Understanding how Emby Licensing works Offline

[TMCsw 249]

On 5/31/2024 at 5:05 PM, ebr said:

You mean make it super easy to defeat?

for me, I agree that emby shouldn't spend a lot of time on this.
But how about an offline mode: where any previously authorized server/client can work for just one(1) or two LAN stream for as long as the premier license was validated, say 21 days ago?

One should be enough!
   

[ebr 16169]

On 6/1/2024 at 9:11 AM, Dreakon13 said:

Only vaguely related but wanted to drop my thoughts here...

I wish hardware transcoding weren't a Premiere feature.  Love Emby, don't mind paying to support the cause, debating buying more lifetime keys for the hell of it.  But hardware transcoding is such a key feature for regular use with widely variable device compatibilities and potential bandwidth limits/connectivity issues... especially considering the hardware is just sitting there next to it waiting to be used, doesn't otherwise require external connections, having it locked behind a (mostly) persistent internet connection/paywall hurts a little bit.  It's the one feature that, in my eyes, takes it from a truly personal media server to that machine that needs to be connected to Emby's servers most of the time.

It's probably the main reason people pay up so I can't imagine it would ever change but if I had one wish. 

It is also one of the most complicated items to develop and support.

Why do you feel that should be free?

[Q-Droid 989]

I'm coming back to this after some time spent scribbling, playing around with options and a few sleep cycles. Bottom line, and I will concede to @ebr that a solution would take work not only to implement but also additional overhead going forward. Time spent on this would take away from work needed in core and mainstream areas of the project. And even then there are holes left in my limited exercise. The ROI is too low.

I will let this sleeping dog lie but will go back to my notes now and then to see if I can work out something new, for my own amusement.

 

[Dreakon13 143]

On 6/2/2024 at 10:05 AM, ebr said:

It is also one of the most complicated items to develop and support.

Why do you feel that should be free?

It's less about making it free, and more about making it not subject to the Premiere license/key validation checks.  Taking it out of Premiere was just a cheeky way to accomplish that lol.  I'm a paid Emby user, I like paying for things that work well and that I use a lot.  I don't like potentially losing key usability features that I paid for because of arbitrary internet checks (for me; you don't know me from Adam but I'lll just say I don't think I'm the kind of user/admin you're aiming to lock out).

I understand why the checks exist and it's been discussed to death here.  Hence the part of my post where I said I didn't expect it to happen.  But if I had one wish.

Edited June 9, 2024 by Dreakon13

[TMCsw 249]

11 hours ago, Dreakon13 said:

It's less about making it free, and more about making it not subject to the Premiere license/key validation checks. 

oxymoron  

[Dreakon13 143]

14 hours ago, TMCsw said:

oxymoron  

Kinda, yeah.  Though if I buy a toothbrush, I can use it without additional internet checks but that doesn't mean it was free.

It's all about subverting piracy and malicious use and I get it, and the idea of unlocking a feature with a valid (paid) Premiere key but not requiring persistent checks wouldn't work for that reason... but ebr pretending like even the thought of offline use of something I bought is just an attempt to get it for free, is a disheartening and frankly ignorant stance to take.  I'm not the bad guy here.

Edited June 10, 2024 by Dreakon13

[visproduction 315]

Related:
3rd party service handling licensing which includes offline access for product owner, not user.  https://licensespring.com/pricing/

Edited June 10, 2024 by visproduction

[bakes82 167]

Why not just go use Jellyfin it’s free and no device licensing?

 

@visproductionyou going to pay for your recommended service?  You think that 1x payment you made can cover the number of api calls they would need to make, or you going to start paying monthly. I’m sure they would love to have everyone pay monthly.

 

@Dreakon13Im sure your only using emby for your legally ripped dvds…  Emby is fairly well known for allowing the hosting of pirated media why they will have issues if more people report them on the app stores and they get black listed.  Why you think they trying to limit devices. Because of the share selling that goes on with emby and since they can’t track it like plex does their product goes bye bye if mpaa or any org really took action to block their apps. 

[TMCsw 249]

1 hour ago, visproduction said:

Related:

Too what?

[TMCsw 249]

7 hours ago, Dreakon13 said:

Kinda, yeah.  Though if I buy a toothbrush, I can use it without additional internet checks but that doesn't mean it was free.

