Tried Emby for one month

[Luke 42077]

 

 

 Search under the music tab is not able to find artists

    * Suggestions are also empty

I'm not able to reproduce this. Does your music library have artists in the Artists tab?

[Luke 42077]

 

 

The video title will sometimes be displayed above the Emby logo in the top left corner, even after the video already stopped (see screenshot, also works on Android)

 

Resolved for next release, thanks.

[Luke 42077]

 

 

The controls are not hidden when clicking into the video

    * Waiting for the timeout is especially annoying when you can't read the subtitles under it

Added for next release.

[Luke 42077]

 

 

* The context menus are way too overloaded - especially bad on Android

    * There's no need for options like "Edit images" or "Edit subtitles" to appear when right clicking on a "Next up" item

 

We need to reduce the number of items in the menu, but the contents will continue to remain just about the same no matter where you click from.

 

We have tried to be smart before to reduce the number of menu items, but then we just get complaints about inconsistency, can't find various actions, etc.

[Luke 42077]

 

 

The player controls are too small and too close to each other (see screenshots)

Agreed.

[Luke 42077]

@@DomiStyle - global play all/shuffle being added.

[Rohanaj 15]

# Server

* Scans are really slow (both, TV shows and movies)

    * Even when nothing was added or changed - a full library scan takes about 20-40 minutes. (1000 movies, 200 shows, 2000 albums)

    * There's no real debug info available - I can't see where it hangs.

 

* Untagged files get added to the Latest section before a poster is downloaded

    * This might be more of an issue because my scans are so slow

    * For example, adding a new episode of a TV show will lead to a new entry in Latest Shows that sits there untagged without poster or information until the scan is finished 20-30 minutes later

    * This also affects notifications - the file name will be shown instead of a proper name

 

* Duplicate artists

    * For example, Daft Punk and Daft Punk (Main) get added to the library - even when all MP3s are tagged with only "Daft Punk". "Prefer embedded titles over filenames" is enabled.

 

# Android (7.1.1)

 

* The Android app crashes frequently

    * Reproducible example:

        1. Start a video that needs transcoding and has multiple languages and subtitles

        1. As soon as the video player starts, switch the language and subtitles (before the server gets to properly start transcoding)

        1. App will crash soon after

 

I've also been trying Emby out for about a month now, so I'll chime in my two cents on a few of your points, DomiStyle, for what it's worth.  For those who don't like posts with lots of text, I apologize ahead of time.

 

Library Scan Speed and Untagged:

I ran full library scans only when initially setting it up, and yes, it took a very long time to complete.  Since that time, whenever I add any media to a specific library, I just run a manual scan of that library ("Scan for new and updated files").  Even when I've added dozens of new items through that method, the timing for those scans to process has been quite quick.  I make sure not to download images in advance for any library.  From my attempts with that, I found that library scans were a massive amount slower when I did that, but I haven't seen any issues with the libraries that don't do that - at worst, it takes an extra second or two to pull up images for something you haven't viewed in a client previously.

 

The one question I have about the speed of library scans, Luke, is whether large or full system scans lengthen in time so much because of metadata retrieval API limitations?  If that's the case, I have to assume you're needing to limit the number of metadata retrieval queries that Emby sends so the metadata providers don't flag my Emby server as spamming and lock me out?  The difference between Plex and Emby scan times would logically be explained by this as well, since Plex defaults to retrieving metadata from a clone/proxy that they have setup rather than sending me directly to TVDb or MovieDb, etc., which wouldn't require them to limit how quickly queries could come in or out since it's their own system you're querying.

 

I haven't noticed the untagged issue, but that's likely because I don't do the full library scans for new items, just a per-library manual scan as I mentioned.  I like really adrianwi's suggestion about allowing scheduled scans at the specific library level rather than the full media library.  I also know that a library scan completely freezing for you is not exactly related to the metadata retrieval either, these are just my thoughts overall about scans.

