Emby what happens when Jellyfin becomes just as good if not better ?

[nz_monkey 5]

Well it's 2024 now and Jellyfin has definitely closed the gap.

 

And in two areas it is significantly better than Emby: transcoding and tone mapping

In Jellyfin you can transcode to and stream in h265 and AV1

The tone mapping is also faster and noticeably visually better (more accurate)

 

 

Edited June 26, 2024 by nz_monkey

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

41 minutes ago, nz_monkey said:

Well it's 2024 now and Jellyfin has definitely closed the gap.

 

And in two areas it is significantly better than Emby: transcoding and tone mapping

In Jellyfin you can transcode to and stream in h265 and AV1

The tone mapping is also faster and noticeably visually better (more accurate)

 

 

Actually, out of curiosity, I looked at Jellyfin last week and i have to say it is little more than hot garbage. It is ugly, one of the least important things to me, and it is slow, and it does not scan my library well at all. it also has a LOT of problems  on my Rokus, which is my favorite client, and it was still basically pirated from Emby. They appear to have removed all Emby's credit for the large chunks of code that Emby wrote. 

Basically they have a product I would use Plex over by a good margin and even just use a browser rather than using the garbage they present as a program.

Edited June 26, 2024 by Gilgamesh_48

[RanmaCanada 494]

I have to agree with @Gilgamesh_48it is nothing but hot garbage. They've abandoned their Apple TV app completely (yes I am hard on the Emby team about their struggles, but at least they're still trying) and they still haven't changed the layout from 6 years ago. Things are so bad at Jellyfin that they have been begging for developers and their community to help since October 2023. Guess when you base your product on "FU give me my free stuff" you get what you deserve. Heck they only have 2 people at most, total, working on their apps.

It's a joke. 

 

[ebr 16169]

11 hours ago, nz_monkey said:

The tone mapping is also faster and noticeably visually better (more accurate)

Hi.  Exactly how did you determine this?

@softworkz

[bakes82 167]

10 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

Heck they only have 2 people at most, total, working on their apps.

It's a joke. 

 

Does emby have more than that?  From what they have posted it seems like they have 1 Roku guy and the rest of the apps are a mash of whoever has time to dedicate from the sever code also.  Luke has also specified that apple development is “hard” but it also doesn’t seem like they have a dedicated Apple developer. I say landscaping is hard but the landscaper I pay weekly seems to make it look super easy bc and has never been like we can’t do that because it’s hard.  I find it interesting that plex hasn’t looked to acquire infuse and have him work on their iOS apps, then they could remove the app and pretty much dominate the Apple ecosystem as emby and jelly wouldn’t be able to complete.

[softworkz 5066]

5 hours ago, ebr said:

16 hours ago, nz_monkey said:

The tone mapping is also faster and noticeably visually better (more accurate)

Hi.  Exactly how did you determine this?

@softworkz

I don't follow what they are doing. Last time I looked (little more than a year ago), they were using the tone mapping as implemented in ffmpeg, just the same like we do as well.

In our case, two exceptions exist:

• I've created a significantly faster implementation for software tone mapping on x86 CPUs which is using CPU vector extension instructions (SSE3, AVX, SIMD) for parallel execution (doing multiple calculations in a single CPU cycle)
• For OpenCL-based tone mapping, I also created a more efficient implementation which is using Intel extensions for increased parallelism
  (actually two of them: Extra-T and Super-T; one works on RGB data which is faster on some CPUs)

All those implementations are functionally equivalent to ffmpeg's implementation and have the same parameters - we're just not exposing all of them (there was no interest shown when we had this in beta).

@nz_monkey - Please provide some evidence/repos/examples for your claim. Thanks.

[speechles 2055]

@bakes82Appearances can be deceiving. There are wheels in motion that you cannot see. You only see the ones on the forum, such as myself, and think where are the others? Since I can also troubleshoot the issues and don't have a problem with being here it is okay. Other devs have just enough time to code, and don't have time to dedicate to the forum or anything else.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/emby

According to this Emby has between 11 and 50 people employed. Does that answer your question?

[yocker 1247]

Only thing Jellyfin has that Emby doesn't that i miss is Dolby Vision transcoding support which i know is a licensing issue but... Please oh please give it to us somehow!

And Device number limit, i can live with that though.

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

21 hours ago, speechles said:

According to this Emby has between 11 and 50 people employed. Does that answer your question?

That is a rather huge difference in numbers and it really does not say much about the current development team as the gap between 11 and 50 is 39 and that is a huge numerical difference. But it may be the best than can be provided as Emb is an internet company. Although the difference may be explained by "contractors" being counted differently than employs or partners but it still sees to be a super large gap.

