Yatse as Jellyfin client: Not sending start media message

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Yatse as Jellyfin client: Not sending start media message:

Yatse works great as a Jellyfin client!

However, I have noticed that while everything plays fine in Yatse, somehow Jellyfin doesn’t know I have started to play the media. It is as if Yatse does not send a “I am now starting to play this” command, even though the media is actually played.

Jellyfin does mark media as watched and also adds resume points, but several features that require Jellyfin to know what’s playing don’t work.

To Reproduce

Yatse 12.0.0
Jellyfin 10.10.7
Playback Method: DirectPlay (i.e. no transcoding)

Note that transcoding is disabled in all examples below, to avoid additional complications, VLC is used as the external player (in both Yatse and official Jellyfin android client), and media is not saved offline via Yatse (i.e. it’s streaming via Jellyfin [IP]/Videos/[ID]/stream.mkv), but not being transcoded)

Method One: Jellyfin Activity Log

  1. Have a Jellyfin server with media on it.
  2. Start playing media using a browser or official Jellyfin client.
  3. Stop playing the media.
  4. Now repeat the same process but using Yatse as the Jellyfin client.
  5. Go to Activity Log in Jellyfin Dashboard
  6. Note that clients like official Jellyfin client, browser, etc. log “[User] is playing [Media]” in Activity Log when starting to play, as well as “[User] has finished playing [Media]” when finished.
  7. Note that any time media is played via Yatse, nothing shows in the Activity Log while playing. Only after finishing playing then “[User] has finished playing [Media]” is logged. The “[User] is playing [Media]” activity is never logged. Jellyfin does not seem to know that Yatse has started playing media.

Method Two: Playback Reporting

  1. Have a Jellyfin server with media on it.
  2. Ensure the official “Playback Reporting” plugin is installed and active
  3. Repeat playing with Yatse and official clients as per method one above.
  4. Note that any media played with Yatse does not show up in the Playback Reporting statistics.
  5. Note that media played with other clients does show up in the Playback Reporting statistics.

Method Three: Using Jellyfin Logs

  1. Repeat playing with Yatse and official clients as per method one above.
  2. Tail the Jellyfin log
  3. Note that the various info in the Jellyfin log is different when Yatse plays media, as opposed to when other clients play the media.
  4. It would appear that other clients send a “Starting to play media” message, which Yatse does not send. It would appear Yatse only sends a “Stopped playing media at offset X” message when stopping playing. Jellyfin is doing a good job of figuring out watched state etc. from these stopped messages, but various things that require the start message (for example the statistics plugin mentioned above) are not working.