Stream Manager

The Stream Manager provides real-time monitoring of active media streams and tools to manage server availability.

Active Sessions

The sessions view shows all currently active streams across your connected servers. It polls every 5 seconds as a baseline, and — when Real-Time Sync is enabled — pushes updates within ~2 seconds of a play, pause, or stop via the server’s WebSocket. Real-time events also let the maintenance, blackout, and transcode enforcers see a new stream within about half a second instead of up to 30 seconds.

Information Displayed

For each active stream:

Field	Description
Server	Which media server is streaming
User	Username and avatar
Title	Media title (movie, episode, or track)
Type	Movie, Episode, or Track
Quality	Resolution, codec, container, bitrate
Player	App name, device, platform, playback state
Connection	Local or remote
Bandwidth	Network bandwidth consumed
Progress	Current position / total duration
Transcoding	Whether the stream is being converted, the encoder in use (VAAPI, NVENC, QSV, … or SW), and transcode speed

Working with Sessions

• Click a session card to open its detail panel with full overview, stream, media, and transcode information.
• Tick the checkbox in a card’s corner to select sessions, then use Terminate Selected — or Select All / Terminate All for everything at once.
• The strip along each card’s bottom edge shows playback progress, colored by state (accent while playing, amber while paused).
• Every termination is written to System Logs under the Streams source — manual ones and automatic ones (maintenance mode, transcode manager, blackout) alike, so one filter shows them all. Each line names the viewer, the media they were watching, what triggered the stop, and the message they were shown as the reason.

Maintenance Mode

Temporarily pause all streaming activity for server maintenance.

Configuration

Setting	Description
Custom Message	Message displayed to users explaining the maintenance
Delay	Seconds to wait before terminating active streams (default: 30)
Excluded Users	Users who can continue streaming during maintenance

Note

The excluded-users picker (used here, in the Transcode Manager, and in Blackout Schedules) lists the users known to your connected servers. Exclusions are matched against the name that appears on a session. For Plex, that is the account’s friendly name (the “Full Name” from Plex account settings) when one is set, otherwise the login username — so the picker shows, and matches on, whichever name is displayed on the session card.

Behavior

When maintenance mode is enabled:

1. A grace period countdown begins (configurable delay)
2. Active streams receive a notification
3. After the delay, sessions are terminated
4. New connection attempts are rejected with the custom message
5. Discord notification sent (if configured)

When maintenance mode is disabled:

1. Normal streaming resumes immediately
2. Discord notification sent (if configured)

Note

The maintenance enforcer polls every 30 seconds to check compliance. Some players may not see the maintenance message immediately — there can be a brief delay before enforcement takes effect.

Transcode Manager

Automatically terminate streams that match transcoding criteria.

Criteria

Criterion	Description
Any Transcoding	Terminate sessions where video or audio is being transcoded
Video Transcoding	Terminate sessions where video is being transcoded
Audio Transcoding	Terminate sessions where audio is being transcoded
4K Transcoding	Terminate sessions where the video of 4K content is being transcoded, including downscales to a lower resolution
Remote Transcoding	Terminate remote (non-local) sessions that are transcoding

Note

“4K” means the source, not what is being sent. Plex reports the delivered stream on a session, so a 4K movie transcoded down to SD shows up as SD. Librariarr resolves the true source resolution from the synced library item, which is why a downscaled 4K stream is still matched. If an item has not been synced yet, it falls back to the resolution the session reports.

Note

4K Transcoding only matches video transcodes. A 4K stream that is direct-playing or direct-streaming its video and transcoding only the audio (for example, downmixing TrueHD to stereo) costs the server almost nothing, so it is not matched. To catch those too, enable Audio Transcoding or Any Transcoding as well.

Settings

Setting	Description
Delay	Seconds to wait before terminating matching streams (default: 30)
Custom Message	Message displayed to users when their session is terminated
Excluded Users	Users who bypass transcode restrictions
Skip Hardware Transcodes	Never terminate a stream Plex is encoding on a GPU, regardless of criteria (Plex-only; default: off)

Skip Hardware Transcodes

A hardware (GPU) encode costs the CPU very little, so this option exempts those streams from every transcode criterion. It applies to the transcode manager only — maintenance mode and blackout schedules still terminate the stream.

