At long last we're pleased to announce Emby Server 4.0. This new release will begin rolling out over the next 24 hours, so please be patient. This has been our longest release period ever, and going forward we intend to get back to a more frequent release schedule. This release is packed with improved performance, updates to existing features, as well as several brand new features.

Important Upgrade Information

After installing the update, the server will begin a database upgrade operation. If you attempt to open the web app during this time, you'll be given a friendly message informing you about this. This operation could take a little time, so please be patient with it.

After this is complete, any plugins you may have installed will require updates, so please check the status of this on your server dashboard. If any plugins are updated, remember that Emby Server will need to be restarted. After all updates have been applied, we recommend that you run a library scan. The first scan following the update could take longer than usual, so please be patient.

With that out of the way, let's go over the highlights of this release.

No Telemetry or Anonymous Usage Reporting

If you're wondering why the anonymous usage reporting setting has been removed, it's because not only have we removed the setting, but we've removed the function altogether. We know our audience pretty well thanks to this community, and because of that we've decided we no longed need any data reporting.

New Emby Live TV Guide Data

As previously announced, Live TV Guide Data is Now Included with Emby Premiere, if you're in the USA, Canada, or the UK. What does this mean? This means if you're in the USA, Canada or UK, you'll no longer need to setup an account with another website nor pay someone else for this data. You'll simply enter your zip code into Emby, select your channel lineup, and we'll handle retrieving your guide data.

We believe this will provide a better experience for Emby users with fewer setup steps. The new data is also quite a bit richer, and we will be looking at how we can take advantage of that to bring new Live TV features to Emby. Going forward, Live TV will require Emby Premiere in the web app, where previously this was not the case.

How to Migrate From Schedules Direct

If you are setting up the server fresh, then you should use our new Emby guide provider, which will be the default. If you are already using Schedules Direct, then you can continue to use it through the remainder of your Schedules Direct subscription. Schedules Direct has pledged to continue to honor your subscriptions, and we thank them for that.

New Levels of Performance

A database re-structuring brings your Emby Server and apps to new levels of performance that were previously not possible. Screens will load faster, videos will start quicker, and more. This will also manifest itself in other areas, such as improved library scan performance, and faster live tv guide refreshes. Please Note: The first scan after the update may take quite a while depending on your library contents and exactly what features you have enabled. Please be patient as subsequent scans will be much faster.

New and Improved Hardware Acceleration

This has been rebuilt from the ground up and is better than ever. We now have sophisticated hardware detection that runs on server startup to determine what your system can support. This allows us to provide you with an "easy mode" setting:

And if you enable advanced control, you'll be able to see what was detected:

Our hardware transcoding has been rewritten to take better advantage of each of the major GPU platforms, whether it be QuickSync, Nvidia, DXVA, VAAPI, MediaCodec, or others. This will allow hardware transcoding performance to perform better than ever.

Best of all, you can now monitor this on the server dashboard. The green bar indicates the current playback position while the orange bar designates the range that has been transcoded so far.

Important: Hardware acceleration has been truly a major effort for us, and because of this, it will now require Emby Premiere on all platforms except for Nvidia Shield and Western Digital.

Transcoding Throttling is Back

This feature has returned after a two year hiatus and is better than ever. What is transcoding throttling? Sometimes your server can transcode content much quicker than you're actually watching it. When the transcoding process gets a big enough lead on your watching position, we can slow it down on the fly in order to reduce the load on your server. Then as you're watching, if we need to speed it back up, we can do that too.

And best of all, your server dashboard will show you when transcoding is being throttled:



Emby Server Now Available for Android and Nvidia Shield

Stay tuned for separate announcements.

Improved Search

Search is now faster and now supports fuzzy search! This means you don't need to type your searches perfectly in order to see the matches you're looking for. For example, if you accidentally enter "Bad Breaking", instead of "Breaking Bad", you'll still be able to see Breaking Bad in the results.

Multi-Resolution TV Shows

Without requiring any changes to your file names, we now support having multiple versions of episodes. This doesn't require any special setup and you'll now see the friendly version selection on the episode screen:

Revamped Grouping Into Collections

This has now been moved from a server setting to directly onto the Movies list screen where it can be easily toggled.

Expanded Filtering

You can now filter on more fields such as container, video codec, audio codec, subtitle codec, and more. This filters are also remembered !



Expanded User Library Access

User library access can now be controlled for sub-folders, providing you with even greater flexibility than before.



Other Improvements

Update to .NET Core 2.2

Update to Sqlite 3.26.0

Improve library scan performance

Improve performance of live tv guide refresh

Improve subtitle delivery performance

Support Brotli http compression

Display video size on detail screens in Media Info

Significantly reduce dlna related network traffic

Add More Like This On Live TV section

Add tabbed layouts for music videos and home videos

Add network browsing to directory picker for Linux, Android and MacOS.

Change new indicators for programs to match guide data

Rework mobile context menus

Rework tv tabs to be consistent with Emby Theater

Downloaded subtitles are now saved using the two-character language code

Improve transcoding of low bit rate hevc

Add Moviedb season image provider

Show favorite people

Support tvg-chno with m3u tuners

Support tvg-shift with m3u tuners

Allow a library to be named "backdrops", a previously reserved name

Improve server dashboard display with blue radiance theme

Improve mobile server dashboard with bottom navigation

Added live tv channels to search feature

Improve layout of live tv channels tab under live tv

Add audio books content type

Use es-MX with MovieDb when Spanish language is selected along with Mexico as the country

Improve metadata with absolute episode ordering

Cloud sync upload improvements

Support launching android server on device startup

Add container, video codec, audio codec, and subtitle codec filters

Improve multi-resolution naming recognition

Improve automatic refreshing in the web app

Improve resiliency with iptv streams

Improve Windows sleep prevention while server is being used

Improve Chromecast volume control

Improve xmltv parsing of European characters

Support multiple images with xmltv

Use transcode=none profile for HD Homerun when appropriate

Support splitting musicbrainz id's on both slashes and semi-colons

Make alpha pickers dynamic based on content

Improve identify feature

Improve manual refreshing when replacing existing images

Improve database cleanup procedures of removed content

Improve automatic refreshing of recordings

Restore user permission to change password and profile image

Prevent syncing of in-progress recordings

Improve authentication failure logging for Fail2ban support

Add API to find item by provider id

Update new user defaults to not allow deleting media

Make news notifications configurable

Reduce size of Windows and MacOS installers by 30 MB

Support user subtitle download permissions

Defer collage image generation until images are needed

Move AudioDb and Omdb to pre-installed plugins

Move fanart.tv to pre-installed plugin

Move MusicBrainz to pre-installed plugin

Move MovieDb metadata provider to pre-installed plugin

Move nfo saver to pre-installed plugin

Move tvdb to pre-installed plugin

Support per-library resume settings

Bug Fixes