Maybe time for a change - Anyone using Emby?

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I'm trialling some new HTPC software solutions, I have been using MediaPortal 1 / Argus TV for approx 5 years, and WMC for nearly 10 years before that, I was curious to see what else is out there in 2016.

So having installed and uninstalled many different things on my laptop to test, I really like Emby. Totally multi-platform, so I am able to configure and tinker with the media library from my laptop / phone / tablet (and playback if I want). And Emby Theatre is (possibly) the easiest to set up, smoothest and best quality video player that I have ever used :eek:

The downside is, it's not free, but $4.99 per month (about £3.50) seems negligible for the impact it can have for the household. Also, Emby seems to be in a fast lane of development, so that's hopeful for longevity and continual improvements. Also it has Frontview+ a solution for my second screen in the lounge, which seems to be a bit of a niche requirement.

Anyone any thoughts on this?
 
Would be interested in how it compares against the "Big Players" so please let us know!

I've been exclusively Kodi for the last few years and it does everything I need it to, but always willing to look around.
 
Best of luck. Let us know how you get on.

I've tried my fair share of HTPC/PVR software over the years - free and paid for - before settling on Media Portal in 2011 when I built the current HTPC.
 
The website:
Emby
The premiere version isn't free but the it looks like the free version has a lot of features.
 
Yes, I was using the free version for a while, but playback in Emby Theatre is limited to 1 minute, Emby Theatre seems really good, so I thought I'd pay to play! The server part of it and lots of other player apps seem to work with the free version.
 
Emby is the new name and built of one of the first HTPC solutions on the PC. It was "MediaBrowser" which was an add-on for WMC in windows 7.
I thought it was excellent, as there were other addons to make the movie playback solid. Their skins were my favourite.

However since they moved to the freeium model, I switched to JRiver. Though this probably has the worse theatre view.
 
Hi
I have tried Media Portal, kodi, JRiver, WMC and the previous version of Emby with WMC (mediabrowser)
Have to say that for set up, so much easier then any of the others, ease, of use (wife usability factor) etc Emby in its current form blows Kodi and media portal out of the water. At one point on my test machine i has Emby, Kodi and Media Portal all running and let the wife and daughter play both prefered the ease of use and operation of Emby.
Video playback absolutely stunning. can stream to multiple devices. Easy to set up, there are a few addons that give some nice eye candy Autobox sets, cover art etc.
I would highly recomend people try it out. Emby Theater is no longer free and some of the add ons also have a small charge but feel that the end result is well worth it.
Emby server is free but to get the best play back then Emby theater (v2.2.4) is $4.99 per month $39 per year or $99 for lifetime. There is the older free version of Emby theater available to download but to get the best you really need the paid for version.
Updates to server and theater are very quick when / if any bugs are found and theres loads of help on the forums.

Would highly recomend.
Regards
Keith W
 
A good point about updates. Kodi is very good, can't comment on others.
 
If you like Kodi's front end you can use Emby as a server for it. Handy if you have multiple Kodi installs and don't like mysql.
 
Kodi, is not for me. I realise that it's very popular, so have tried it a number of times, but find it clunky and basic.

I still think MediaPortal is the best out of the free offerings.

I also tried JRiver a few times as that seems to be very well liked for its video and audio quality, but it isn't for me at all, I found it very annoying to set up, the database seems to have been built primarily for music, and trying to catalogue films and tv was very un-intuitive. Plus it is a bit like Apple in the way it is locked down, and doesn't really support third party plug ins (that it can't control) such as Trakt, or a solution to run a second screen, and that is really a deal breaker for me.

I am, however, very much enjoying Emby. I am running it alongside MediaPortal and switching between the two. Emby Theatre seems to have the edge on video / audio playback quality, but it is very close, so might be the 'honeymoon' period. But the server / client set up for Emby and the support for multi platform devices is so different to what I am used to, and fun to play with, I am still working out how best to use it all. Plus, I am not using it for live TV at the moment, as I don't want to upset my very stable and reliable Argus TV server, but Emby is monitoring the recordings folder so they become available to playback on any device.
 
