Emby Xbox background music playback not working

[Clackdor 109]

I recently started revisiting trying to have emby handle my music collection, and one of the roadblocks right now is having music playing in the background while gaming on Xbox.

When playing audio the emby app will completely close/crash when trying to send it to the background. I do recall the old Xbox app worked fine in this scenario as I had looked into moving my music into emby a while back. During the beta cycle I believe background playback was working (although I may be mistaken).

This is something that would be nice to have working since the couple of other background music players for Xbox that can connect to a local server rely on DLNA (which has some major limitations and drawbacks). I'm currently on the latest stable release 2.222.70.0

[softworkz 5066]

I can confirm that the app doesn't run in the background. My suspicioni is that this is due to the HEVC playback capability. This doesn't only unlock the codec but also grants more memory 2 instead of 1 or 3 instead of 2 GB to the app (and more CPU cores) than regular UWP apps.

My suspicion is that apps which have that, cannot run in the background. 

10 hours ago, Clackdor said:

During the beta cycle I believe background playback was working (although I may be mistaken).

The initial public release didn't have the Hevc capability and during that time, the beta didn't have it either, so that might cnfirm my suspicion if it would match the time frame when you tried it.

There's a (complicated) method for background playback from which the docs say that it's no longer needed - there might be a chance that this way is still working in cases like our app. I've added it to the list for the next major update.

[Clackdor 109]

On 4/10/2025 at 8:26 PM, softworkz said:

There's a (complicated) method for background playback from which the docs say that it's no longer needed - there might be a chance that this way is still working in cases like our app. I've added it to the list for the next major update.

@softworkzDid you ever find out any definitive answers regarding background playback on the xbox and whether or not it will be possible to get it working again? I know it's been a while, but I just wanted to follow up on this.

[softworkz 5066]

We can look into it during the next beta phase.

Thanks