All dates are off, problem with timezone?

[visproduction 315]

I often see one day off dates in actor's birthdates.  The bug still happens and has been there for several years. 

A wild guess would be inside the code that transfers dates.  If there is a list of available dates by month for January for example:  (1,2,3,4,...31)  Position 0 is 1, position 1 is 2, position 2 is 3.  It's easy to see how it's possible to pull the wrong number and never see that this is broken. 

[coreyh74 0]

Is there any update to this? This is still the case. Would be great to have a fix for this.

[Luke 42077]

On 10/26/2024 at 10:12 AM, coreyh74 said:

Is there any update to this? This is still the case. Would be great to have a fix for this.

Hi there, can you please describe your issue in more detail? Thanks !

[Quack6765 2]

I'm having the same issue. For example using the following show Stat (2022) with episode 119:

https://www.thetvdb.com/series/stat-2022/episodes/11072929

We can see that the aired date is april 24 2025 but yet in Emby it shows april 23 2025:

Now in my Emby logs we can confirm that the metadata is pulled from TVDB from the correct page and I made sure to have TVDB as my main metadata provider.

2025-05-06 14:21:57.219 Debug App: Running TvdbEpisodeProvider for /data/tv-shows/Stat (2022)/Season 03/Stat (2022) - S03E119 - Episode 119 [WEBDL-1080p][AAC 2.0][h264]-TFA.mkv
2025-05-06 14:21:57.219 Info HttpClient: GET https://api4.thetvdb.com/v4/episodes/11072929/extended?meta=translations
2025-05-06 14:21:57.310 Debug App: Running EpisodeNfoProvider for /data/tv-shows/Stat (2022)/Season 03/Stat (2022) - S03E119 - Episode 119 [WEBDL-1080p][AAC 2.0][h264]-TFA.mkv
2025-05-06 14:21:57.310 Debug App: EpisodeNfoProvider returned no metadata for /data/tv-shows/Stat (2022)/Season 03/Stat (2022) - S03E119 - Episode 119 [WEBDL-1080p][AAC 2.0][h264]-TFA.mkv

If we check the any other episode from TVDB and Emby we can see the same behaviour. For example using the episode 1 of season 3 TVDB says the aired date is sept 9 but Emby shows sept 8.

 

So the issue is that somehow when fetching the metadata Emby does some parsing or formatting to the date and something is not working correctly which results in subtracting 1 day for all released date versus what TVDB has for all episodes

[Happy2Play 9780]

Comes up every so often

 

But not sure where the disconnect happens on some systems.

[Quack6765 2]

If you change your browser timezone to America/Toronto are you able to reproduce the issue ?

 

Edited May 6, 2025 by Quack6765

[Quack6765 2]

Looking at the dev console, it seems the backend is showing the correct date but yet the frontend shows 1 day earlier as the aired date

[Luke 42077]

Hi, have you checked to ensure that the local time zone is set correctly on both the server and client machines?

[Quack6765 2]

I was able to fix the issue. Using the official docker image, the value

TZ='America/New_York'

is not respected and does nothing. So even if Emby was using the correct timezone, the actual docker container was still on UTC.

Instead I mapped the following volume in my docker compose file:

- /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
- /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro

which resulted in my container using the host (so the correct) timezone. 

After that I refreshed+replaced all metadata for the show and the episode is now correctly showing april 24.

Thanks !

[Steve E 2]

I thought the emby server was messed up first time I used privacy.resistfingerprinting browser setting

That setting forces GMT ignoring the computer's timezone

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting

[Blue278 22]

On 07/05/2025 at 13:51, Quack6765 said:

I was able to fix the issue. Using the official docker image, the value

TZ='America/New_York'

is not respected and does nothing. So even if Emby was using the correct timezone, the actual docker container was still on UTC.

Instead I mapped the following volume in my docker compose file:

- /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
- /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro

which resulted in my container using the host (so the correct) timezone. 

After that I refreshed+replaced all metadata for the show and the episode is now correctly showing april 24.

Thanks !

Would you be so kind to tell me step by step how to use docker compose file to solved timezone issue?

Thanks

Edited July 16, 2025 by Blue278

[Blue278 22]

@Lukewould it be possible for Emby to natively support the correct timezone? 

The fix is referring to FireFox. I use safari.

Edited July 17, 2025 by Blue278

[brothom 177]

On Windows 10 using Emby version 4.8.11.0 with the timezone set to UTC+1 I see that in my example the date for the episode Foundation s02e03 the Emby premieredate is the following: 2023-07-27T00:00:00.0000000Z.

That matches with https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/93740-foundation/season/2/episode/3 but not with https://www.thetvdb.com/series/foundation-2021/episodes/9785494
 and that's correct for my settings; TMDB is preferred over TVDB.

In my case the date "27 jul 2023" is also displayed with this episode so that also seems correct.

@Blue278does this issue affect all of your episodes or just some?

