Live Sessions

Live Sessions is the main WSDashboard page — your live operations center for monitoring every active stream. It displays real-time metrics, library content, and session details with full administrative controls — all updating automatically without page refreshes. WSDashboard surfaces every Emby, Jellyfin, and Plex session here the moment it starts.

Key features

Stats banner

The hero stats banner sits at the top of the page and provides instant visibility into your streaming activity:

A connection status indicator in the page header shows whether the real-time data feed is active. A green pulsing “Live” badge confirms the connection is healthy.

Library drawers

Two expandable drawer tabs sit below the stats banner:

• Recently Added — a horizontally scrollable strip of poster cards showing the newest content added to your libraries, sorted by date added
• What’s New — poster cards sorted by premiere or release date, showing newly released content

Each poster card displays media artwork with a small server badge. Hovering over a card reveals a tooltip with the title, episode details, year, duration, content rating, dates, and a brief overview. Clicking a poster card opens the full detail page in the Media Portal.

When multiple servers are configured, filter pills appear to filter drawer contents by server. Only one drawer can be open at a time.

Session monitoring

The sessions panel is the main content area showing all active streaming sessions. Each session displays:

• Media information — thumbnail, title, subtitle, year, and playback progress bar
• User — username with quick access to the user administration panel
• Device information — client application, device name, IP address with connection badge, and geographic location
• Stream information — bitrate, video codec, audio codec, and playback method (Direct Play, Direct Stream, or Transcode)
• Actions — administrative controls for the session

View modes

Three view modes are available, each suited to different monitoring scenarios:

Categorical View (default) — Sessions grouped by media type (Movies, TV Shows, Live TV, Music, Other). Each category is a collapsible section showing the category name, session count, and bandwidth. Sessions are displayed in a dense, multi-column table layout. Clicking on a device name, IP address, or username expands an inline detail panel below the session row with additional information.

Cards View — A responsive grid of richly styled cards, one per session. Each card features a blurred backdrop image, poster artwork, server badge, transcoding indicator, media and stream metadata, and a sliding controls panel. A progress bar along the bottom edge shows playback position.

Table View — A flat DataTable listing all sessions with sortable and filterable columns. Best for administrators managing many simultaneous streams at once.

Session actions

For each active session, administrators can perform these actions:

Inline detail panels

In the Categorical View, clicking on certain metadata fields expands an inline detail panel below the session row:

• Clicking a device name — expands a device detail panel with device history, rename options, and connection stats
• Clicking an IP address — expands a geographic information panel showing city, country, ISP, coordinates, and a map
• Clicking a username — expands a user profile panel with watch history and policy controls

In the Cards View, clicking these fields opens the same information in a modal dialog instead of inline expansion.

Playback Mirror

Playback Mirror lets an admin open a floating, draggable video player that streams exactly what a user is currently watching — the same content, proxied through the QuickBox Pro server in real time.

What the mirror does

When you click Mirror on any active session, a floating Picture-in-Picture (PiP) dock appears. The dock shows the session’s live HLS stream starting at the viewer’s current playback position. You can:

• Drag the dock anywhere on screen by its header bar
• Resize it from any edge or corner (8 resize handles)
• Mute / unmute audio
• Toggle fullscreen for a closer look
• Toggle Nerd Stats — a diagnostic overlay showing codec, resolution, bitrate, play method, playback position, and mirror token time remaining
• Minimize the dock to a tab at the bottom of the viewport and restore it later
• Close the mirror when finished

Supported servers

Playback Mirror works with all three supported media servers:

Security model

The mirror system is designed so your media server’s API credentials never reach the admin’s browser:

• Server-side proxy — the QuickBox Pro server fetches the HLS stream from the media server and rewrites segment URLs before sending them to the browser. Raw API keys and tokens are never exposed to the client.
• HMAC-signed tokens — each mirror session receives a short-lived token that is cryptographically signed server-side. The HLS player uses this token to authenticate segment requests. Tokens are never stored in plain text.
• Configurable TTL — by default, mirror tokens expire after 2 minutes. You can increase the TTL or disable expiry entirely in General Settings when the Playback Mirror flag is enabled. When TTL is disabled, the mirror runs until you close the dock or the source playback ends.
• Admin-only — mirror start requests require administrator session authentication plus CSRF verification. Regular dashboard users cannot initiate or view mirrors.
• Audit logged — every mirror start and stop is recorded in the server audit log.

Concurrent mirror limit

Each admin can have up to 3 concurrent mirror sessions. Opening a new mirror when you already have 3 active will automatically close the oldest one. In practice, opening a new mirror from the session list closes any previously open dock since the dock displays one session at a time.

Configuring TTL

The mirror TTL is set per-server in Settings → General → Feature Flags (the TTL sub-section appears below the Playback Mirror toggle when the flag is enabled):

• TTL enabled (default) — mirrors expire automatically after the configured duration (default: 120 seconds). Set a higher value for longer monitoring sessions.
• TTL disabled — mirrors run indefinitely until you manually close the dock, the source user’s playback ends, or the server restarts.

How the mirror stream works

The mirror always delivers HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) to your browser, but where the stream comes from depends on the session type:

• VOD (Movies & TV Shows) — the mirror requests a new transcode from your media server, scoped to the admin. Even if the user is direct playing a high-bitrate file, the mirror runs through the media server’s transcoder.
• Live TV — a live channel is single-consumer, so the media server will not open a second copy of the tuner for the mirror. Instead, the dashboard runs its own relay off the multi-consumer channel source and serves that as HLS. This means a Live TV mirror does not add a transcode job to your media server and does not disturb the user’s own playback.

In both cases:

• There is a startup delay of a few seconds while the stream warms up
• The mirror may lag the source by a few seconds due to HLS segment buffering

Real-time updates

The sessions panel updates automatically through a server-sent event connection. You do not need to refresh the page. When a new stream starts, it appears immediately. When a stream ends, it disappears. When playback state changes — pause, resume, bitrate shift, progress — the display updates live.

If the real-time connection drops, the dashboard automatically attempts to reconnect with progressive backoff. The connection status indicator in the header reflects the current state.

GPU telemetry overlay

On servers with an Intel integrated GPU, the Streaming Dashboard can display real-time GPU utilization in a floating overlay. The overlay shows:

• Three engine utilization lines — Render (3D), Video (decode/encode), and Copy (DMA/blit) engine percentages
• Current GPU frequency in MHz
• GPU temperature when sensor data is available
• 5-minute history chart with continuous updates every 2 seconds

The overlay is a draggable panel that persists its position. Toggle it on and off using the GPU telemetry button in the page header. This feature is only visible when Intel GPU hardware is detected on the server.

Empty state

When no streams are currently active, the sessions panel shows an empty state message. The stats banner displays zero counts. The library drawers continue to function normally since they display library content rather than active session data.

If no media server is configured at all, the page displays a setup prompt directing you to configure at least one media server in the Streaming Dashboard settings.

Best practices

FAQ

Related pages