Okay your toothbrush is a STATIC product and you can use it anyway you please even if you sharpen it into a shive, unless you stab some-one with it, it's perfectly legal (the manufacturer/seller is only responsible for defects by local laws).

You don't buy software, you pay for a license to use it (or agree to the terms to use it for free)  and it keeps changing.

What do you give away for free?

[ebr 16169]

20 hours ago, Dreakon13 said:

but ebr pretending like even the thought of offline use of something I bought is just an attempt to get it for free, is a disheartening

Hi.  I was going by this statement you made.  I apologize if I mis-interpreted it but the features that are not Premiere, are free.

Quote

I wish hardware transcoding weren't a Premiere feature.

 

[visproduction 315]

On 5/31/2024 at 12:14 AM, Mikoyan said:

Had the local internet go down which was annoying, but then I noticed that I could not stream from a few of my devices from my local emby instance due to "not having premiere", which was tenfold more annoying. It is my understanding that there is a period where the license is cached (for at least 3 weeks? Unclear on this part) and devices should not require additional subscriptions or etc. to use Emby from devices so long as it conforms  to the device limit. However, certain devices such as my iPad refused to stream from the server despite only losing internet a few hours prior due to no subscription.

My earlier related comment was not aimed at any Emby user.  It's a solution for adding a possible offline sign-in feature built in to Emby.

The original question, quoted above, regards not being able to authenticate a license offline.  My comment above, was to show a 3rd party product that offers the service to the software creator, Emby in this case. This company in Canada claims they would solve licensing valid for offline and still keep online licensing working for their software clients.  This is for the product creator, not for we users that have a server running.  The fact that this feature is so complex that a separate company is making a business out of offering this feature should point out there is some complexity and considerable expense for Emby to code and support it themselves.  

In my opinion, the percent of people asking for this feature, probably doesn't justify a dev and support expense budget of perhaps $80K for the initial development and maybe $15K support costs, annually, to make sure it keeps working and update it, as needed.  If this estimate is close, then obviously the 3rd party subscription with this company would start less expensive, but Emby would still spend dev and support time on this offline feature.  Exactly how many people are asking for it? Are there 10 users total?  I don't know.  Is it worth $10K per user to offer this feature?

I get the feeling that perhaps people, who enjoy the software, may not be aware that to add such a feature is not just switching some code "off" to "on".  It is sort of easy to ask, "How hard can it be?".  I just wanted to point out that this feature is probably really tricky and sort of expensive to create.

Hope that makes some sense.

[bakes82 167]

11 hours ago, visproduction said:

"How hard can it be?".  I just wanted to point out that this feature is probably really tricky and sort of expensive to create.

Just because there is a service doesn’t mean it’s hard or tricky to implement.  There are restaurants and serve crappy burgers.  There are also Michelin starred restaurants that serve burgers. It’s 2024 no reason to have offline license, they already support the ability to download media to a device and that works offline. If your internet goes out seems a bit silly of an excuse that you then wanted to use a device that you haven’t used in days, and even then most people have cell service that could hotspot for the license activation.  They could also easily implement what plex does and allow local access w/out authorization and disable the premium features, seems like the more logical choice to me than worry about offline client mode.

[ebr 16169]

13 hours ago, bakes82 said:

They could also easily implement what plex does and allow local access w/out authorization and disable the premium features

That is exactly how we already work.  Only Premiere features are impacted by this situation.

[bakes82 167]

16 minutes ago, ebr said:

That is exactly how we already work.  Only Premiere features are impacted by this situation.

So are you saying that OP wouldn’t have any issues if he put his lan ip in a certain field?  I’m not sure sure how this works in emby but in plex there is a field to allow this.  So if anything it sounds like you should reply with to enable lan access w/out with you do xyz.  Otherwise if you’re saying it’s on by default then why wouldn’t his iPad work if it was on the same lan as the server.

[ebr 16169]

3 minutes ago, bakes82 said:

So are you saying that OP wouldn’t have any issues if he put his lan ip in a certain field?  I’m not sure sure how this works in emby but in plex there is a field to allow this.  So if anything it sounds like you should reply with to enable lan access w/out with you do xyz.  Otherwise if you’re saying it’s on by default then why wouldn’t his iPad work if it was on the same lan as the server.