Edited July 17, 2025 by brothom
Correct / clarification

[Blue278 22]

5 hours ago, brothom said:

On Windows 10 using Emby version 4.8.11.0 with the timezone set to UTC+1 I see that in my example the date for the episode Foundation s02e03 the Emby premieredate is the following: 2023-07-27T00:00:00.0000000Z.

That matches with https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/93740-foundation/season/2/episode/3 but not with https://www.thetvdb.com/series/foundation-2021/episodes/9785494
 and that's correct for my settings; TMDB is preferred over TVDB.

In my case the date "27 jul 2023" is also displayed with this episode so that also seems correct.

@Blue278does this issue affect all of your episodes or just some?

All

[brothom 177]

23 minutes ago, Blue278 said:

All

This is going to sound weird, but are the dates of on all devices as well? Have you tried the mobile app, TV app and browser version? 

If they're off an all devices, can you post an example of a specific episode and the date that's displayed/wrong and the date you're expecting/correct?

Edited July 17, 2025 by brothom

[Blue278 22]

7 hours ago, brothom said:

This is going to sound weird, but are the dates of on all devices as well? Have you tried the mobile app, TV app and browser version? 

If they're off an all devices, can you post an example of a specific episode and the date that's displayed/wrong and the date you're expecting/correct?

All are in sync.

[brothom 177]

9 hours ago, Blue278 said:

All are in sync.

With "All are in sync." you mean that they all display the same (wrong) date or did the issue somehow fix itself on all of your devices?

Can you also provide an exact episode and incorrect date so we can check the data on our end?

[Blue278 22]

All showing the wrong date.

18/7/2025 - The Unexplained SE7 E12. The date is correct, but technically incorrect for my timezone when using Emby.

 

 

 

Edited July 18, 2025 by Blue278

[brothom 177]

Okay so the issue here is that the date itself is correct, but the expectation is that timezone settings are applied to the date itself?

So for example a date of 2025-07-19 at 19:30:00 in a timezone of +5 would translate to 2025-07-20 at 00:30:00?

I'm not sure if Emby can work this way. That means each media item would also have to have a source timezone attached to it because a US release would be different from a EU or JP release.

Formatting the timezone according to localisation is no problem and already happens but I'm not sure if this is intended to work that way.

Regardless; any release dates are also displayed as-is without timezone application on my end as well.

[Blue278 22]

On 19/07/2025 at 09:29, brothom said:

Okay so the issue here is that the date itself is correct, but the expectation is that timezone settings are applied to the date itself?

So for example a date of 2025-07-19 at 19:30:00 in a timezone of +5 would translate to 2025-07-20 at 00:30:00?

I'm not sure if Emby can work this way. That means each media item would also have to have a source timezone attached to it because a US release would be different from a EU or JP release.

Formatting the timezone according to localisation is no problem and already happens but I'm not sure if this is intended to work that way.

Regardless; any release dates are also displayed as-is without timezone application on my end as well.

Thanks. I’ve been using Kodi for years and it handles timezones with ease, so I had high expectations. I was set on using Emby as my daily driver, but apart from that, there are two annoying bugs that haven’t been fixed yet: auto-next episode and stuttering when subtitles are enabled. Unfortunately, I won’t be renewing my subscription, but I hope the two bugs will be sorted in a few months.

[brothom 177]

7 hours ago, Blue278 said:

Thanks. I’ve been using Kodi for years and it handles timezones with ease, so I had high expectations. I was set on using Emby as my daily driver, but apart from that, there are two annoying bugs that haven’t been fixed yet: auto-next episode and stuttering when subtitles are enabled. Unfortunately, I won’t be renewing my subscription, but I hope the two bugs will be sorted in a few months.

Well as I said, I'm not exactly sure about the timezones but I can imagine you'll need a source timezone to "translate" the time from the source, to the target timezone.

I did a double check on The UnXplained (2019) - s07e12 and I receive the following date: 2025-07-18T00:00:00.0000000Z which is displayed Jul 18, 2025 and is also shown on TheMovieDB https://www.themoviedb.org/tv/91371-the-unxplained/season/7/episode/12.

@LukeI suspect no datetime formatting is actually done given the date in Emby always seems to match the date provided by the data provider (themoviedb, thetvdb, etc). I can't find any way to make the displayed date show as "another date", regardless of my local machine's timezone, browser locale or server timezone.

I think what's going on here is: 

Expectation
2025-07-18T00:00:00.0000000Z in a -8 timezone = 2025-07-17T16:00:00.0000000Z

Reality
2025-07-18T00:00:00.0000000Z = 2025-07-18T00:00:00.0000000Z.

The above makes sense (to not translate the date according to timezone). The premiere date needs to be formatted according to the source timezone (for example GTM-5) and then converted to the local timezone (GTM+3), resulting in an 8 hour time different. Looking at TheMovieDB and TheTVDB I can't even find any premiere date timezones / release time zones tho.