Very unreliable behaviour from the app

[devster31 0]

I recently got the premiere subscription to use the Emby Android app on the go, sync stuff and watch it later. I encountered 3 general issues using the Android app:

• The communication with the server is unreliable, it takes a lot of time to sync new content on mobile, even when it already shows on the web interface, some episodes are missing metadata on Android only and some show as unwatched even though on the WebUI they're flagged as watched.
• When using the app as a remote for Chromecast the time is stuck at 0, connection gets randomly dropped and cannot be restored (I have to use a laptop to disconnect the chromecast app).
• When playing an episode the automatic bandwidth detection almost always goes for direct streaming or the lowest possibile setting, very rarely something in between. When stopping the play the event is not recorded, meaning that time keeps ticking on the WebUI and the next time I open the episode it's misteriously 20 minutes ahead.

I'm not really sure what to do right now, the server works well on web and on a PC, but somehow fails spectacularly on my phone. What could cause it?

Edited July 31, 2017 by devster31

[Luke 42077]

Hi, can you give examples of missing metadata? Synchronizing the watched data is something we just haven't done yet for offline content but are planning to add soon. Thanks.

[devster31 0]

The most frequent one for me are episode descriptions, which are present on TVDb. The missing Metadata however is probably the thing I care less about. I tried multiple times to download episodes on my phone and the transfer progress is always stuck at 0 in the app but in the notification drawer the bar moves. In addition to this subtitles don't seem to work on downloaded episodes. The download is problematic also for another reason, whenever the connection is dropped, even if the reason is switching to a different access point, the download stops without failure messages. I have to remove it and try again, with the hope it works.

 

To specify that this is not a conversion issue I tried both the 'Original' and 'Low' settings and in the first case it usually gets stuck to 0 while in the second it performs the conversion and gets stuck again at 0% download. This is both on the phone and via the server dashboard.

Edited July 30, 2017 by devster31

[Luke 42077]

Ok yea some of these things are just not completed yet. As far as connection dropping though, you don't need to remove and re-add. We register a background process that runs every 15 minutes and on the next run it will restart the download. I suppose what we can do is also run the process whenever the device connection changes.

[devster31 0]

Thank you for the answers.

I have to admit that this is a bit disappointing though. The whole process seems kind of flaky, and especially the fact that on the app it always gets stuck at 0 with no discernible messages of error or anything is a bit annoying.

I eagerly wait for improvements on this.

[Luke 42077]

Thanks for the feedback. We will be looking to improve it in upcoming updates.