Continue Listening Bug

[tmurphy2792 27]

I hope you guys aren't getting sick of hearing from me, but I'm trying to do my part by reporting small bugs as I see them.

Also, going by my posts you'd probably be lead to believe I mostly use emby for listening to podcasts. But I promise that's not the case. It's just that emby seems to work so smooth for movies and tv so there's nothing to report, and after I finally got used to having to manage music/audio books through tags, that one is fine as well.
My current bug is only semi-related to podcasts this time at least.
 

Context:
For the context of this explanation, there are only two libraries involved, an Audiobooks library, and the Podcasts library that appears from using the podcast functionality.
Under Home Screen in the app settings both the audiobook library as well as the podcast library are checked to "Display in secondary home screen sections such as latest media and continue watching".
But, depending on the device I'm using they may or may not show under continue listening. While playing with this to try to understand and troubleshoot before making this post, I found the behavior shifted on me and certain devices started working as they should. So apparently there is some way I can trigger it to behave correctly, but I don't know how I did it.

Roku TV (last night): Only podcasts appeared in continue listening
Roku TV and Roku stick (today): Both libraries correctly display in continue listening.
FireTV Stick: Only the audiobooks library displays in continue listening
Android smartphone app: Only the audiobooks library displays in continue listening
Windows (microsoft store) Emby Theater (multiple PCs): Only the audiobooks library displays in continue listening
Browser UI (Chrome, multiple PCs): Only the audiobooks library displays in continue listening

What lead me to discover this was last night I went to turn on an audiobook on the roku tv in my living room, but when I got to the emby homepage there I noticed the "Continue Listening" section only contained the podcasts I'm currently listening to. I can't say for certain if it's always been like that or if this was a one off as usually when I turn this roku tv on it's so my wife and I can catch a tv show or movie.
Anyway, I decided to manually go find my audiobook and resume it. Upon navigating to it and specifically navigating to the chapter I knew I was on, the roku did not show a continue play point on the track like my android app did. So I had to check where I was at using the android, then manually fast forward to the appropriate point. 
My guess is doing this might have kicked it into gear because the roku is now working perfectly with the continue watching for audiobooks and podcasts.

That being said, I started paying more attention to it and realized the rokus are the only devices that actually show my podcasts in the continue listening. Everything else (including the android app I use for doing 99% of my podcast listening) only shows the audiobooks section. If it wasn't for the fact that my roku devices initially showed ONLY podcasts and now show both libraries, I would have put this in as a bug with podcasts not appearing in continue listening. But I truthfully think there's more at play here than that.

To test if playing the podcasts on one of these devices would suddenly get them to start populating in continue listening, I went to my windows emby theater and found a podcast/episode I knew I was partway through. Again, it didn't show on this device that I had any continue point, but when I hit play it automagically jumped to the point where I last left off.
I played this podcast for a good 30 seconds then stopped it and closed and reopened Emby theater, but no dice, this trick did not seem to resolve it for me like it did on the roku devices.

 

Sorry that's a long wall of text, it's sincerely my hope that giving a detailed background of what I've seen and experienced can be of help for troubleshooting this.
Either way here's the TLDR:
Certain devices only show certain libraries in the "Continue Listening" section, and while I've accidentally fixed some devices, it's not repeatable. Also there doesn't necessarily seem to be any correlation to which device was the one that did the previous listening that needs to be continued and whether or not said device can see said "continue listening" on the home screen.

If there's additional specific tests anyone can think of to have me run, feel free to mention them and I'll be glad to do what I can to help troubleshoot this.

[tmurphy2792 27]

Bump.

 

Hopefully the emby team will be able to figure out the root of this bug, because the continue listening feature would be really nice to have working properly.

[nospotify 184]

Continue Listening is *offered* as an option on Home Screen but apparently does not actually work. See attached images. This behavior is seen on multiple Android devices running the Play app and Emby TV app on Chromecast. Can this be fixed and made to work please?

[tmurphy2792 27]

6 minutes ago, wordlover said:

Continue Listening is *offered* as an option on Home Screen but apparently does not actually work. See attached images. This behavior is seen on multiple Android devices running the Play app and Emby TV app on Chromecast. Can this be fixed and made to work please?

Yeah it seems like the continue listening is pretty bugged depending on the device. Would love for this to get fixed to work properly.

 

If I try to "continue listening" on my Roku devices it just starts whatever audio files from the very beginning rather than jumping to a certain point.

[user24 314]

Is "Continue Listening" only designed to work with Audio Book Libraries???

With the web app, and only Music Libraries, "Continue Listening" does not appear on the Home Screen, even if selected.

If an Audio Book Library (with music albums) is added, then "Continue Listening" appears and works for these music albums.

But, if other music albums, from a Music Library, are then played, these do not appear on the "Continue Listening" list.

[pwhodges 2012]

32 minutes ago, user24 said:

Is "Continue Listening" only designed to work with Audio Book Libraries???

Yes - surprisingly.

Paul

[tmurphy2792 27]

43 minutes ago, user24 said:

Is "Continue Listening" only designed to work with Audio Book Libraries???

With the web app, and only Music Libraries, "Continue Listening" does not appear on the Home Screen, even if selected.

If an Audio Book Library (with music albums) is added, then "Continue Listening" appears and works for these music albums.

But, if other music albums, from a Music Library, are then played, these do not appear on the "Continue Listening" list.

Continue listening has to be enabled and configured per library. By default it's enabled on certain types and not others I believe.

 

Here's a screenshot of my audiobooks library configuration.

[tmurphy2792 27]

Correction: The above screenshot options don't appear to be available for a music library from what I'm seeing. So it seems like the ability is enabled/disabled based on library type.

[tmurphy2792 27]

23 minutes ago, pwhodges said:

Yes - surprisingly.

Paul

Looks like it also is enabled for podcasts, but this doesn't work as it doesn't show up on most devices.

Also since podcasts isn't a true library, I can't get to the page I shared a screenshot of above showing the resume settings.

 

Altogether the continue listening seems to need some TLC to get it polished and working properly on all client devices. Which is the original point of this bug report post that went unanswered.

[nospotify 184]

The absence of Continue Listening for Music is related to the issue of play queues not being written to 'disc'. The user issue is that for a variety of reasons music playback may be paused or terminated, and the play queue is often lost. Recording the play queue (contents and status) to something more persistent than dynamic memory would stop the loss of play queues and also enable Continue Listening for music, just ss ee have for video content.

[tmurphy2792 27]

15 hours ago, wordlover said:

The absence of Continue Listening for Music is related to the issue of play queues not being written to 'disc'. The user issue is that for a variety of reasons music playback may be paused or terminated, and the play queue is often lost. Recording the play queue (contents and status) to something more persistent than dynamic memory would stop the loss of play queues and also enable Continue Listening for music, just ss ee have for video content.

It wouldn't matter anyway, even for the libraries that have continue listening it's kinda buggy and broken.

[tmurphy2792 27]

@LukeI'm guessing this thread got buried in posts on this forum. Have you seen this?

[Luke 42079]

5 minutes ago, tmurphy2792 said:

@LukeI'm guessing this thread got buried in posts on this forum. Have you seen this?

So it's just Roku that's inconsistent for you?

[tmurphy2792 27]

6 minutes ago, Luke said:

So it's just Roku that's inconsistent for you?

Yes Roku is the only inconsistent one, but everything else is consistently NOT showing podcasts in Continue Listening. 
Also, because podcasts don't show up as a library in the management, I cannot edit the resume settings for podcasts.

So I guess that makes this 2 bug reports and a feature request in 1.
 

[Luke 42079]

OK we'll take a look at this. Thanks.