 

Duplicate Artists:

I've run into this, but when I've looked at the embedded data for my music files, it's always been a problem with inconsistency of an artist name within the files on my end, and not Emby's reading of that data.

 

Android App:

I haven't searched much in the Android forums of Emby yet (this is my first post here actually), but I too was having problems with app freezing/crashing when trying to play anything.  In my case, it appeared to be because I had set my user preferences to automatically show subtitles and apparently the Android app doesn't like subtitles, not even a little bit.  Once I turned subtitles off, I could play things nicely, but you're right with your statement that it causes issues again if you try and turn the subtitles back on.  It would be great if that got addressed, but it's not making or breaking my experience on that app, it just makes me view on other platforms if I really want subtitles.

 

I do agree with many of your other points, especially the control spacing.

 

Additional Item:

This hasn't been mentioned above, but just to toss it in, my daughter loves being able to play all her soundtrack music in the Emby app.  My big criticism with the music situation on Emby is the lack of sorting options on the Roku app specifically.  In the web browser and other platforms, you can group/sort by the Album, but on Roku it is only by Artist.  Soundtracks are a great example of why not being able to sort by Album is problematic as they frequently have half a dozen different artists for a 12-track soundtrack.  I got around this by teaching her to go to the "Genres" option, which then shows music by album, but it also meant I had to clean up a whole lot of genre metadata on all my files to make sure they all had "Soundtrack" as that.  In the grand scheme, it's a minor inconvenience, but might as well be mentioned.

 

 

Overall Impression:

My family and I have been very happy with Emby so far.  I love the control I have as the admin, the per-user preferences are great, and direct connection to my server rather than having a middleman.  I've had no issues with connectivity for the server.  As far as transcoding goes, I've noticed from the admin side that the transcoding gets way out in front of the actual playback location of a file.  Some people might view this as a negative since it means your system is transcoding the whole file when it might not need to, but I have no qualms about it.  For playback, there have been a few times where items stuttered when not on my local network, but any time it happened I've checked my connection speeds from where I was at and they've consistently been quite low so I'm attributing the issue to that.  I'm doing Emby Premiere monthly at the moment, but have yet to try many of the possible features as I got it primarily for the device full playback, but I'll experiment around with things eventually I'm sure.

 

DomiStyle, as others have said, thanks for all your time in compiling that feedback, it's very helpful for the rest of us as well.

 

Luke, thanks for being so responsive on the forums and in making adjustments/improvements to Emby.  It is much appreciated.

[Luke 42077]

 

 

retrieving metadata from a clone/proxy that they have setup rather than sending me directly to TVDb or MovieDb, etc

 

This could result in a difference in the first scan, yes, but don't you feel better about going directly to Tvdb and MovieDb?

[Luke 42077]

 

 

It's not possible to set a separate date/time format

    * For example, it's not possible to use English (United States) with German date/time format

 

This is being added, thanks.

[DomiStyle 11]

@@DomiStyle

 

 

Do you really feel that this is a problem? Are you saying you think we should hide content until it's first metadata download has fully completed?

It's not necessarily a problem - more of a side effect of the long scan times.

If ten movies are added for example, the whole "recently added" section will be untagged for half an hour right now.

 

@@DomiStyle

We use ffprobe to extract audio tags, and I am willing to bet that ffprobe thinks one of your audio files is tagged with Daft Punk (Main). Do you have a sample file? I can verify this for you. Thanks.

Yes, I see now that these files have the comment tag named ARTISTS set to Daft Punk (Main).

 

I'm not sure if that's the correct behavior though.

