Is Emby Theater officially at EOL now that we have the unified app?

[AxeMan 25]

I have a perfectly well working Windows 7 PC that runs Emby Theater - handles all of my content from HEVC to ATMOS, TrueHD, etc. 

Over the last few months the whispers of the new Emby app coming was very exciting. I was hoping I can finally use Emby on my Xbox and deprecate the Win7 machine. 

Got everything fired up yesterday - and almost everything caused transcoding. Quickly realized part of it is that I had to play the lotto, which I won this morning and tried again. Made no difference. All of my HEVC videos are still transcoded. I even tried turning off subtitles. 

Also - I can't for the life of me get audio to passthrough - I have all the settings correct on the Xbox the Dolby App plays directly and my amp indicates Atmos. Emby app transcodes to ac3. Oddly, even if the title has an ac3, emby still wants to transcode the audio. 

I guess stay on ET for the time being? 

IF this is a me problem, I'd be happy to pull some logs. 

[softworkz 5066]

4 hours ago, AxeMan said:

Got everything fired up yesterday - and almost everything caused transcoding. Quickly realized part of it is that I had to play the lotto, which I won this morning and tried again. Made no difference. All of my HEVC videos are still transcoded. I even tried turning off subtitles. 

Transcoding still happens when your videos are of high bandwidth - specifically above 30 Mbps. Unfortunately this is an Xbox limitation, as it doesn't play such videos very well. It seems that they've only ever tested 4k HEVC videos like from online streaming providers where bandwidths never get that high..

Regarding the Emby Theater app I'm afraid, but it will be phased out as described in the FAQ:

 

Even though I thin kthat Win 7 has been the best Windows ever made (in relation to its time of release), it is a dead end - even without playing the "security card": There's no development reaching down to that platform anymore: Many of the techniques we are using are not available on Windows 7 and so the new Emby app cannot run on this platform.

Once ET Desktop is no longer working, your only option on Windows 7 will be to use the web app.

[AxeMan 25]

1 hour ago, softworkz said:

Transcoding still happens when your videos are of high bandwidth - specifically above 30 Mbps. Unfortunately this is an Xbox limitation, as it doesn't play such videos very well. It seems that they've only ever tested 4k HEVC videos like from online streaming providers where bandwidths never get that high..

Regarding the Emby Theater app I'm afraid, but it will be phased out as described in the FAQ:

 

Even though I thin kthat Win 7 has been the best Windows ever made (in relation to its time of release), it is a dead end - even without playing the "security card": There's no development reaching down to that platform anymore: Many of the techniques we are using are not available on Windows 7 and so the new Emby app cannot run on this platform.

Once ET Desktop is no longer working, your only option on Windows 7 will be to use the web app.

Thank you @softworkz. 

Agree regarding Win7 and it's greatness. I knew this date would come - just didn't know how much longer I had. Is there a drop dead date? 

Got really excited about possibly using the Xbox app. I could've understood the lower end Xboxen not being able to handle higher bitrate stuff. 

I guess it's time to get a NUC or a Shield or something. Definitely not a fan for Roku. 

 

Congrats on this release - it looks awesome!

[softworkz 5066]

7 hours ago, AxeMan said:

Agree regarding Win7 and it's greatness

Win 11 is my second favorite so far, way ahead of Win 10, but it takes time and effort to get rid of the many things they try to force upon users.

 

7 hours ago, AxeMan said:

I knew this date would come - just didn't know how much longer I had. Is there a drop dead date? 

Not yet. It will be months at least, so you got enough time

 

8 hours ago, AxeMan said:

Got really excited about possibly using the Xbox app. I could've understood the lower end Xboxen not being able to handle higher bitrate stuff.

We haven't gotten fully behind, there weren't that many Xbox users in the beta. Maybe it limits memory transfer for non-games in some way. Sometimes 50 Mbps videos seemed to play well, but this might also depend on which part of the video you're watching. We just determined that with 30 Mbps, we're on the safe side. It doesn't seem to make sense to use a higher limit and then see users reporting stuttering playback where we could only say "sorry, there's nothing we can do about it". So, that's the story so far.

Once we'll go for another beta round for a major update (at some time, not immediately), we can continue exploring this, but for the time being the 30 Mbps limit was the only solution.

 

8 hours ago, AxeMan said:

I guess it's time to get a NUC or a Shield or something. Definitely not a fan for Roku. 

Windows App (with mpv player) is the nonplusultra of what you can get. Regarding Shield, I'm pretty sure there will be a successor soon, but the current models are stil a great choice.

I would keep away from Roku indeed as the hardware is pretty limited, even more than FireTV devices, which are far behind Shield, but at least good value for money.

[AxeMan 25]

15 hours ago, softworkz said:

Win 11 is my second favorite so far, way ahead of Win 10, but it takes time and effort to get rid of the many things they try to force upon users.

 

Not yet. It will be months at least, so you got enough time

 

We haven't gotten fully behind, there weren't that many Xbox users in the beta. Maybe it limits memory transfer for non-games in some way. Sometimes 50 Mbps videos seemed to play well, but this might also depend on which part of the video you're watching. We just determined that with 30 Mbps, we're on the safe side. It doesn't seem to make sense to use a higher limit and then see users reporting stuttering playback where we could only say "sorry, there's nothing we can do about it". So, that's the story so far.

Once we'll go for another beta round for a major update (at some time, not immediately), we can continue exploring this, but for the time being the 30 Mbps limit was the only solution.

 

Windows App (with mpv player) is the nonplusultra of what you can get. Regarding Shield, I'm pretty sure there will be a successor soon, but the current models are stil a great choice.

I would keep away from Roku indeed as the hardware is pretty limited, even more than FireTV devices, which are far behind Shield, but at least good value for money.

Yes, 11 is nice - love the little animations. 

Thanks again for going through all this.