Using Emby App/Server offline

[mollat 2]

Hi all,

 

I am using Emby Server for a couple of months now and I like it very much. Today I tried the Android App and I liked it also...

 

Now I have two questions before buying a license as I have a special usage in mind: I want to use Emby Server 'on the road' with a 12V server for entertaining my three children on long travels with the caravan.

 

1. Are there any issues for the Premiere license using it 'offline' (without internet connection)?

2. Can I use the Premiere licensed Android apps without any commercial appstore? (The tablets of the children have Lineageos and F-Droid only.)

 

Thank you in advance,

 

Andreas

[mastrmind11 722]

1)  It needs to be able to verify your license every couple of weeks, so as long as you're connected prior to your road trip, offline should be good to go for a couple weeks.

2)  No idea about this one.

[Luke 42077]

For #2, yes the mobile app is available for download on our website:

 

https://emby.media/download.html

[mollat 2]

1)  It needs to be able to verify your license every couple of weeks, so as long as you're connected prior to your road trip, offline should be good to go for a couple weeks.

 

This is probably not true!

 

I recently purchased a lifetime license and made a setup on a raspberry pi. However - booting it up in the camper (without internet connection) the web gui does not show this golden premiere coin and the server won't work with more than one Android App connected (Is this a normal limitation? Then an error message would be a great improvement over the timeout...). If I connect the pi to lan again - all works without problems. So it looks like the premiere functions are tied to a working internet connection - at least on startup. Sad!

 

Now I hope that the web viewer will work smoothly on this old tablets or my children will kill me for the false promises...

 

Andreas

[mastrmind11 722]

This is probably not true!

 

I recently purchased a lifetime license and made a setup on a raspberry pi. However - booting it up in the camper (without internet connection) the web gui does not show this golden premiere coin and the server won't work with more than one Android App connected (Is this a normal limitation? Then an error message would be a great improvement over the timeout...). If I connect the pi to lan again - all works without problems. So it looks like the premiere functions are tied to a working internet connection - at least on startup. Sad!

 

Now I hope that the web viewer will work smoothly on this old tablets or my children will kill me for the false promises...

 

Andreas

As I said, it has to phone home every couple of weeks to verify your premiere status.  Once it does that, it will be fine until it has to phone home again.  Worst case, set your phone as a mobile access point, let it phone home, then kill the access point.  Problem solved.

[ebr 16169]

This is probably not true!

 

I recently purchased a lifetime license and made a setup on a raspberry pi. However - booting it up in the camper (without internet connection) the web gui does not show this golden premiere coin and the server won't work with more than one Android App connected (Is this a normal limitation? Then an error message would be a great improvement over the timeout...). If I connect the pi to lan again - all works without problems. So it looks like the premiere functions are tied to a working internet connection - at least on startup. Sad!

 

Now I hope that the web viewer will work smoothly on this old tablets or my children will kill me for the false promises...

 

Andreas

 

Hi.  Did you allow it to validate while connected the first time?  It needs to validate at least once.

 

Thanks.

[mollat 2]

As I said, it has to phone home every couple of weeks to verify your premiere status.  Once it does that, it will be fine until it has to phone home again.  Worst case, set your phone as a mobile access point, let it phone home, then kill the access point.  Problem solved.

 

The problem is, that I have to let the server connect to the internet EVERY TIME I SWITCH IT ON. I can't let the server run 24/7 in our caravan just for licensing purposes - this is not practical, as it would consume battery all the time. And no - it is not as easy to connect the pi to the internet. It is (by now) a plain, headless raspbian, the internal wireless module is (manually) configured as access point (for the pads) and my mobile phone has (of course) no ethernet connection to plug it into the pi.

 

Hi.  Did you allow it to validate while connected the first time?  It needs to validate at least once.

 

I tried this when the pi was connected to the lan (several times now). However - switching it off, pulling out the lan, and on again the golden coin disappears and the 'get emby premiere'-button appears again.

 

Thanks for all your help anyway - but now(!!! I have to get into the caravan and go. I configured the web client to use small bandwidth only, so it will not stutter anymore and allthough the web user interface is a bit ugly and slow on the old pads (Amazon's Fire 7" 2013 with lineageos) in contrast to the android app, I think my kids will be satisfied somehow...