 

Here's a raw dump of the tags:

TIT2 = Ouverture
TPE1 = Daft Punk
TALB = Daft Club
TCON = Electro,Techno/House,Dance
TRCK = 1/14
TBPM = 123
TSRC = GBDUW0300005
TPE2 = Daft Punk
TXXX : ARTISTS = Daft Punk (Main)
TPUB = Parlophone France
TPOS = 1
TYER = 2003
TDAT = 0112

Here's the output of ffprobe:

Metadata:
    title           : Ouverture
    artist          : Daft Punk
    album           : Daft Club
    genre           : Electro,Techno/House,Dance
    track           : 1/14
    TBPM            : 123
    TSRC            : GBDUW0300005
    album_artist    : Daft Punk
    ARTISTS         : Daft Punk (Main)
    publisher       : Parlophone France
    disc            : 1
    date            : 2003-12-01

According to http://id3.org/id3v2.3.0#User_defined_text_information_frame TXXX is for user defined text information. So it would make more sense to use the official specification and use TPE1 (artist) in this case.

Not sure if ffprobe does this or Emby but I'm sure you could check.

 

I'm still removing those frames but it could be that others run into this since this seems common for some reason.

 

This is intended to play, so we'll start playback by clicking anywhere in the poster and not just the play button.

Do you mean it is intended to play right now or it will be in one of the future versions?

 

I'm not able to reproduce this. Does your music library have artists in the Artists tab?

 

Yes. I attached two screenshots - the first one searches "daft punk" from the Home page, the second one from the Music page. Notice the missing Artist section.

 

We need to reduce the number of items in the menu, but the contents will continue to remain just about the same no matter where you click from.

 

We have tried to be smart before to reduce the number of menu items, but then we just get complaints about inconsistency, can't find various actions, etc.

 

It doesn't necessarily need to be reduced but making it smaller on desktop and adding some dividers like Plex does (see screenshot) would already be a lot more organized.

 

This could result in a difference in the first scan, yes, but don't you feel better about going directly to Tvdb and MovieDb?

 

The only reason Plex is using this system is because the providers asked Plex to cache the data to stop all the traffic it caused.

Nowadays it's probably also so they can get that sweet sweet user data they want so much.

 

There are a lot of things slowing down initial scan but that doesn't really matter to me. The only important aspect are the repeated scans that are so slow.

Is Emby using any sort of fingerprinting to identify changed files? That would indeed take forever.

 

I can't imagine why Emby would use so much time to just check through a list of files and the creation/edit date/file sizes though. That task is completed in C# in mere seconds, even over the network.

[DomiStyle 11]

 

I've also been trying Emby out for about a month now, so I'll chime in my two cents on a few of your points, DomiStyle, for what it's worth.  For those who don't like posts with lots of text, I apologize ahead of time.

 

Library Scan Speed and Untagged:

I ran full library scans only when initially setting it up, and yes, it took a very long time to complete.  Since that time, whenever I add any media to a specific library, I just run a manual scan of that library ("Scan for new and updated files").  Even when I've added dozens of new items through that method, the timing for those scans to process has been quite quick.  I make sure not to download images in advance for any library.  From my attempts with that, I found that library scans were a massive amount slower when I did that, but I haven't seen any issues with the libraries that don't do that - at worst, it takes an extra second or two to pull up images for something you haven't viewed in a client previously.

 

The one question I have about the speed of library scans, Luke, is whether large or full system scans lengthen in time so much because of metadata retrieval API limitations?  If that's the case, I have to assume you're needing to limit the number of metadata retrieval queries that Emby sends so the metadata providers don't flag my Emby server as spamming and lock me out?  The difference between Plex and Emby scan times would logically be explained by this as well, since Plex defaults to retrieving metadata from a clone/proxy that they have setup rather than sending me directly to TVDb or MovieDb, etc., which wouldn't require them to limit how quickly queries could come in or out since it's their own system you're querying.

 

I haven't noticed the untagged issue, but that's likely because I don't do the full library scans for new items, just a per-library manual scan as I mentioned.  I like really adrianwi's suggestion about allowing scheduled scans at the specific library level rather than the full media library.  I also know that a library scan completely freezing for you is not exactly related to the metadata retrieval either, these are just my thoughts overall about scans.

 

Duplicate Artists:

I've run into this, but when I've looked at the embedded data for my music files, it's always been a problem with inconsistency of an artist name within the files on my end, and not Emby's reading of that data.

