Emby Theater for Linux

[TMCsw 249]

On 12/20/2025 at 11:07 PM, TMCsw said:

f I were betting on this, I'd take it to be here before Santa.

Santa, you were late...

Can I hope for more this Year??

[SHSPVR 123]

On 1/7/2026 at 9:24 PM, TMCsw said:

Santa, you were late...

Can I hope for more this Year??

Good luck with that But as I say better late than not at all

[Luke 42078]

For those who missed it:

 

[chesterseenes316 0]

how the beta going

[rdhardi 42]

48 minutes ago, chesterseenes316 said:

how the beta going

Working great for me! You can follow its progress & feedback here:

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/forum/188-linux-beta/

Edited January 24 by rdhardi

[SHSPVR 123]

I have wait in tell their support for Bazzite for now

[softworkz 5066]

5 minutes ago, SHSPVR said:

I have wait in tell their support for Bazzite for now

I'm afraid, there's no change to be expected. The RPM packages can be installed via rpm-ostree, but officially, Bazzite is not supported and won't be.

[SHSPVR 123]

3 minutes ago, softworkz said:

I'm afraid, there's no change to be expected. The RPM packages can be installed via rpm-ostree, but officially, Bazzite is not supported and won't be.

That bummer as it the best option for my Steam Library is Emby still plan for Flatpack ?

[softworkz 5066]

1 hour ago, SHSPVR said:

That bummer as it the best option for my Steam Library is Emby still plan for Flatpack ?

Not at the moment - no.

But like I mentioned in the beta forum, one of the private beta testers was running Bazzite and had no problem installing all the betas. 
Please see here: https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/145424-new-emby-linux-beta-228100-beta/#findComment-1501644

 

[richt 94]

I installed the beta on my Bazzite box and it ran fine.

Edited January 25 by richt

[CrappyUserName 30]

I've got emby theater running on an Allwinner h618 tv box with Armbian installed. 

I've managed to get video acceleration enabled in MPV and it plays great with that player. To get it working involved installing specific ffmpeg and mpv versions.

The issue I have is Emby is still a choppy mess. I have video output set to libmpv and the acceleration set to unset (for mvp.conf).

I've set MPV to save a log and after playing the same file in each player and comparing the log, it seems Emby is using it's own version of mvp and ffmpeg

				mpv			emby
MPV				0.35.1			0.38.0-dirty
ffmpeg				5.1.8-0+deb12u1		n6.0.1-180-gf4af3f1cbb
libavutil			57.28.100		58.2.100
libavcodec			59.37.100		60.3.100
libavformat			59.27.100		60.3.100
libswscale			6.7.100			7.1.100
libavfilter			8.44.100		9.3.100
libswresample			4.7.100			4.10.100

The emby ffmpeg version fails with the following errors and and reverts to software rendering. 

[   0.028][v][libmpv_render/drmprime] drmprime hwdec requires at least one dmabuf interop backend.
[   0.028][v][libmpv_render] Loading failed.
[   1.422][v][ffmpeg] Unable to open any dma_heap device
[   1.422][e][ffmpeg/video] hevc: Failed to set destination format: S265 1920x1080
[   1.422][e][ffmpeg/video] hevc: Failed setup for format drm_prime: hwaccel initialisation returned error.

I've searched the system and can only find one copy of ffmpeg but I don't really know what I'm doing. If I run ffmpeg --version in the terminal it reports the versions MPV is using.

Is there any way to make emby use the versions in the mpv column above or is it baked into the emby-theater exe?

Alternatively does anyone have a solution for the dma issues in the newer ffmpeg version?

The mpv.conf file uses hwdec=drm. In regards to dma and drm the MPV ffmpeg has the following features enabled and the emby version only has dmabuf-interop-gl, drm. egl-drm

dmabuf-interop-gl
dmabuf-interop-pl
dmabuf-wayland
drm
egl-drm
drm-is-kms
vaapi-drm

I've spent so much time getting this box functional and this is the last hurdle I need to clear. Someone here is my only hope!

[CrappyUserName 30]

Figured it out.

Added an external player

/usr/bin/mpv

arguments:

--ontop

--no-border

{path}

Now I just need to reconfigure the ir remote to interact with mpv as well as emby which shouldn't be too hard.

Happy days!

[ZanderKeen 72]

@softworkzIt looks like wayland is adding the persistent window positioning protocol... finally...

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/264

[softworkz 5066]

17 hours ago, ZanderKeen said:

@softworkzIt looks like wayland is adding the persistent window positioning protocol... finally...

Yeah, I know this thread. This is about positioning only and it doesn't work while dragging, etc.

What we need is sync of:

• Position
  realtime while dragging
• Size
  realtime while dragging
• Un/Minimize
• Un/Maximize
• Fullscreen
• virtual desktop
• stacking order

When we extrapolate from the positioning API - which took 5 years from when the issue was filed - and with 7 remaining items, this means...

