Using Emby when offline

[Jutsch80 11]

I bought Emby about a year ago and so far was very happy with it. So today my home internet was out for about an hour (at the time I didn't know how long it would take) so I naively thought, I got a Synology NAS with Emby Premiere 2 rooms away on my network, I should be able to watch a movie from there on my Android TV. Turns out I can't, at least not with Emby. The NAS and files on there are available without issues but Emby gets stuck booting, then has the audacity to show me my Emby server but refuses to enter it, even suggest me removing it. Same on the iPhone and directly in the browser. 

I also tried Kodi and at seemed to work for about 30 seconds until the Kodi plugin established the connection to the Emby server which made Kodi crash immediately, even after already starting to play a file. 

I guess my question is, if "always on" is supposed to be some kind of useless feature or is there a setting or mod to make it work properly without an internet connection? Because I don't know if the developer of Emby realizes it but not needing a constant internet connection is one of the main points of running an Emby server. 

 

Edited May 7, 2025 by Jutsch80

[Jutsch80 11]

Edit: After getting back online for a few minutes, there was another internet outage (I assume it's maintenance work). This time I was able to access the Emby server, but only with the official apps, Kodi still crashed after 30-40 seconds.

So maybe my rant was not justified but the reason for that behavior of Emby still interest me. 

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

FWIW: I live in a pretty rural area of SE Tennessee, We get frequent internet outages of usually fairly short duration, less that two hours. But we do from time to time have longer outages. The last outage that was of any duration at all was one of the longer ones lasting a little over four hours. At no point was I unable to play content from my server. I did lose access to live TV as that requires a premium act. and has to be verified over the internet. I believe my server determined that it needed to check the status and Live TV stopped functioning. But that is not really a problem for me as my "live TV" is all acquired over the internet. 
All during my outage, and several other smaller ones over the last few weeks, I was able to play content from my server to any of my clients. (Roku, Shield  and Fire Stick) 
In fact the only thing that happened during this outage was that a message popped up saying that my internet was out and I had a little trouble getting rid of it as it originated from my Shield. It looked pretty much like a message Emby might produce but I had to access the the settings menu on my Shield to remove it and make it not produce that message again. 

I only present this to show that the problem you report is not really Emby's but it is possible that Emby is not handling some outages correctly and that could be related to interactions between the various hardware/software on your network.  Emby cannot possibly test every possible combination of hardware, software and humans, or at least Emby only could if the developers used magic or were one of the richest companies in the world. The first is simply impossible and the second is also impossible. 

[Jutsch80 11]

Thank you for your post. As I wrote before, maybe (even probably) my rant was not justified. I guess it's obvious but I was in a bad mood when wiring the post. 

I am currently trying to replicate the issue without any success so far. 

[ebr 16179]

Hi.  More than likely, the app was trying to validate your Premiere status.  All the apps cache this validation for about 7 days but, if you hadn't used that app for longer than that, then that is why it may not have worked for you.  This is also why you now cannot reproduce the problem.

Does that make sense?

[Jutsch80 11]

Going back the last 7 days I’ve used at least one client (mainly the Android TV one) almost daily and also added media twice. 
 

I didn’t open the server app on the NAS recently tho. 
 

For me it’s mainly upsetting that it would be so easy to make a licensing issue transparent to the user by creating an error message clearly telling the user the problem and how to solve it or how to avoid the it in the future. 

Generally, as a paying customer, I should never ever run into an issue that someone who simply stole the product wouldn’t run into. 

[ebr 16179]

Hi.  What version of the app were you using?  I agree that it should have a better way of handling the situation.

[Jutsch80 11]

21 minutes ago, ebr said:

What version of the app were you using?

The server app was on 4.8.10 when the outage happened last night, I updated it this morning manually to 4.8.11 since the version in the Synology package center sometimes is a bit behind.

The clients I tried on AndroidTV and iOS are automatically updated by their respective app stores, therefore I don’t know which version they are on. 

[ebr 16179]

39 minutes ago, Jutsch80 said:

AndroidTV and iOS are automatically updated by their respective app stores

Hi.  The app version is displayed in the app settings screen.

[Jutsch80 11]

My iOS app is on 2.2.38, for the AndroidTV app I’ll need to look later when I’m home from work.