Any other Plex to Emby migrants?

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casperghst42

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Sep 14, 2015
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As a Plex convert I've been running Emby for the last month, and have found a couple of things which is slightly annoying;
- Emby needs to transcode more than Plex - or Plex is just more effective (less impact on the Media Server)
- Plex is smoother than Emby, like on AppleTV it does not update the watched flag until one refreshed the library, and a few other things which makes Plex easier to use

On the positive side:
- No need for connection to Plex.tv to watch anything (Plex does no longer have the unauthenticated on local network), and authentication can only take place if you can reach Plex.tv
- Emby is using less Resources (mem and cpu) than Plex - though Transcoding is less effective

Also, maybe it's me, but Emby feels less buggy, Ples has an enormously number of silly bugs which annoys me, where as with Emby I just would like a few things in the functionality department, to make me really happy.
 
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whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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Thought I'd post this here for you all to get a good laugh/mock Plex...internet went down today for a few hours and my 5yr old was NOT impressed that not only was netflix unavail but also plex (local media) w/out internet conn...GARBAGE. Was there talk of a setting that 'can' work around this I thought I heard?
 

casperghst42

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Sep 14, 2015
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Thought I'd post this here for you all to get a good laugh/mock Plex...internet went down today for a few hours and my 5yr old was NOT impressed that not only was netflix unavail but also plex (local media) w/out internet conn...GARBAGE. Was there talk of a setting that 'can' work around this I thought I heard?
The requirement for an internet connection was introduced a couple of years ago, when they forced all clients to be logged in, and removed the option for clients on local network to "just" play media. And you can only authenticate via the Plex backend infrastructure. That was uproar number one, the second happened when they started to collect "anonymous" data, and the third was when they added the [News] option to some of the clients without the option to remove it.

There are a couple of threads on the Plex forum about these things, but absolutely no response from the Plex team. The only way to get any a response is to post things on redit, where suddenly they will show interest.

People have now started, to ask for the life time subscription to be paid back ... interesting to see how that goes.
 

moblaw

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Jun 23, 2017
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I fired up this Turnkey Emby .iso in a Hyper-V. Everything went smooth, and took 15min like K D said.

Everything works out of the box, and also without an internet connection. I did not notice any difference in playback, that made me shy away of Emby. It's cool :)

meta-data searching takes longer on emby, thats it. I did not find any PS3 emby-gui-program, it uses DLNA, which takes away the "experience". And that alone would take up all my weekends, to teach my gf how to browse media :)

I'm very keen on where Emby is headed. I will say, that I have some reserved skepticism. Because not long ago emby was open-source, and I can't help wonder why it isn't anymore. Furturemore, I think there's such a big market for consumer "cookies" that it's just a matter of time before this lucreative scheme becomes apart of emby aswell, but honest to god, I hope it doesn't.

I can't help think, maybe someone can correct me, but isn't the whole reason for plex having a middle-man handling the SSL connection, because that way, they just need 1 server with SSL "wildcard" and clients to authenticate to it. That way, it saves us running the server software, from having a server-side-ssl certificate & private domain.

I see the "plex.tv" as a security layer, but also a downside, when isps goes Down.

At the end of the day, we can't have a perfect solution to fit everyones need. As it looks right now, running emby with a proper certificate ev or wildcard, makes the for a pretty neat solution for all our worries, atm :p.
 
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ttabbal

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Mar 10, 2016
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I think it makes sense to get a let's encrypt cert for emby. I don't do much remote use, but I plan on getting it set up.

I installed the server and it seems to work well. The only problem I have right now is that the letters you can click on to jump around don't work. Both in the web UI and Android app, which is pretty much the same UI. Anyone else see the same?

The Xbox one app works better than the Plex app now. I can't even get the new Plex app to connect all the sudden.

