Very, very low trailer quality

[rbjtech 5284]

Is Trailers an advertised part of emby premiere ?

Emby Premiere - Emby

Do Trailers work on the free tier ?

[AllesMeins 27]

52 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Is Trailers an advertised part of emby premiere ?

Yes

53 minutes ago, rbjtech said:

Do Trailers work on the free tier ?

No

At least not the part where you get trailers delivered to you without having to curate them yourself.

[hoopsdavis 27]

44 minutes ago, AllesMeins said:

Yes

No

At least not the part where you get trailers delivered to you without having to curate them yourself.

Trailers are part of the Cinema Intro which comes with Emby Premiere.  This is why I have an issue with the low level trailers (We're paying for) within the emby Premiere (Paid) features.
From my point of view it doesn't appear there is any action on addressing or improving this paid feature which was a higher quality about a year ago.   
As I've mentioned in the past, Emby should drop the price on Premiere until trailers are improved.   For many of us Cinema Intros is one of the primary reasons we're paying the Premiere fees monthly or yearly.    Come on guys, do one or the other, address and improve it or drop your Premiere price

Cinema Intros gives you the true cinema experience with trailers and custom intros before the feature
https://emby.media/premiere.html

As I've mentioned before, we appreciate the platform, we understand most of your time on the platform is volunteered and we appreciate that but please address the trailer issue.

[rbjtech 5284]

@AllesMeins @hoopsdavisThanks - as part of Cinema Intro makes sense.

Luckily I aquire my own Trailers so never really seen an issue with this but 480p trailers on a 4K screen must be painful to watch ... 

You'd think studios would want people to see the trailers .. but I guess it's the cost of hosting and the bandwidth plus a lot of sponsorship deals I guess .. all about the money .. 

[podonnell 47]

Started making my own thread about this but then found this via search.

This thread is about a year old but it appears this hasn't been improved? I just started my Premiere trial and found this 'feature' to be incredibly lacking from what would be considered 'premium' to me. I have only had a few trailers play, and they were unacceptably low quality to the point that I have just disabled this plugin.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, yes ultimately this will be switched to YouTube, so tuned.

[hoopsdavis 27]

5 hours ago, Luke said:

Hi, yes ultimately this will be switched to YouTube, so tuned.

This would be great to have adressed and resolved.

[Happy2Play 9780]

All depends on it forced ads come with YouTube requirements.

[yocker 1247]

4 minutes ago, Happy2Play said:

All depends on it forced ads come with YouTube requirements.

Sadly 30+ minutes of unskippable ads is part of the cinema experience as well.

[rbjtech 5284]

Not for trailers surely ?  The ad will be longer than the trailer !  ...

[pwhodges 2012]

1 hour ago, rbjtech said:

Not for trailers surely ?  The ad will be longer than the trailer !  ...

You think YouTube cares?

Paul

[Luke 42077]

9 hours ago, rbjtech said:

Not for trailers surely ?  The ad will be longer than the trailer !  ...

If the youtube sdk allows configuring credentials to utilize youtube premium without ads, then we can look at incorporating that.

Additionally if you find a better source of trailers we're happy to look at it.

[yocker 1247]

52 minutes ago, Luke said:

If the youtube sdk allows configuring credentials to utilize youtube premium without ads, then we can look at incorporating that.

Additionally if you find a better source of trailers we're happy to look at it.

Apple Trailers are in high quality and with no ads but i have no idea if Apple will allow them to be imported into apps like Emby.

[ebr 16169]

10 hours ago, yocker said:

Apple Trailers are in high quality and with no ads but i have no idea if Apple will allow them to be imported into apps like Emby.

That went offline a couple of years ago.

[yocker 1247]

31 minutes ago, ebr said:

That went offline a couple of years ago.

https://tv.apple.com/us/room/edt.item.64248313-7414-4d63-a6fc-7c29f9916c79

I admit it's called Apple TV now but same thing really. Question might be if they will allow you guys access, knowing Apple they most likely want big $$$ for something they hand out for free normally and is basically just ads.

Isn't it possible to lock Youtube into a specific quality? I know many browser extension can do this, not possible for you guys due to API usage or something?
 

Edited August 24, 2024 by yocker

[visproduction 315]

Yocker,

The Apple collection is current and high quality.  They embed the videos with a blob / sequential .m4s similar to .ts clips, each a few seconds long.  I would not expect a download or embed option, because the trailers are licensed by Apple from other studios, so Apple would not normally have any rights to reissue the trailers to anyone.  They don't belong to Apple.

I mentioned before that any company can apply to individual studios to download trailers for reuse.  I would expect this license is probably free from all the studios.  But that is not the only part of the solution.  Studios offer downloads.  That's it.   It's less likely that the original studios will have any playback server setup to offer HD embed playback.  Why would they?  That would be considerably expensive to offer and maintain. 

For example: A single large studio to offer embedded video playback from a server that works nationally or internationally would need to have an account with a distributor like Akamai and much of a film library trailers be added to the distributed network for embed playback.  For a studio with 2000 films, a monthly distribution fee might run, perhaps $2000 and that has nothing to do with setting the server to make the source website work, which might need a dev hour annual estimate of something like $25,000 or so. This is for one studio with 2000 films.  As far as I know, no studio does this for trailers, obviously because of this cost.  They do tend to do it on a membership sites for paid playback for the entire movie and then offer the trailer on that site for free. 

Youtube does trailers, but restricts embed to their rules, which has lowered playback quality, in the last few years. 

What studios do offer, is trailer download rights by license, for a company to remarket the trailers on their website.  The studios give you some playback guidelines to suggest links and info to promote their content.  They obviously like the trailers to link back to buy tickets or copies of the movie.