 

Android App:

I haven't searched much in the Android forums of Emby yet (this is my first post here actually), but I too was having problems with app freezing/crashing when trying to play anything.  In my case, it appeared to be because I had set my user preferences to automatically show subtitles and apparently the Android app doesn't like subtitles, not even a little bit.  Once I turned subtitles off, I could play things nicely, but you're right with your statement that it causes issues again if you try and turn the subtitles back on.  It would be great if that got addressed, but it's not making or breaking my experience on that app, it just makes me view on other platforms if I really want subtitles.

 

I do agree with many of your other points, especially the control spacing.

 

Additional Item:

This hasn't been mentioned above, but just to toss it in, my daughter loves being able to play all her soundtrack music in the Emby app.  My big criticism with the music situation on Emby is the lack of sorting options on the Roku app specifically.  In the web browser and other platforms, you can group/sort by the Album, but on Roku it is only by Artist.  Soundtracks are a great example of why not being able to sort by Album is problematic as they frequently have half a dozen different artists for a 12-track soundtrack.  I got around this by teaching her to go to the "Genres" option, which then shows music by album, but it also meant I had to clean up a whole lot of genre metadata on all my files to make sure they all had "Soundtrack" as that.  In the grand scheme, it's a minor inconvenience, but might as well be mentioned.

 

 

Overall Impression:

My family and I have been very happy with Emby so far.  I love the control I have as the admin, the per-user preferences are great, and direct connection to my server rather than having a middleman.  I've had no issues with connectivity for the server.  As far as transcoding goes, I've noticed from the admin side that the transcoding gets way out in front of the actual playback location of a file.  Some people might view this as a negative since it means your system is transcoding the whole file when it might not need to, but I have no qualms about it.  For playback, there have been a few times where items stuttered when not on my local network, but any time it happened I've checked my connection speeds from where I was at and they've consistently been quite low so I'm attributing the issue to that.  I'm doing Emby Premiere monthly at the moment, but have yet to try many of the possible features as I got it primarily for the device full playback, but I'll experiment around with things eventually I'm sure.

 

DomiStyle, as others have said, thanks for all your time in compiling that feedback, it's very helpful for the rest of us as well.

 

Luke, thanks for being so responsive on the forums and in making adjustments/improvements to Emby.  It is much appreciated.

 

It's probably not mentioned too much here but I also think Emby is excellent as it is. It's just very small things that keep driving me back to Plex from time to time. Shuffle all for example.

 

The initial library scan took about 24 hours for me, which is to be expected. I tried without downloading images in advance first but I'm downloading them in advance now. The initial scan takes longer but repeated scans take long in both instances. Also I appreciate having the metadata present locally.

 

As mentioned, the untagged issue only arises when the library scan takes longer than expected.

 

Subtitles actually work fine on Android for me - the only exception being switching them right after the video started when transcoding.

 

My music files are generally tagged really clean since I spend a lot of time on them. However, when ripping CDs or downloading from Amazon I don't really check them closer - except removing stuff like [Explicit] of course.

 

When the red bar is the transcoding progress on the dashboard then yes - it finishes the file when transcoding. Some sort of throttling would be appreciated.

 

You're welcome. I also appreciate the interaction of @@Luke on the forums. One of the main reasons why I switched to Emby.

[DomiStyle 11]

@@Luke I moved the list to GitHub and added a few new issues as well as removing those that are fixed/updated. (New issues are highlighted)

 

https://github.com/DomiStyle/emby-issues

Edited October 29, 2017 by DomiStyle

[Rohanaj 15]

This could result in a difference in the first scan, yes, but don't you feel better about going directly to Tvdb and MovieDb?

 

Absolutely, I appreciate that it goes directly there rather than through a cached or proxied version.  I was more just wondering if the scan time was accounted for by built-in querying pauses because of directly connecting.  I'm all for the direct connection, even if it is at the expense of scan time.

[Luke 42077]

@@DomiStyle any chance you can pm me a link to one of those audio files? or produce ffprobe output using the following command:

ffprobe -i "input" -show_streams -show_format -print_format json

Thanks.