Nobody mentioned Plex? Well, I've changed from Mediaportal 1 to Plex, solely because of the Multiplatform support and and how easy it is to configure the server. I've tried it before many years ago, and it has come a long, long way.

I can definitely recommend giving it a go. Downside - no support for Live-TV.
 
I did try Plex, twice, as it seems to be so highly rated, but I couldn't get on with it. I think something was broken - collections, or the plex equivalent to collections, and out of the two Emby and Plex, it was Emby that seemed to work best for me.

I am not using Live TV in Emby - but support is there to plug in existing servers (unfortunately not Argus, which is what I use), it does also have it's own Native Emby TV, but only for specific tuners (HD Homerun) and I don't have any of them, they seem quite expensive also, but I like the idea of them (they seem to be standalone network tuners that don't have to be connected to a PC).
 
Maybe it's time for me to try Emby again (last time I tried the Alpha version). What I find impressive about Plex is the whole transcoding thing, so that you can stream to basically any devices, also with limited bandwidth. Can Emby do that as well?
 
Yes, Emby does transcode if you want it to, although I have PC's as clients so have it set to not transcode to those.

If you do try it, let me know what you think, especially about Emby Theatre as that seems really good to me.
 
I have tried a few and prefer Kodi .It's good that we have a number of choices.
 
Okay, I've played around with Emby yesterday evening and have some conclusions with regards to comparing it to Plex.
  • Both do what they are supposed to do and work nicely as server backends, fetch metadata etc. Overall, Plex seems to be a more rounded product at the moment, but Emby seems to update faster.
  • Plex has no usable live-tv support for UK/Europe, so if that's important to you, Emby is the way to go (I didn't try it, not so important for me).
  • The web-interface of Plex is better.
  • Transcoding quality of Emby is rubbish. I don't know what quality presets they use for FFMPEG, but the result looks horrible, with plenty of artefacts. Transcoding the same video in Plex looks much better, and Plex has some quality settings which Emby currently lacks. On the other hand, Emby supports hardware accelerated transcoding (e.g. QuickSync), so if you have weak(er) hardware, it might work on Emby.
  • Emby Theater is better then Plex Media Player/Plex Home Theater
These are my first impressions. I would say that both are pretty good, but the horrid transcoding quality in Emby is a dealbreaker for me. Overall, Plex feels more 'plug & play', and works very easy with Chromecast, PS4, Android, PC etc. Plex seems to have an edge over Emby now, but this may change in a year or so.
 
Oh how things have changed after 4 months!

I have very much fallen out of love with Emby, multiple video quality playback issues with Emby Theater, and despite being very active on their forums, the issues have not been fixed. Maybe they will in time, but for now I need to jump ship and try something else as I have very much run out of patience :(

There aren't many options left - so I am going to give Plex a go. I bought a Plex Pass (monthly subscription) and tested it out a bit on my laptop. The server side seems okay, although not as pretty as Emby. And both Plex Media Player - Preview and Plex Home Theatre look hopeful, so I'll have to see how that goes in 'real world' use. Plex seems to have some extra features that Emby doesn't such as the 'Plex it' button and better support for YouTube and iPlayer plug ins.

If anyone is using Plex regularly and has any tips - particularly on getting maximum video quality playback on windows HTPC's, that would be helpful!
 
I am using Plex extensively. On my HTPC in the living room I use it with Kodi and PlexKodiConnect. It works perfectly. I use the Titan skin. The flexibility of Kodi is both curse and blessing, but I think it's worth it, because you can customise everything to your needs.
 
Thanks @Pintu good to hear that Plex is at least stable. I would rather go pure Plex throughout the house, but if I still don't get decent (I mean excellent!) quality playback, I will look into the Kodi / Plex combo. Out of interest, what issues did you have with Plex Media Player / Plex Home Theatre?
 
