Increase the timeout when viewing media info during playback

[bjerne 20]

When viewing media info during playback, the menu will disappear after just a couple of seconds idle time.
This does not leave me enough read through the media summary, or to look through the cast. 

Could the idle timeout be increased to, say, 20 seconds, or entirely disabled, thus leaving it up to the user to press the back button to exit the media info menu?

[ebr 16169]

Hi.  When the summary or cast are actively being displayed, the OSD should not time out.  Is this not the case for you?

[bjerne 20]

1 hour ago, ebr said:

Hi.  When the summary or cast are actively being displayed, the OSD should not time out.  Is this not the case for you?

Hi, 

So when playing in emby app on my android phone, the osd does time out after just around 3 secs. 

When playing on my LG TV emby app, the osd times out in the same amount of time, unless I hit the "down" button which selects the text area and keeps the osd visible.

[Luke 42077]

Quote

Could the idle timeout be increased to, say, 20 seconds

Hi, that's not really what most apps are doing, right?

[bjerne 20]

8 minutes ago, Luke said:

Hi, that's not really what most apps are doing, right?

I guess you're right.
I would also prefer for the osd auto-hide to be disabled  altogether (when I have clicked one of the menu items such as "info" or "cast"), but is there a good argument against doing this, that I'm just not seeing? Other than differing opinions and user-preferences, of course?

[Luke 42077]

Did you click down into the tab? Or are you still on the tab buttons? Try clicking down into it.

[bjerne 20]

Well this behaves differently on my LG/WebOS and on my Android device.
On WebOS, I can click down into the tab, and this keeps the osd visible until I hit the back button.

On my Android device, I don't see any option to click down into the tab, so here, the osd will autohide after the few secs timeout.

Would it be possible to keep the osd visible as soon as I have marked any one of the osd menu headers, thus not needing to click down into the tab content for the menu to stay visible?

[rechigo 364]

This sounds exactly like the *issue* I am describing in this post. It hasn't yet been fixed. Its an issue on Android, iOS, and web app. As OP stated, the info menu should stay up indefinitely as it should be the user's choice when to back-out of the menu when they're done reading.

Edited August 17, 2025 by rechigo

[crusher11 1100]

I've had the Chapters OSD time out on me on my phone while I was scrolling through them. I assume it only registers contact with the screen as an interaction, so when I flicked across the screen to quickly scroll towards the end of the chapter list, it believed I'd stopped interacting even though the list was still scrolling.

[seanbuff 1313]

12 hours ago, rechigo said:

This sounds exactly like the *issue* I am describing in this post. It hasn't yet been fixed.

Yep, also previously reported here:

 

[CBers 7450]

On 17/08/2025 at 20:14, Luke said:

Did you click down into the tab? Or are you still on the tab buttons? Try clicking down into it.

I've reported this issue in the past as well, and pressing down shouldn't be the answer, especially if you just want to read the INFO tab.

Having it disappear after a few seconds is a PITA.
 

Edited August 27, 2025 by CBers

[rechigo 364]

16 hours ago, crusher11 said:

I've had the Chapters OSD time out on me on my phone while I was scrolling through them. I assume it only registers contact with the screen as an interaction, so when I flicked across the screen to quickly scroll towards the end of the chapter list, it believed I'd stopped interacting even though the list was still scrolling.

This is what I experienced too. Scrolling through chapters or actors doesnt register as interacting so it closes the menu after a timeout. But regardless if it did register it as interacting, the info menu shouldn't disappear until the user chooses to back out of it once they're done reading

Edited August 18, 2025 by rechigo

[bjerne 20]

It seems there is general consensus and plenty of requests to do away with the osd timeout altogether

@Luke

Is there any reason that this seemingly simple change cannot be made in the short term? 

[ebr 16169]

2 hours ago, bjerne said:

to do away with the osd timeout altogether

We do not want to do that.  We just need to make the mobile app extend the timeout every time you scroll.

[rechigo 364]

17 hours ago, ebr said:

We do not want to do that.  We just need to make the mobile app extend the timeout every time you scroll.

How long of a time out are you thinking then? 

[bjerne 20]

On 21/08/2025 at 15:36, ebr said:

We do not want to do that.  We just need to make the mobile app extend the timeout every time you scroll.

