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Emby

The Emby provider gives Trobar playlists from your Emby server. Its playlist entries are matched against your local library by artist/album/title, the same as every other provider.

Emby and Jellyfin share the same lineage (Jellyfin is a 2018 fork of Emby's server) and a near-identical API — this provider is a separate client from Jellyfin's, and the two behave the same way from Trobar's side apart from how they authenticate.

Connecting to a Jellyfin server? Use the Jellyfin provider, not this one. Pointing the Emby provider at a Jellyfin server has historically worked, because the two APIs are so close. Against a default Jellyfin 12.0 server it stops authenticating: the Emby-style X-Emby-Token header this client sends is one of the legacy authorization mechanisms 12.0 ships turned off, and the request comes back 401. Measured on 10.11.11, where that header authenticates, and on 12.0.0, where it does not.

The header is disabled, not removed. A Jellyfin administrator can turn the legacy mechanism back on server-side (EnableLegacyAuthorization), after which this provider authenticates against that server again — so a 12.0 server may or may not accept it, depending on a setting Trobar cannot see. The advice is the same either way: use the Jellyfin provider for a Jellyfin server. It authenticates the way Jellyfin keeps, which is unchanged on both versions. This is a change on Jellyfin's side, not a Trobar deprecation — nothing changes for Emby servers.

Connecting

Enter the connection details in the setup wizard, or later under Administration → Provider connection (editable live, no restart):

  • Server URL — your Emby base URL (e.g. https://emby.example.com).
  • API key — created in Emby under Settings → API Keys.
  • Username — the Emby user whose playlists Trobar reads.

These credentials are read-only: Trobar uses them to read playlists.

Trobar can write to an Emby server, as a mirror target — a separate connection you configure yourself. Mirroring creates and updates playlists on that server and can delete items from them. It is off until you enable it, and never touches a playlist it did not create. When the mirror target is this same server, each mapped member's playlists are mirrored into their own Emby account. See Playlists.

Note

Emby is closed-source (Jellyfin is the FOSS fork) — that has no bearing on Trobar, which is only ever a client of your own server's documented API, the same relationship it has with Plex.