Plex Home Theatre is basically a skinned Kodi. Plex Media Player is an original development. Both worked fine, but I like to have everything my HTPC is supposed to do under one roof, that is BBC iPlayer, some German Media Streaming, Internet Radio etc. Plus the photo support of both Plex players is not very good - Kodi can do that much better.

I don't know why either of the three options would be different in the quality of video playback.
 
At one stage PHT was a fork of XBMC but that was quite a few years ago I believe and now is a completely codebase (I'm open to correction on that though).

As far as I'm aware Emby "Lifetime" is for the lifetime of that major version rather than the lifetime of the product. So when they move to the next major version you'll have to pay again (again I'm open to correction on that).

I used Emby for quite a while with the monthly pass but just found it buggy. The Amazon Fire app wasn't great and kept hanging and had to force it closed. Profiles used to get confused and the whole Connect thing had me confused. The HTPC app was also buggy but admittedly was only Beta. Being on a rapid development cycle doesn't mean anything other than ramming as many features in as quickly as possible which in software is not always a good thing.

Very very early days with Plex for me (as in this week I started using it) but so far it's more stable.
 
Well, I have been with Plex for a couple of weeks and it seems okay.

I go for the monthly subscription as £4 per month, seems negligible for now.

Plex Media Player (the new one) is buggy, unfortunately, so I am not using that much. But Plex Home Theater (the old one - based on xbmc) seems fine, so I am using that for now. And the server seems okay.

Having used Emby for 4 months, and now Plex for 2 weeks - they both have +ves and -ses - but for my needs, Plex seems to have the features I need for the least bugs.
 
+1 for Emby

I had been a loyal Plex user for years and it served my needs quite well. Recently however, the Plex agents ceased downloading metadata for some new content that my wife purchased. I scoured documentation and forums and tried many different potential fixes which were unsuccessful. Granted it may have been a problem with an external service the agents were using (i.e. themoviedb) and not anything on my end.

But I was at a crossroads: keep chipping away at fixing Plex (or just wait), or try something new.

I chose the latter option for a few reasons, but mainly because I was impatient and wanted something that worked. It seemed that Plex’s other main competitors were Kodi and Emby. I saw some screenshots of Emby’s interface and liked it personally, and along with Emby’s open source model, greater configurability and support for books (with plugin), I decided to try it.

And from a former Plex user’s point of view, I wanted to give my VERY initial thoughts:

- I was up and running in just a few hours.

- I am loving the chapter access and (what I see as) slightly more comprehensive metadata display.

In order to make my Plex library Emby-friendly:

1. Emby mistook my extras as movies, but then again I should have RTFM and made “extras” folders.

2. Emby didn’t get metadata for my documentaries, but that was because again I didn’t RTFM and select the correct library type and follow the suggested naming scheme.

3. When it comes down to it, the only “real” problem it had was misidentifying “M (1931)” as something totally different. But after manually identifying it, all was good.

I have yet to sample playback of a full film on my local network although I imagine it is comparable. The Xbox One app freezes when I try to play trailers but maybe that is because it tries to go to YouTube if I don't have a local trailer.

In short, I am really liking Emby. I am fully aware that Plex may offer features I like about Emby, and for other users Plex is the more ideal platform. As I said, I was impatient and decided to try something new :)
 
Yes, I think I agree that Emby may have the edge on the server side of things, although Plex is okay, after I discovered a few 'workarounds' to get it to meet my needs.

I fell out with Emby Theatre though, big time, I got very impatient with it being increasingly more broken with each forced update and that was the main driver for me to move over to Plex, I'll be interested to see how you get on.

Having said that, Plex Media Player is not really any better, just as buggy as Emby Theatre and not giving me the super high quality audio and video playback that I am seeking.

However the old Plex Home Theatre is still functional, it is based on Kodi, and I can't really fault it, apart from some audio / video sync issues, but there is an easily accessible slider to adjust during playback, I can live with that for now. Also there is a spin off - Open Plex Home Theatre, which is about to release a new version, so I'm interested to see what that offers.
 

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