No, local vs remote doesn't matter for Premiere features.  Any features/apps that don't require Premiere will function just fine offline.  The OP was trying to use an app/feature that requires Premiere.

[bakes82 167]

1 minute ago, ebr said:

No, local vs remote doesn't matter for Premiere features.  Any features/apps that don't require Premiere will function just fine offline.  The OP was trying to use an app/feature that requires Premiere.

So you’re saying because it’s iOS it’s premier thus will always have issues. This is where plex doesn’t have the issue if the client is on the same network you can use the server w/out creds bypassing the plex auth servers, most people won’t enable it since it’s in advanced settings and you’d need to know your ip/cidr.

[ebr 16169]

10 minutes ago, bakes82 said:

So you’re saying because it’s iOS it’s premier thus will always have issues. This is where plex doesn’t have the issue if the client is on the same network you can use the server w/out creds bypassing the plex auth servers, most people won’t enable it since it’s in advanced settings and you’d need to know your ip/cidr.

That effectively makes everything on your local network free...  I'm afraid we couldn't survive that way - even without the potential spoofing.

The other guys are generating revenue in much different ways than we are.

[bakes82 167]

7 minutes ago, ebr said:

That effectively makes everything on your local network free...  I'm afraid we couldn't survive that way - even without the potential spoofing.

The other guys are generating revenue in much different ways than we are.

Sure.  I was just confirming that is the issue. You could also just charge everyone for devices, that’s what plex does for the “mobile” devices iirc unless you have their premium plex pass thing, then the device unlock is handled on the device side iirc on how that works since it’s handled thru the devices store APIs and what not id imagine.

[ebr 16169]

7 minutes ago, bakes82 said:

then the device unlock is handled on the device side

Our unlocks already work that way too.

[Mikoyan 15]

Oh. It would seem this topic has garnered a much larger amount of interest than I had imagined.

Never said it would be easy or pain-free to implement offline procedure that would also keep the payment model intact. I just thought the overall experience using Emby when the internet went offline was very poor and not at all intuitive. The fact I was led to ask the question here makes that pretty clear I think.

I would just like some detailed explanation and documentation as to what is needed to use Emby in the event of outage, as well as what makes a device usable/unusable, time limits, etc. I think that is the bare minimum that could be done for this if the developers want to spend their time elsewhere (like my other open issue maybe? )

[visproduction 315]

On 6/12/2024 at 7:49 AM, ebr said:

...  Any features/apps that don't require Premiere will function just fine offline.  The OP was trying to use an app/feature that requires Premiere.

Miko,

Apparently your site works without the premiere features, when you are offline with no license confirmation is possible.  Playback from stored media, I believe will work.  What limitation exactly are you missing when you say?
 

"...using Emby when the internet went offline was very poor and not at all intuitive."

Do you mean TV listings or recording options?  What Emby feature would you prefer to continue to work?

[imoutuomi 0]

Hi I came here researching whether I should go Premiere or not.

I have no real issues with the servers going down once in a while although it goes against my thinking that I would need to have foreseen this issue and used the client I want to use before mine or YOUR outage. Many of us run Emby to be able to run all things locally when we need to, sure it might not be the product for it.

However when running the whole infrastructure locally my main worry with signing up for lifetime would be that the service gets abandoned or that the company goes bankrupt or the key developers lose interest and it slowly dies because of that. What are our guarantees that we will be able to continue using the software as is if/when the above happens?

On 12/06/2024 at 16:49, ebr said:

No, local vs remote doesn't matter for Premiere features.  Any features/apps that don't require Premiere will function just fine offline.  The OP was trying to use an app/feature that requires Premiere.

 

[Happy2Play 9780]

24 minutes ago, imoutuomi said:

my main worry with signing up for lifetime would be that the service gets abandoned or that the company goes bankrupt or the key developers lose interest and it slowly dies because of that.

That same question has been asked for over 10yrs now.  Don't see it ending anytime soon.

Does any software product guarantee you anything?

[ebr 16169]

On 6/28/2024 at 1:00 PM, imoutuomi said:

I have no real issues with the servers going down once in a while although it goes against my thinking that I would need to have foreseen this issue and used the client I want to use before mine or YOUR outage.

Hi.  All of the discussion in this thread has been related to an individual's internet access going out.  That is a much, much more likely scenario.