A Few Questions about Audiobook Support

[Chyron 256]

I have a few questions about Audiobook support on Emby:

 

1. Is there an Album View, or rather a way to show all audiobook "albums" across all authors/artists on the top tier in Books?
2. Is there a way to automatically populate author posters from local image files?
3. What filetypes are supported? If m4b is supported, does it have chapter mark support?
4. Can any clients separate each book by disc (like, inline with disc subheadings)?
5. Does Emby observe disc numbers from folder structure only, or from embedded tags?
6. Can Emby resume a book by remembering which track I was last on as well as where in it I was?  (ie. Album-resume, not just track-resume)
7. From where on the web does Emby scrape audiobook album posters and backgrounds?

[Chyron 256]

Sorry if it seems like I'm dumping a bunch of feature requests into one thread. I've been playing around with Emby the last few days and am actually excited about using it.

 

But in any case, I am just trying to clarify a few things regarding Emby's audiobook support, because I'm new to the software and not sure how to do (or if I can do) what I'm trying to do.

 

In any case, from what I can glean from my own usage so far:

 

 

1. No, there is no cross-Author/Artist album view.
2. unknown
3. untested
4. untested but unlikely
5. Emby does not read discnumbers from embedded track metadata.
6. Emby assigns individual Watched Status markers to each audiobook track. (Plex does not do this and it is annoying; I screenshot my phone to remember my place)
7. Emby does not scrape online sources for audiobooks.

 

These are not complaints. I'm just getting accustomed to Emby and I'm excited about it.

Edited October 5, 2017 by chyron8472

[Dizzy49 99]

I've got a really old Bookshelf add-on that I use for eBooks.  Support is very limited, but it gets me fairly easy access to my massive eBook collection while on the road, so I'm OK with it

[Chyron 256]

What??

 

Okay, wait. Is the "Book" content type supposed to catalogue eBooks, or is it supposed to be used to stream audiobooks?

 

I added my Calibre ebook library folder to a new Emby Book Library, and all of the authors and book titles appeared but it had no access to displaying the ebook files themselves. It was kind of just a simple catalogue.

 

Then I added my audiobooks to a Music Library... but it's not displaying the audiobooks properly (yet. I will check it later  t see if it just is taking a while to build the library).

[Luke 42077]

 

1. Is there an Album View, or rather a way to show all audiobook "albums" across all authors/artists on the top tier in Books?

 

 

There is only a generic file browsing view at this moment in time. We will get there, but you may have to wait a little longer until we're able to make this a top priority and really dive into it for every Emby app.

[Luke 42077]

 

 

1. Is there a way to automatically populate author posters from local image files?

 

Right now, since it is all just folder browsing, I imagine you'll have a folder for your author so you can just put a folder.jpg file inside, or use the emby image editor to upload an image for the folder.

[Luke 42077]

 

 

1. What filetypes are supported? If m4b is supported, does it have chapter mark support?

 

For text books - ".pdf", ".epub", ".mobi", ".cbr", ".cbz"

 

For audio books - all the same extensions as music libraries. We may not actually have those listed anywhere but it is a very extensive list.

[Luke 42077]

 

 

1. Can any clients separate each book by disc (like, inline with disc subheadings)?

 

There is someone currently helping us expand the file naming conventions for books, so that all of the same conventions you can use for multi-disc videos will be usable for audio as well.

[Luke 42077]

 

 

1. Can Emby resume a book by remembering which track I was last on as well as where in it I was?  (ie. Album-resume, not just track-resume)

 

Just file-based resume right now.

[Chyron 256]

Wow. Thanks for answering all of that.

So both. Both audiobooks and ebooks. Nice.

 

Umm.... if you would, please add azw3 to the list of hopefully future supported ebooks.

[Luke 42077]

We can pretty much support them all right now because the apps currently don't do anything to help you read the books. they just get displayed in the library, and of course you can use download features to pull them down onto mobile devices.

[Chyron 256]

Right now, since it is all just folder browsing, I imagine you'll have a folder for your author so you can just put a folder.jpg file inside, or use the emby image editor to upload an image for the folder.

 

After a bit of googling, apparently this:

 

for /R %d IN (artist-poster.jpg) DO copy artist-poster.jpg folder.jpg

 

and this:

 

for /R %d IN (poster-1.jpg) DO copy poster-1.jpg folder.jpg

 

from command prompt while in the audiobook folder, converts the locally stored author and album posters used by Plex so that Emby's book library uses them.

(I'm actually not telling you this. I'm leaving this here so I can find it later just in case I need it.)

Edited October 6, 2017 by chyron8472