I don't really care much but the answer given is about as close to useless as a true answer can be.

There are two ways to think about answers of this sort:
1. It is the best answer possible.
2. It is an attempt to answer without answering and giving info by hiding it within such a huge mass of data that, even if found, will be hidden by being overwhelmed in the masses of extraneous info.

But it does not matter much to me as all I want/need is for my Emby server(s) to work correctly and now, mostly, they do.

[speechles 2055]

@Gilgamesh_48There is no benefit to knowing how many people work for Emby either as contracted or employed directly. I myself do not even know those numbers. I would expect this is normal as that range is given for tax purposes. You must disclose certain things and that website keeps track of those things. It wasn't to deceive you or act mockingly giving a funny answer. I was being quite serious. That is the most accurate reflection of the company at this time. Emby will continue to be awesome and support your media your way regardless of how many the headcount is. Apologies it appeared there was some hidden meaning behind any of what I said. I was being honest with what information is available at this time.

Edited June 27, 2024 by speechles

[speechles 2055]

16 hours ago, yocker said:

Only thing Jellyfin has that Emby doesn't that i miss is Dolby Vision transcoding support which i know is a licensing issue but...

Is Jellyfin violating any licensing and using a public repository to host their agenda? That could lead to headaches for them in the future. They might get deleted. In this world we are in today abusing licensing rights is something you want to avoid.

Edited June 27, 2024 by speechles

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

37 minutes ago, speechles said:

@Gilgamesh_48There is no benefit to knowing how many people work for Emby either as contracted or employed directly. I myself do not even know those numbers. I would expect this is normal as that range is given for tax purposes. You must disclose certain things and that website keeps track of those things. It wasn't to deceive you or act mockingly giving a funny answer. I was being quite serious. That is the most accurate reflection of the company at this time. Emby will continue to be awesome and support your media your way regardless of how many the headcount is. Apologies it appeared there was some hidden meaning behind any of what I said. I was being honest with what information is available at this time.

I am sorry I used the verbage I did as it has clearly resulted in misunderstanding.

I did not mean to say that there was any nefarious purpose to the post I just wanted to say that the post really did not mean anything as it was so vague as to be meaningless. 
The actual numbers matter not at all but what does matter is perception and the perception of vague answers is that something is being hidden. I do not believe anything is actually being hidden but I can see how some, perhaps many, people could see it as intentionally misleading.

I usually love Emby, if I did not I would not use it or post here, but often as a company Emby comes across as less than upfront with their users. 

I really wish Emby was totally upfront about everything but I understand that in the internet world and the corporate world that is nearly impossible. 

Oh: I hope that Emby does not get so paranoid that they withdraw from most all user interaction as one of the big positives of Emby is the willingness to listen and even act on some user input.

BTW: I think I have said this before but Emby is very similar to God in some respects, one obvious example is that Emby answers all prayers but, sometimes, the answer is no.

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

50 minutes ago, speechles said:

Is Jellyfin violating any licensing and using a public repository to host their agenda? That could lead to headaches for them in the future. They might get deleted. In this world we are in today abusing licensing rights is something you want to avoid.

I believe that Jellyfin violates a LOT of licensing and use laws but they do it in a way so as to make any enforcement very very hard. They use the law like a drunkard uses a car. While it provides transportation it also becomes a lethal weapon in the hands of said drunkard.

[yocker 1247]

2 hours ago, speechles said:

Is Jellyfin violating any licensing and using a public repository to host their agenda? That could lead to headaches for them in the future. They might get deleted. In this world we are in today abusing licensing rights is something you want to avoid.

It's possible but as with how Jellyfin is structured it might be hard to enforce anything. Any agency might just be able to force Jellyfin to remove something but it will be back soon cause of it's open sauce.

That's not a bad thing necessarily, to many things are no longer yours even when you paid for them. Just look at Apple and Microsoft products. IMO.

[RanmaCanada 494]

17 hours ago, yocker said:

It's possible but as with how Jellyfin is structured it might be hard to enforce anything. Any agency might just be able to force Jellyfin to remove something but it will be back soon cause of it's open sauce.

That's not a bad thing necessarily, to many things are no longer yours even when you paid for them. Just look at Apple and Microsoft products. IMO.

DV tone mapping does violate IP laws as DV is 100% proprietary and you must have a license to use it. I would not be surprised if Dolby pulls a Nintendo and goes after Jellyfin if they get bigger. As for now, they might be flying under their radar, until someone blows them up on tiktoc like what happened after emulation came to iphones.