....we will have that in 2061 (applause! applause!)

 

[mmhorda 5]

On 1/24/2026 at 11:10 PM, softworkz said:

Not at the moment - no.

But like I mentioned in the beta forum, one of the private beta testers was running Bazzite and had no problem installing all the betas. 
Please see here: https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/145424-new-emby-linux-beta-228100-beta/#findComment-1501644

 

I think having a flatpak package would solve it. Many linux distros support it (Bazzite, SteamOS, Arch based, etc)

[Arcau 10]

2 minutes ago, mmhorda said:

I think having a flatpak package would solve it. Many linux distros support it (Bazzite, SteamOS, Arch based, etc)

+1 for flatpak - I dare say that would already be on the radarr though. 

Current build seems to be mostly working for me, however I keep finding myself defaulting to the browser version more often than not out of habit from not having a usable linux app for the longest time. 

 

[mmhorda 5]

39 minutes ago, Arcau said:

+1 for flatpak - I dare say that would already be on the radarr though. 

Current build seems to be mostly working for me, however I keep finding myself defaulting to the browser version more often than not out of habit from not having a usable linux app for the longest time. 

 

Same here. I think flatpak would solve it mainly for immutble distros such as Bazzite and SteamOS. (SteamOS is a big chunk of linux desktop users as of today)

[SHSPVR 123]

5 hours ago, mmhorda said:

Same here. I think flatpak would solve it mainly for immutble distros such as Bazzite and SteamOS. (SteamOS is a big chunk of linux desktop users as of today)

That's exactly what I was thinking too because when something goes wrong as they mess to try to fix

[softworkz 5066]

I'm afraid, but the only other format we could provide at the moment is AppImage.

8 hours ago, SHSPVR said:

when something goes wrong as they mess to try to fix

I don't quite understand what this is supposed to mean.

We've gone through dozens of iterations and package versions and there never happened to be any "mess".

[mmhorda 5]

52 minutes ago, softworkz said:

I'm afraid, but the only other format we could provide at the moment is AppImage.

I don't quite understand what this is supposed to mean.

We've gone through dozens of iterations and package versions and there never happened to be any "mess".

AppImage would be good as well. better than nothing   (for seteamos and bazzite).  by the way i've noticed that i have to run Emby-Beta with -nompv on SteamOS. are you still adjusting the playback backend?

Edited 3 hours ago by mmhorda

[SHSPVR 123]

54 minutes ago, softworkz said:

I'm afraid, but the only other format we could provide at the moment is AppImage.

I don't quite understand what this is supposed to mean.

We've gone through dozens of iterations and package versions and there never happened to be any "mess".

Emby Theater is already on Flathub or Flatpak I can just wait i'm in no hurry to get anytime soon, Also as I remember wasn't appImage meant for developers as it not store front?.

I've made mistakes with linux command and I don't want to go that route, it's not like your traditional msdos commands

 

[mmhorda 5]

56 minutes ago, SHSPVR said:

Emby Theater is already on Flathub or Flatpak I can just wait i'm in no hurry to get anytime soon, Also as I remember wasn't appImage meant for developers as it not store front?.

I've made mistakes with linux command and I don't want to go that route, it's not like your traditional msdos commands

 

Emby Theater is Electron based. it plays laggin/jittering video in Wayland (i didn't check in gamescope though). Maybe there is a workaround related to HW acceleration, but I didn't bother, since i was impressed by this beta app

[softworkz 5066]

1 hour ago, SHSPVR said:

Emby Theater is already on Flathub or Flatpak I can just wait i'm in no hurry to get anytime soon,

These will be deprecated without replacement.

 

1 hour ago, SHSPVR said:

Also as I remember wasn't appImage meant for developers as it not store front?.

No, it's not for developers.

 

1 hour ago, SHSPVR said:

I've made mistakes with linux command and I don't want to go that route, it's not like your traditional msdos commands

That's why we have the universal installer script. You can't do anything wrong that way.

 

[softworkz 5066]

2 hours ago, mmhorda said:

AppImage would be good as well. better than nothing   (for seteamos and bazzite)

We do have AppImage packages, but we're not sure yet about publishing them, because those do not have any update mechanism and this would end up many people using outdated versions.

At least for SteamOS, you can install just normally with our package installer, no need for AppImage.

For Bazzite, it can be installed directly as well - just search the Linux Beta forum for Bazzite.

 

2 hours ago, mmhorda said:

 by the way i've noticed that i have to run Emby-Beta with -nompv on SteamOS. are you still adjusting the playback backend?

Bazzite is unsupported and SteamOS just partially, please see here: https://support.emby.media/support/articles/apps/linux/Emby-Linux-Platform-Support.html

On SteamOS, MPV playback is working in desktop mode, but not in Game mode (only with -nompv there).  This is not expected to change, unfortunately.