Why not though? I'm just trying to understand the rationale behind having it time out in the first place as I personally find it rather annoying. 

[ebr 16169]

18 hours ago, bjerne said:

Why not though? I'm just trying to understand the rationale behind having it time out in the first place as I personally find it rather annoying. 

Simply because it is a well-established convention so everyone is going to expect that behavior and most people won't know that they need to do something to make it go away.

[bjerne 20]

On 23/08/2025 at 15:59, ebr said:

Simply because it is a well-established convention so everyone is going to expect that behavior and most people won't know that they need to do something to make it go away.

Yes, the majority (myself included) would expect the osd to auto hide when clicking down into the seeking bar or subs, etc. But are you certain this is also the case as well, when clicking further down into the media summary, cast, etc? 

Maybe there would still be a majority vote for auto hiding even when having jumped down into the movie info or similar, but I would at least think that a significant minority would share my preference of keeping the osd visibile in this particular case. 

This brings me to suggesting an alternative approach, which would be adding an option to keep the osd visible, but leaving the default to auto hide. Ideally a setting that could be toggled in the osd itself, under the cogwheel/settings menu.

Do you think this might me feasible to do? 

[ebr 16169]

21 minutes ago, bjerne said:

But are you certain this is also the case as well, when clicking further down into the media summary, cast, etc? 

That should already be the case in those areas.  I know it behaves that way in the TV apps but in touch-only interfaces, it becomes harder to determine where "focus" actually is.

 

[rechigo 364]

On 8/25/2025 at 1:32 PM, ebr said:

That should already be the case in those areas.  I know it behaves that way in the TV apps but in touch-only interfaces, it becomes harder to determine where "focus" actually is.

 

Truly it makes sense for the touch screen apps to behave the same as the tv apps. The OSD will disappear after a timeout when focused, but when the user enters a menu in the OSD, whether it be quality settings, cast, info, etc. the interface will stay focused until the user backs out of it, because we want to keep focus until the user is done reading or performing whatever action they want. It seems a good amount of users are in the same boat about this behavior. Maybe we should hold a poll of some sort.

[ebr 16169]

14 hours ago, rechigo said:

Truly it makes sense for the touch screen apps to behave the same as the tv apps. The OSD will disappear after a timeout when focused, but when the user enters a menu in the OSD, whether it be quality settings, cast, info, etc. the interface will stay focused until the user backs out of it, because we want to keep focus until the user is done reading or performing whatever action they want. It seems a good amount of users are in the same boat about this behavior. Maybe we should hold a poll of some sort.

I don't think a poll is necessary.  As I already stated, when we can determine that you are interacting with one of those features, the interface should stay active.  If it isn't now, that is something that should be addressed.

[crusher11 1100]

On 8/26/2025 at 4:32 AM, ebr said:

That should already be the case in those areas.  I know it behaves that way in the TV apps but in touch-only interfaces, it becomes harder to determine where "focus" actually is.

 

To me, if something is visible on the OSD other than the on-screen controls, that's where focus is. I would note expect to have to navigate down into the overview in order to make it stay on-screen—in fact, it's never even occurred to me that it would be possible to do so.

[rechigo 364]

13 hours ago, ebr said:

I don't think a poll is necessary.  As I already stated, when we can determine that you are interacting with one of those features, the interface should stay active.  If it isn't now, that is something that should be addressed.

Thats exactly the issue now... there is an extremely short timeout causing the info/cast/chapters list to disappear often times before you even have a chance to tap to focus. Is this something being worked on? Its really annoying trying to look through info and actors when Emby keeps hiding the OSD as im reading 

[rechigo 364]

This is a frustrating issue here. We have several forum users, including myself & my server users, that complain about this behavior. There are complaints about this behavior going back to July. It's simple as disabling the auto-hide timeout when the user is browsing the info, cast, and chapters menus. The OSD already behaves correctly by NOT hiding itself when going through subtitles, playback rate, etc. So clearly the functionality to disable the auto-hide timeout when the user is interacting with the OSD is already implemented.

[Luke 42077]

The scroll issue that was mentioned has been resolved for the next set of app updates.