My random thoughts on emby and the forum

[Apotropaic 55]

Just to be clear this is not meant to be criticism against the emby project or any individuals involved with emby as developers or as users!

I started my emby journey back when it was Media Browser and my users peaked just before Covid took over and strangely it went downhill after that and I shut my server down for maybe 3-4 years. Maybe a year ago I started my server back up, mainly for my own 'enjoyment'. I was curious where the project had got to, what the community was up to and to be part of the community again to help out.

What I found was not much had changed, my premier key still worked, everything materially looked and felt the same. It was as if I had never left. I think I had expected it to be 'shinier' in some way.

I will say the HDR and Atmos support was probably the biggest thing I noticed, I don't doubt that was a big effort. I'm unsure if my media presentation eye has been dumbed down by commercial apps or emby has improved - I can't tell but I've applied minimal customisation to my media views, where as I remember back in the day I had a certain amount of tinkering to get it looking right.

Now to the forum, I would have expected a lot more participation. I feel outside the regular names I see participating there is very little going on, maybe it's the limited number of sub-forums I look at!? It makes me question how active the user base is now, or how has it changed?

Also the people requesting help has me questioning my sanity sometimes, like it takes a certain amount of knowledge and experience to even know about emby, nevermind go to the trouble of installing it and getting it half way there. Sometimes I get the feeling people are data mining, that their issues are fake and they are just obtaining information about what emby is being used for. Just to ask the question you've managed to install emby on some hardware and are using the internet to register with a forum, the last thing I expect is to explain how to operate a mouse.... When stuff doesn't make sense it leads me to think there's something else going on, or maybe I'm just paranoid!!

Anyway, that's my mini-rant over with, would be interested in what others think.

[Neminem 1618]

I tent to agree.

Most new user are Emby server users that don't own and have installed there own servers.

Asking 1 time questions about there experience / failed attempts to connect to, what they call there own server, and never again reply.

Share sellers redirecting there support to this forum or just don't care.

Sadly this started after the big purge, where the forum was deleting old unused accounts with on forum activities, meaning 0 posts or replies.

As a result share sellers are making them ask 1 question, most topic "KJHJKHK" Body "djfhk" 

1 thing I have noticed is that some of the old account / helpful people have stopped helping new people, sadly I'm 1 of them.

I have hade enough of people asking for help directly via PM or getting a smirky reply they cooked up via some AI.

Or they never get back to you if that helped them

Then there is the other people asking for help that don't want to supply logs or read the linked "how to guide" and supply where that fail them.

So spending 1 - 2 hours trying to help them is going unanswered, and right now I feel like I'm waisting my time.

Edited 5 hours ago by Neminem

[Apotropaic 55]

ah...in my response I hadn't considered the server access sellers and the support angle, I'm aware of that side of course and they are pretty easy to spot.

I also think there are wannabe sellers, or even someone recently who sounded as if they had inherited a server lol

As for the helping burnout, in some way it's probably because emby as a project is pretty much solid for the core functionality. Yes there are nice to have's and some of us want a particular feature, but there is more than enough which is stable and feature-complete, and where not there are easy and well understood hacks and workarounds.

Things were a lot more fun when trying to get emby working on a Synology NAS and then within Hyper-V, I think I spent most of my time tinkering than actually watching anything, now it is the other way around.

Helping is difficult as people with simple issue who don't want to invest their own time in simple investigation and reading are tiring. I don't want to deal with them at work, why would anyone want to do this out of work...

But hey we are all still here because Emby is an amazing piece of work, I don't even class it as a product.

[Neminem 1618]

Example from today No context, other that does not work on this device

 

[visproduction 334]

Apo, I think you have some interesting comments.  Try clicking on "Unread Content" link top right, if you want to see the latest activity across all the forum posts.

Beta versions have a large update with custom home page features. Changing the look and adding many features to a media server or any website is challenging, takes much more effort, than many people think and can be detrimental and kill popularity, if not done carefully.  Many software products have lost marketshare from adding too many bells and whistles. Some audio / video types are sort of protected by license limitations and software policies must follow many rules to even get permission to post a download with Google or Apple. There are even legal liabilities which make some features, a real risk to even create. 

 https://emby.media/community/topic/145871-41001-revamped-home-screen-section-editor/

===

Occasionally, in the forum posts some staff developer working with Emby may write, that this or that feature is a liability and the user will respond, "But just add a switch."  A lot of technically correct answers are misunderstood, which is rather amusing.  That is the nature of support.  I think this forum is quite active, compared to many online forums.  Trying to read everything posted in a day, would take many hours.

For Web Emby, there are many customization options using the custom css code entry in Admin dashboard / General.  Unfortunately, this customization does not follow though to mobile or TV apps, mostly because those apps have to include everything within the code and there are really restricted rules from Goggle and Apple, as to what is allowed.  I've offered a custom css code package that has over 3800 lines of code.  There are many others, with customized features, as well.

 https://emby.media/community/forum/144-web-app-css/

 

Edited 2 hours ago by visproduction

[Apotropaic 55]

Hi Vis, I think I might need to expand the sub-forums I frequent, it might just be that the things I'm interested in are just not that cool and interesting anymore.

As I said I'm not trying to criticise emby in any way, I do agree the core UI needs to remain consistent and adding the wrong thing jeopardises the community. Maybe the UI is too good in that even though there were changes I couldn't even notice them after being away for a few years!!

The CSS work you've done is pretty amazing, I'm also looking forward to the new customisable home pages. I've stayed away from the Beta versions as I've just not had the time to deal with it or have the resource available.