Only the encode counts. A hardware decode feeding a software encode is still doing the expensive work on the CPU, so it is not exempt.

Caution

Hardware acceleration means the CPU is spared — not that the transcode is keeping up. A saturated GPU still reports hardware acceleration while running below realtime, and the viewer buffers. Check the stream’s Speed in the session detail: anything under 1.0× means the transcode is losing ground. With this option on, such a stream is exempt and will not be terminated.

Caution

Hardware detection — and therefore this exemption — is Plex-only. Plex reports the acceleration API actually in use per job (transcodeHwDecoding/transcodeHwEncoding), so librariarr shows the real encoder (VAAPI, NVENC, QSV, …) in the session detail. Jellyfin and Emby only report their configured accelerator — the same value whether or not a given job actually used hardware — so it can’t prove a stream is GPU-accelerated and is not used for the exemption. On Jellyfin/Emby this option therefore has no effect and no HW badge is shown. (Neither server reports which physical device is used, only the API, so an Intel iGPU and a discrete Arc card both show QSV/VAAPI on Plex.)

Enforcement

The enforcer checks active streams every 30 seconds. Sessions matching any enabled criterion are terminated after the configured delay.

Caution

Enforcement depends on what your media server reports about each stream. Some player apps may not accurately report their status.

Note

On Jellyfin and Emby the custom message is pushed to the client as an on-screen notification just before playback stops — players that cannot display messages simply stop. Plex delivers the reason with the stop itself.

Blackout Schedules

Schedule recurring or one-time maintenance windows when streaming is automatically paused.

Schedule Types

Recurring

Set repeating windows on specific days and times.

• Days of week: Select one or more days
• Start/End time: 24-hour format
• Example: Monday, Wednesday, Friday — 2:00 AM to 4:00 AM

Note

Overnight windows are supported: if the end time is at or before the start time, the window runs past midnight into the next calendar day. The selected days are the days the window starts on — a Friday 22:00–06:00 blackout runs from Friday night through Saturday at 06:00, and does not touch Friday morning.

One-Time

Set a single maintenance window with specific start and end dates/times.

• Example: December 25, 2024 12:00 AM to December 26, 2024 11:59 PM

Blackout Behavior

During a blackout window:

• Active sessions are terminated after a configurable delay
• Custom message displayed to users
• User exclusions supported
• Discord notification sent (if configured)

Actions

Action	Description
Terminate Immediately	Stop sessions as soon as the blackout starts
Warn Then Terminate	Send a warning, then terminate after a configurable delay
Block New Only	Allow existing sessions to continue but block new playbacks

Note

Warn Then Terminate delivers a real on-screen warning on Jellyfin and Emby (a client message shown at the start of the grace period). Plex has no way to message a playing client without stopping it, so there the grace delay itself is the “warning” and the message appears when the stream is stopped.

Note

Block New Only grandfathers whatever is playing on each connected server at the moment the window opens, so multi-server setups keep their in-flight streams. It grandfathers the specific playback, not the device: on Jellyfin/Emby (where a client keeps one long-lived session) starting a different title during the window is still blocked. Because the snapshot is held in memory, restarting Librariarr mid-blackout re-grandfathers whatever is playing at that point.

Limitations

• Stream data accuracy depends on the media server’s API reporting
• Maintenance mode and blackout enforcement have up to a 30-second delay between checks
• Some player apps may not immediately respond to a stop request
• Stream conversion detection relies on what your media server reports, which varies by player app
• Blackout and recurring schedule times are evaluated in the server’s local timezone (set TZ on the container to control it)
• On Jellyfin and Emby, LAN vs WAN is inferred from the client’s IP address (private, loopback, link-local and CGNAT/tailnet ranges count as local) because those servers report no explicit “local” flag. Plex reports it directly.
• The 4K Transcoding criterion matches the source resolution of the version being played. For a Plex item with several versions at different resolutions, the exact version’s resolution is resolved from the server; other criteria and servers use the synced library value.
• The 4K criterion, and hardware detection, are richest on Plex. On Jellyfin/Emby the 4K source resolution comes from the item itself and hardware acceleration is not detected (see above).