[Luke 42077]

Context menu options will be made a little easier, thanks.

[DomiStyle 11]

@@DomiStyle any chance you can pm me a link to one of those audio files? or produce ffprobe output using the following command:

ffprobe -i "input" -show_streams -show_format -print_format json

Thanks.

 

Sent you one of the files.

[Luke 42077]

Ok the comments do appear to be ffprobe's doing:

 

 

A while back we chose to prioritize Artists because it can hold mulitple artists. 

 

The only possible improvement i can think of here is that maybe we should prioritize whatever appears first in that tag list, assuming that ffprobe might be putting the user defined fields at the end.

 

@@ginjaninja

[Luke 42077]

Artist search being resolved, thanks.

[ginjaninja 605]

I t

 

Ok the comments do appear to be ffprobe's doing:

 

 

A while back we chose to prioritize Artists because it can hold mulitple artists. 

 

The only possible improvement i can think of here is that maybe we should prioritize whatever appears first in that tag list, assuming that ffprobe might be putting the user defined fields at the end.

 

@@ginjaninja

AFAIK

any tag can hold any string (with any 'delimiter'(s) as prescribed by the application reading the tags) and any tag can hold multiples of anything (taking a delimiter into account), its only convention and what the clients prescribe..

I first noticed ARTISTS being popularised by Musicbrainz and Picard.

IMO ARTISTS is not a popular tag relative to ARTIST, so if ARTISTS is present, its  likely there 'on purpose' (eg created by PICARD), so it makes sense that EMBY would use ARTISTS in preference to ARTIST.

IMO 'whatever appears first' is less predictable, Id rather have a  tag standard to conform to, that EMBY prescribes.

[Luke 42077]

Thanks for the info @@ginjaninja.

[Luke 42077]

Scroll arrow issue is being resolved, thanks.

[DomiStyle 11]

I t

 

AFAIK

any tag can hold any string (with any 'delimiter'(s) as prescribed by the application reading the tags) and any tag can hold multiples of anything (taking a delimiter into account), its only convention and what the clients prescribe..

I first noticed ARTISTS being popularised by Musicbrainz and Picard.

IMO ARTISTS is not a popular tag relative to ARTIST, so if ARTISTS is present, its  likely there 'on purpose' (eg created by PICARD), so it makes sense that EMBY would use ARTISTS in preference to ARTIST.

IMO 'whatever appears first' is less predictable, Id rather have a  tag standard to conform to, that EMBY prescribes.

 

That's correct. Still not sure why the comment field is used for multiple artists when the regular artist field also supports multiple artists.

 

 

TPE1 The 'Lead artist(s)/Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)/Performing group' is used for the main artist(s). They are seperated with the "/" character.

 

I'm going to just strip all TXXX tags for now. Don't see any use in them anyway.

 

@@Luke It seems like the tap to hide OSD isn't working properly on Android. It requires a very precise click length to work. All the other times it will just reappear again right after hiding it.

[Luke 42077]

For some of these you just need to explore the settings in your emby server dashboard.

Even popular artists do not get an artist poster

Additional providers are available that can be turned on.

The "Latest Movies/Shows" section seems to ignore older movies that are newly added

Explore date added settings in library config section.

[Luke 42077]

There is no indicator when playing on a different device

The cast indicator icon in the header becomes filled.

[DomiStyle 11]

For some of these you just need to explore the settings in your emby server dashboard.

Even popular artists do not get an artist poster

Additional providers are available that can be turned on.

The "Latest Movies/Shows" section seems to ignore older movies that are newly added

Explore date added settings in library config section.

I enabled both available image fetchers for Music artists but "Queen" still doesn't have any poster, even when replacing all metadata.

 

Removed the latest movie issue, didn't see the setting before.

 

There is no indicator when playing on a different device

The cast indicator icon in the header becomes filled.

 

Coloring it would probably be more eye catching than it is currently is but it probably will do as it is.