without transcoding New player look and feel Features Channels are now supported. Just enable some channels on the server and enjoy them on your windows 8.1 device. Playlists are now supported, just go into the music hub and you'll find them. Multiple backdrops. The app now use all the backdrops that you have for your items and fades nicely between them Fewer buttons, the resume button is gone and replaced with a flyout. Just hit play, if the playable item can resume the options will be shown The change user option has moved up to the top left corner of the main screen Languages Two more languages have been added, Spanish and Kazakh

The Infrastructure Release That's probably the best way to describe this as it brings a lot of improvements to existing features. Let's jump right into the highlights: New text subtitle delivery system New metadata refresh options DLNA Improvements New Channels New Channel Improvements Unified web interface New Text Subtitle Delivery System The server now has the ability to deliver text subtitles directly to the client, thereby eliminating the need to "burn them in" on the fly. What does this mean? It means that the server will no longer be forced to transcode on account of subtitles (though it may still for other reasons). It also means that clients have the ability to customize the appearance of the text. Notice in the screen below, this is how the Chrome browser chooses to render them, but in the future, we can offer customization around this. Ask the developer of your favorite client to support this new delivery system. It is currently used by the web client, and is coming soon to Roku. New Metadata Refresh Options When you refresh metadata using the web interface, you now have the ability to replace all images as well. The "Identify" feature will do this automatically. DLNA Improvements User audio language preferences now respected User subtitle language preferences now respected Seek is supported via remote control Changing audio/subtitle tracks on fly is now supported via remote control Numerous DLNA server improvements - more devices should be supported now Playing a music album or folder should now function correctly New Channels Thanks to Snazy2000's continued efforts, the list of available channels is growing rapidly. New Channel Improvements Now you're able to see your latest channel items just like any other content. Some channels also support downloading content ahead of time for smoother viewing: Unified Web Interface The web interface now has the same look wherever you are and should be easier to navigate and learn, no matter how you use it. Also there is a new "Media Folders" configuration option for the web client. While the interface is designed around views that you customize, we understand many will prefer plain folder navigation. We've also listened to your feedback and brought back the Suggested section in the tv area. Now you can view suggestions on both the home page, and within the tv section. Join the Team If you have any experience in the following technologies, now's your chance to step up and be a part of all the fun that's going on. Javascript / HTML5 Java Python C# / .NET Framework Mono

This has been a longer than usual development cycle and as a result we've got some great things to introduce. Let's get right to the release highlights: New Internet Channels Infrastructure Improved DLNA Support Improved Server Localization Live TV H264 Optimizations Subtitle downloading via OpenSubtitles.org Newly designed web client home page Design and customize your web client Expanded user audio/subtitle language preferences Improved remote control in the web client New Internet Channels We're happy to announce new infrastructure we've built to allow for browsing and playback of internet content from your favorite Media Browser apps. Right off the bat we're releasing four channels, but look for more soon. The channels are available as plugins in the plugin catalog you've come to enjoy. Big thanks to Snazy2000 and TimHobbs for their contributions to channel development. We are looking for new contributors who may have interest in helping us add more channels. For now, trailers will also be available as a library folder in order to give the developers a little time to catch up. Within another release or two, it will strictly be a channel. Improved DLNA Support Thanks to community efforts we've added support for some additional devices, as well as improved our default profiles to help increase compatibility. Live TV H264 Optimizations (ServerWMC Only) For those of you who have H264 tv programs, you'll soon see improved server cpu utilization during playback, depending on the device being used. Subtitle downloading from OpenSubtitles.org In the metadata area you'll notice new settings related to subtitle downloading. With a supplied OpenSubtitles account, you can now enjoy automated subtitle downloading as items are scanned into the library. There's even a management page in the metadata editor that allows you to see what subtitles you have, download new ones, delete, and more. Newly designed web client home page It's no longer just a portal but is now much smarter - smarter about putting the content you want to consume right in front of you. But if there's something about it you don't like, now you have the ability to personalize it to your own tastes. Expanded user language settings Each user now has additional options they can utilize to customize their audio and subtitle language preferences. You'll also see greater consistency in getting these settings applied across your devices. Expanded remote controls Remote controls in the web client now include a number of exciting new features. Select your audio stream: Select your subtitles: Even scroll through the scene selection menu with the swipe of a finger: Summer of Code We're looking for new people to join the development team! It doesn't matter what your skillset is, we can find a place for you. There's all kinds of projects available from new channel development, new app development, and many more.

We decided it was time to update the face we present to the world, so we've spruced up our website a bit. We needed to do more to show off what we can do with this incredible set of applications, and let people know what a fantastic community of users and developers we have here. Hey if you've got it, you might as well flaunt it, right? It is a work in progress with improvements and additions still to come, so stay tuned! So, without further ado... http://mediabrowser.tv