[yocker 1247]

They could probably fork it if that happened or more likely someone else make a plugin.

[ebr 16169]

18 hours ago, yocker said:

to many things are no longer yours even when you paid for them

But you didn't pay Dolby...

25 minutes ago, yocker said:

They could probably fork it if that happened or more likely someone else make a plugin.

People can always find a way to steal, correct.

1 hour ago, RanmaCanada said:

I would not be surprised if Dolby pulls a Nintendo and goes after Jellyfin

No Idea if they will or not but I can tell you they definitely contacted us in our early days.

[Abobader 3464]

1 hour ago, ebr said:

People can always find a way to steal, correct.

True Indeed.

[yocker 1247]

1 hour ago, ebr said:

But you didn't pay Dolby...

No Idea if they will or not but I can tell you they definitely contacted us in our early days.

That is correct but i was thinking more of the bigger picture and not just Dolby there. Like right to repair and such where open source can be very helpful. That is whole other conversation though. (Just in case so theres no confusion, i'm in no way complaining about lack of Dolby transcoding in Emby and i understand why it's not there).

What was the reason they contacted you? I don't see you breaking any licensing at any point.

Edited June 28, 2024 by yocker

[softworkz 5066]

10 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

DV tone mapping does violate IP laws as DV is 100% proprietary and you must have a license to use it.

It's not that simple and probably not true in this case.

In Europe at least, software patents are tightly limited to certain cases. Sometimes it's also said like that software cannot be patented at all and neither formats. The only thing which can be patented are "procedures" (like algorithms) and these need to have a rather high level of unique and inventionary character. One such example are audio and video codecs (actually only specific elements).
From my understanding, none of the Dolby Visiion components meets those citeria - for Europe at least, and that's where the headqarter of ffmpeg is located (France).
Probably they have plenty of nonsense patents in the U.S., though, but that doesn't suffice for a worldwide strategy. It appears to me that their actual strategy is to make their DolbyVision standards incredibly complicated (without need) in order to avoid anybody dealing with it. And there comes their deal in place for DV licensing where they offer a complete IP Core (which is like a software on a chip, but not on a physical chip but rather the definition of it, which TV manufactures can then include in their own hardware chips.

Their licensing model is up for masses, so when they would go after 

• JF: There's no money to get from anybody there
• Emby: It would be a pretty small amount, not worth sending lawyers for it

So, the only reasons for acting in this direction would be of strategical kind, and both, Emby and JF are not really primary targets, because then they would go after the source of the tone mapping implementation, which is MPV player and ffmpeg. They won't be able to get after ffmpeg, but they would probably start with the biggest US bundlers of ffmpeg .

This needs to be seen in relation: ffmpeg has a reach of probably > 100 Million installations (at least tens of Millions). Emby and JF are just nothing compared to those figures.

[softworkz 5066]

From the Technical Side

You may remember that those DV files still play - just with false colors. What's missing was the knowledge how to do that transformation in order to get the proper output colors.
A guy has figured it out and added to libplacebo, which drives MPV player graphics. Later it has been added to ffmpeg.

The problem is that it uses Vulkan hardware acceleration and that's something we're not using currently. Interoperation between hw contexts is error-prone and unpredictable and when doing everything with Vulkan, then other transocding operation wouldn't be possible and it would severely affect reliability in transcoding.

I haven't followed their threads, but I would bet on the following: When you read a little bit further than just the headline, telling that it can do DV tone mapping, then you will find many caveates and conditions under only which this is working there. This is something for fiddlers, but we try to provide features in a solid, reliable and predictable way.

It would be easy to get this working in Emby for a specific case, then we could raise the hand and say "yes, we got that feature", even though it wouldn't work for most of you and cause issues for those where it's working. 

[ebr 16169]

On 6/28/2024 at 10:42 AM, yocker said:

What was the reason they contacted you?

They wanted us to pay licensing for AC3 because we supported it in our apps.  Basically, their patent on that particular codec expired before any resolution was found. 

[TMCsw 248]

22 minutes ago, ebr said:

They wanted us to pay licensing for AC3

This makes me a little curious about AC4 as there are some hinting on the 'orange' forum that emby is ignoring this license...

[softworkz 5066]

 

32 minutes ago, TMCsw said:

there are some hinting on the 'orange' forum that emby is ignoring this license...

So, Plex doesn't?

[softworkz 5066]

Strictly speaking, it's ffmpeg which supports it, Emby doesn't have any specific implementation regarding AC-4.