 

Regards, Andreas

Edited July 30, 2019 by mollat

[Luke 42077]

Are you running the latest version of emby server?

[stephen.m.carter.2016 1]

Admins please delete if not appropriate...

OP - I have similar needs. The kids have the emby app on their tablets and can download some movies before we leave but it's a pain and takes a while if more than a few movies, especially when transcoding to a downscaled version.

 

I also use an RPi while out.

[mollat 2]

We are now back from holidays. The first part of the road trip was fine - as we had one Emby app working, the second child had alternately to play a video game and the third one had some movies uploaded on the tablet.

 

After a week or so, the Emby app stopped working (some "no license" error message). However - the golden coin appeared again on the emby server. The childs then watched on the travel with the web app - but this did not run very smoothly. Every now and then the playing was interrupted and had to be started again. This was not really satisfying...

 

Are you running the latest version of emby server?

 

It was version 4.1.1.0.

 

I'll try again with the 4.2 version. I have lots of time to test this now until the next road trip...

Edited August 15, 2019 by mollat

[Luke 42077]

How long was the road trip?

[mollat 2]

How long was the road trip?

 

We were two weeks on the way with the camper. About 20 hours to entertain the children. However - they loved it to look movies and series as much as they like. And we loved it to have silence while driving...

 

I took a raspberry pi 4 (4GB) as standalone wireless access point connected with a 2TB ssd drive (usb3) and an additional 12V fan plugged on to a 5V USB connector (slow and quiet). However - I am not allowed to insert a photograph here, so I will attach one.

 

Exept the licensing problems it was seamlessly providing about 6000 movies and (mostly) series on the road...

[stephen.m.carter.2016 1]

I’ve solved it using an out of he box solution. Using a Raspberry Pi I installed an image called Piratebox onto it. It runs as a WiFi hotspot and serves media content using either its own built-in web server or via DLNA. The kids have VLC media player on their iPads. They attach to the WiFi network running on Piratebox then browse the movie collection using VLC ‘Local Network’. It isn’t as nice as emby as it is just serving files only so no enrichment of content or user rating controls or played / currently watching knowledge etc but it does work on the road with no license restrictions. I completely understand the need to protect emby as a product but I also do long haul trips with the family often away from civilisation for more than a fortnight.

I plug it into a 12v socket attached to my Auxillary battery so when I stop the car it doesn’t hard power off the RPi. I SSH to it using Terminus app from my iPhone the perform clean shutdown. The later being relevant regardless of emby or other setup while on the road.

[Luke 42077]

We were two weeks on the way with the camper. About 20 hours to entertain the children. However - they loved it to look movies and series as much as they like. And we loved it to have silence while driving...

 

I took a raspberry pi 4 (4GB) as standalone wireless access point connected with a 2TB ssd drive (usb3) and an additional 12V fan plugged on to a 5V USB connector (slow and quiet). However - I am not allowed to insert a photograph here, so I will attach one.

 

Exept the licensing problems it was seamlessly providing about 6000 movies and (mostly) series on the road...

 

Ok, the grace period in the app is a little bit less than that so that's why this happened. We can look into improving it.

[mollat 2]

Ok, the grace period in the app is a little bit less than that so that's why this happened. We can look into improving it.

 

If I could make a suggestion: Checking the license online in short periods is essentially important for the monthly/yearly licenses.

 

You could extend the grace period for the yearly licenses, or you do not even need the grace period for the lifetime license at all...   As the most important features in Emby need internet access anyway - you could still check the valid key and the license limits everytime someone works online and you could still block stolen keys easily.

 

However - I would be happy with a grace time of 6 weeks (for the lifetime license), which is a typical summer holiday period here. Maybe you could also motivate other people to switch to yearly or lifetime licenses for the benefit to use it better offline...

[Luke 42077]

Thanks for the feedback.

[JSH19 0]

I have not had issues with the server, but "every couple of weeks" is simply not true for Emby Theater on Windows 10.

 

I live on a boat and my marina has got the worst wi-fi I have seen since my second tour in Iraq.