Well, if Emby gets these trailer download permissions, which should be possible, for each studio (aorund 250 sources), the problem then becomes how to distribute the content.  I have never heard about a central Emby video playback server.  Emby would run into the same expense the studio has, if they wanted to distribute nationally or internationally say 10,000 trailers.  With Akamai, I would guess international fees would be maybe $15,000 to $35,000 a year, depending on traffic.  Plus Emby would need to support this service with dev hours... another $10,000 year budget.  Obviously, getting an Akamai account is too expensive, just for trailers.

So, let's think no national / international distribution network, just through one or a few load balanced servers for Emby users.  It's really a separate service that should have it's own domain and name, so any legal questions don't involve Emby. So, now running a separate business, website server for downloading trailers to allow embedded playback inside Emby members servers, we are still looking at hardware, bandwidth, dev time, maybe $50,000 to start and $15,000 a year would be low ball in the US plus the cost of starting a new business.  Remember this is still only for trailers.

Paying someone else, who already has a business. Doing this looks now, like a better deal.  We are back to the $1500 a month subscription to a company like Fabric.  With that, you still need to troubleshoot, update and fix bugs, so dev time might cost an extra $2000 a year, if you are lucky, bringing the total annual here to just under $20,000, again, just for trailers.

I worked on the code for these types of distribution services at Akamai, years ago.   Akamai is pricey. Other companies offer better deals.  I think maybe the idea of clicking a button to get something, that seems already free online, doesn't sound like it should cost too much.  I thought I would give a few quick estimates, to show the work and cost of getting trailers to be better.  It's sort of easier said, than done.

Edited August 24, 2024 by visproduction

[AllesMeins 27]

@visproduction thank you for your thorough calculations. However I think your overestimating some numbers here. What Emby sells is a "Cinematic experience" with curated trailers for upcoming movies - somewhat tuned to the genre of the film your about to watch. So I don't think there is a need to offer 20.000 trailers a year. A low four digit number should be easily enough for enough variety. Real theaters have around a hundred trailers on rotation in a year.

Secondly: this is a paid service for Emby premiere members. I admit I've no idea how many subscribers there are, but I would be very surprised if they got anywhere near the numbers where you'd need the services of Akamai or something similar. And we're not talking about constant streaming, we're taking about serving a handful of trailers before a user watches a movie. This should be something you can handle with one ir maybe a few properly connected servers somewhere in a server farm. And renting those isn't that expensive nowadays. Or to put it the other way around: if the demand were to be in "Akamai-territory" Emby should also pull in some serious money from subscription fees.

And thirdly: since they also control the client they could even incorporate their own load balancing by letting the clients download and cache some trailers in advance, so they have something to show if the server load were to high.

Edited August 24, 2024 by AllesMeins

[pwhodges 2012]

3 hours ago, AllesMeins said:

Secondly: this is a paid service for Emby premiere members.

Not as a separate item, though; it is one small part of what Premiere covers, and I suspect that many (like me) have no interest in it whatsoever.

Paul

[AllesMeins 27]

1 hour ago, pwhodges said:

Not as a separate item, though; it is one small part of what Premiere covers, and I suspect that many (like me) have no interest in it whatsoever.

Paul

So? There are probably quite a few members that don't care about the part that got you to subscribe. And you probably would be annoyed as well, if that part suddenly stopped working. And rightfully so...  (Especially if emby would continue to advertise this defunct part to new members)

Edited August 24, 2024 by AllesMeins

[Happy2Play 9780]

The issue is not that is does not work.  The issue it the quality the source provider is offering.  So until a new source is implemented this will be a quality issue not a functionality issue.

But on those small screens one could say what issue.

[yocker 1247]

9 hours ago, visproduction said:

I worked on the code for these types of distribution services at Akamai, years ago.   Akamai is pricey. Other companies offer better deals.  I think maybe the idea of clicking a button to get something, that seems already free online, doesn't sound like it should cost too much.  I thought I would give a few quick estimates, to show the work and cost of getting trailers to be better.  It's sort of easier said, than done.

Yeah sounds like it all complicated as all hell.
Just still somehow can't get out of my mind how something that's basically ads can't just be freely distributed to a wider audience, they are meant to "hit" as many people as possible anyway.
 

Good post, thank you.

[Happy2Play 9780]

Sure but hosting them for that wider audience cost money so here we are with relatively no options or no sources that would like to share legally.  As there are many site where you can go and watch all you want.

[hoopsdavis 27]

Do we have any updates on the trailer (terrible) quality issue?
Considering moving to a different media option until trailers are watchable.   I can no longer pay for Premiere under the circumstances.

[Luke 42077]

1 hour ago, hoopsdavis said:

Do we have any updates on the trailer (terrible) quality issue?
Considering moving to a different media option until trailers are watchable.   I can no longer pay for Premiere under the circumstances.

Hi, yes. The plan will be to switch to YouTube, so stay tuned.

[hoopsdavis 27]

On 9/4/2024 at 11:43 PM, Luke said:

Hi, yes. The plan will be to switch to YouTube, so stay tuned.

OK, that sounds great.   Please, what's the ETA?
This has been going on for a year, we only get feedback when asking the same question, my Premiere cost hasn't decreased nor have I been offered a partial refund for the year of paying for a service that isn't functioning fully.    Please provide an ETA, a year has been too long.   We've been patient and continued to support your product and as I said before we appreciate the product and your time BUT, your paid service has been sub-par for over a year and it seems the issue has been swept under the carpet.   Resoving the issue of a paid service whould have been a priority and never been an issue for as long as its been, with no updates unless we (the consumer) ask.