Many many people use Emby as their home media server, yet the Home Assistant community seems blind to its existence. The integration is barely functional, still labeled “legacy”, and gets no active development at all. Why?
In contrast, Plex, which has questionable privacy practices to run their server, gets all kinds of development in HA. Not being a developer myself, I (and many others) depend on the kindness of people to volunteer their contributions, and we are very grateful to those who do… But there has to be some kind of management of these things by the HA developers, in my opinion.
Home Assistant shows that Emby is a supported integration on their integrations page, even though it’s not functional in the most basic of ways. Part of the marketing is saying that the platform integrates all of these things, so there should be some level of responsibility to make sure the marketing is accurate. If my resume included a statement that I supported 35 programming languages, but then after getting hired, said that I couldn’t actually write code that worked… well… You get the point.
How can we get someone with some knowledge to look into committing basic functionality into Emby (and other) seemingly dead integrations?
Possibly because its designated maintainer has abandoned it?
Integrations can have designated maintainers or are completely community supported (scroll to the bottom of the integration’s documentation to see its maintainers).
Sometimes the maintainers are employees of Nabu Casa in which case they tend to keep the integration up to date. In other cases they are volunteers with plenty of time to maintain their integration. In many other instances, they are volunteers with very limited time or have lost interest.
In some situations, the integration has fallen so far behind the times, and no volunteers are available to resuscitate it, that it’s removed.
The Emby integration falls somewhere in that spectrum.
It’s been two years since this was updated at all… If nobody is available to step up, I’d say it’s time for Home Assistant to stop claiming that it supports one of the most popular media servers out there…
I understand the challenges of volunteer work, and I’m not beating up anybody. I just don’t think it should be listed as supported when it isn’t.
Honestly, I’m not sure. I’ve had this integration installed for a very long time, so technically, I’m a “user”… But I just had it sitting there in a dysfunctional state hoping it would be updated at some point. Maybe some others will chime in here, on whether they actually still use it in some way, or like me, it’s just sitting there doing nothing but throwing “unavailable” entities into our configuration.
I’m removing it, as it seems there is no hope for it improving… There isn’t even anyone to ask, since the maintainer hasn’t done anything on Github for a couple years…
Thanks, I’m aware of Jellyfin. I liked its open source philosophy, but at the time, Emby seemed ahead of it since Jellyfin was a fork. I can always spin up a docker a see where Jellyfin is now (it’s been years) compared to Emby.
But I also have a lifetime Emby subscription. They should run side by side with the same movie shares though…