 

My set up has all my media files in a Synology NAS plugged into the router in my boat which has no internet access, it just provides a backbone for services on the vessel.

 

Because the NAS is not connected, at any time, to the internet my server lives on a laptop which is generally wirelessly connected to the router, In fact, the only time I usually connect the laptop to the Internet is to update software, the main driver of this is Emby Theater which will not load after 1-2 days.

 

Once I connect to the internet it opens and seems to run normally so, presumably, it is successfully contacting https://api.github.com/repos/MediaBrowser/Emby.Theater.Windows/releases.

 

it was more like 5-6 days previously, but it is definitely shorter now.

 

Perhaps the check for Emby Theater license could be rolled into the server since i run that in the background at boot?

 

in any case, I have very little content on my laptop so I don't typically run the Emby Theater app when I am online, unless it has been two days since the last time I did...

 

really, I bought the lifetime license because I don't have cable/Satellite/or robust enough internet for streaming content.

 

I am happy to discuss the license verification process at length, I'm sure that I don't understand how it works, but I am equally sure that it doesn't work well at all if you don't have a pretty close to full time internet connection.

[ebr 16169]

It may actually be the update check instead of the license check that is giving Theater problems...

[Luke 42077]

We're looking into improving this. Thanks for the feedback.

[Dibbes 514]

If I could make a suggestion: Checking the license online in short periods is essentially important for the monthly/yearly licenses.

 

You could extend the grace period for the yearly licenses, or you do not even need the grace period for the lifetime license at all...   As the most important features in Emby need internet access anyway - you could still check the valid key and the license limits everytime someone works online and you could still block stolen keys easily.

 

However - I would be happy with a grace time of 6 weeks (for the lifetime license), which is a typical summer holiday period here. Maybe you could also motivate other people to switch to yearly or lifetime licenses for the benefit to use it better offline...

Good to see I'm not the only one with these issues... I've never understood the reason for a call-home with a perpetual license, not even M$ does that...

[cptlores 40]

They want to prevent you from running the same licence on multiple servers... It's the "guilty until otherwise proven" mentality that ALWAYS ends up hurting legitimate users.

Edited August 31, 2019 by cptlores

[mollat 2]

They want to prevent you from running the same licence on multiple servers... [...]

 

I think this could be reasonably covered already with:

 

- checking the licence while installation and

- checking every time internet connection is available.

 

As the strong points of Emby are only usable with internet connection anyway, if the licence will be checked while installing and while online, I don't see a real risk of someone stealing a key and using it for lifetime offline and totally without updates. Even then, in sum this people will have less features than with the free version.

 

Another idea: Make an option to "downgrade" an Emby installation (with lifetime key) to a "play only" sub system, that switches off all functions exept plain watching movies. No cloud, no Alexa, no TV, no re-encoding, not even editing of metadata. This instance then maybe could live with the licence checks I described above... Just as a plain media library for caravan or boat. That would be sufficient, as nobody would work on his media library without internet connection anyway.

 

BTW: It would be very helpfull for me getting to know when the 'grace period' (of my 'offline' server) exactly expires, so that I can plan the next internet connection early enough... Does anybody know how to achive this date/time ???

 

Andreas

Edited September 2, 2019 by mollat

[JSH19 0]

Have we made any progress on this issue? I understand that it probably only effects a small percentage of users,  but two days is....

[mollat 2]

Played around with the date settings of server and clients. Now I am able to "extend" the grace period for a couple of weeks that will fit my minimal needs on travelling.

 

Please try yourself, I will not post the exact method, not to inspire anyone to enlengthen his monthly license or someone else to close this "bug".

 

Annoying though, so I still hope for a clean and sturdy solution on this...

Edited October 30, 2019 by mollat

[crazy4emby 1]

Hi Team. Was this ever addressed again? I think and easy solution was to allow the lifetime license to not phone home at all until it has been registered 25 times on 25 different installations. All kinds of inconvenience is being caused for a case that effects very few people. The Theater app also craps out for no apparent reason when using a pi or nuc type of computer in the car on localhost with HDMI. Emby is such an incredible machine. This really needs to be fixed.