I discovered that the MiBox units support a number of USB ethernet adapters. I have one to try out. USB2, so somewhat limited, but even 100Mbs ethernet is fast enough for a media streamer. My wifi could handle it, but I am getting more and more portable devices around here and I'd prefer to keep fixed location traffic on wired when possible. Particularly the constant bandwidth use type.
 

ttabbal

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Mar 10, 2016
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Oh, make sure you set up your account with a password. Particularly if you have upnp set up. By default, it opens a port and allows remote connections. I'm not sure what someone can do with an emby admin account, other than mess with my library settings, but something to be aware of.
 

IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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I've been continuing to use Emby with no major issues. Metadata definitely does take longer to download/update compared to Plex but that's not a huge issue once it's all bee done once. Library scans also take a lot longer than Plex which is a bigger issue I've brought up to the developers and they are aware of it. However, I have mitigated that issue by basically only running a single library scan per day early in the morning and using the Emby Connect feature in Sonarr and Radarr. This basically forces an partial update on the individual items that are added once they are downloaded and moved into the proper directories.
 

ttabbal

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Mar 10, 2016
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I've found Emby to perform similarly to Plex overall. I need to work with it a little more before I cut over, but so far so good. I've been distracted by other projects. :)

One thing to note with the miBox units. The USB port causes the thing to bog down with high bandwidth use. Seems like USB storage does the same thing the network adapter did in my case. Playback stutters etc.. I set it to use wifi and it's working much better. I find it annoying, but not enough to get a different box. Even with a few of them going, the network should be alright. If it's not, I'll set up an extra AP or two... Annoying, but not the end of the world.
 

casperghst42

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Sep 14, 2015
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I've been using emby exclusively the last 1-2 months, I only got one client; an AppleTV, the client works, not as smooth as the one from Plex, but in generally nicer.

I ran into a problem, which is that randomly the last 2 seconds will be repeated, and after I reported it to emby, other people are seeing it, even with the browser client. I worked around it by correctly enabling hw encoding, and moving my transcoding temp directory to a small raid0 on my ssd boot drive ... since then I've not noticed the problem.

The emby team says that it's an AppleTV problem, I don't know, I just hope that they will figure out how to fix it.
 

Kybber

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May 27, 2016
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Been trying out Emby for about a month. It shows promise, but unfortunately the Emby client for Roku is absolute crap. Until they improve the client or we get a new media player (Apple TV is on the wish-list, fingers crossed!), I will probably go back to Plex.
 

Nnyan

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Mar 5, 2012
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Old thread I know so sorry for the necro but is anyone still using Emby or Jellyfin?
 

IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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Old thread I know so sorry for the necro but is anyone still using Emby or Jellyfin?
I still use Emby for my own personal media playback at home and on the road. I migrated my users back to Plex as it's just an easier interface for them to use and I mitigated most of the privacy concerns.
 

Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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Primary server is Emby portable window version.

Jellyfin in PROXMOX LXC container with NVIDIA video card for transcoding , testing and secondary server
 

azev

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Jan 18, 2013
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I still use Emby for my own personal media playback at home and on the road. I migrated my users back to Plex as it's just an easier interface for them to use and I mitigated most of the privacy concerns.
What do you have to do to mitigate all the privacy concern ?? I am still debating whether to pay for plex or emby subscription.
 

IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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What do you have to do to mitigate all the privacy concern ?? I am still debating whether to pay for plex or emby subscription.
First I got all my users to opt out of all the data collection options that Plex gives users the ability to opt out of. Then I created floating firewall rules in pfsense to block any connections (inbound and outbound) to metrics.plex.tv.
 
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Nnyan

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Mar 5, 2012
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Thanks for the feedback. I'll have to look at doing what you did IamSpartacus.
 

azev

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Jan 18, 2013
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@IamSpartacus thank you for the Tips, I will give it a try... One of my main reason I want to use plex is to stream ota TV remotely.
My brother and I want to cut the cord, but his house does not have good signal for ota tv while mine do ok. I am planning to get hdrun box and use that to stream tv at his home.
 

IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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@IamSpartacus thank you for the Tips, I will give it a try... One of my main reason I want to use plex is to stream ota TV remotely.
My brother and I want to cut the cord, but his house does not have good signal for ota tv while mine do ok. I am planning to get hdrun box and use that to stream tv at his home.
I use an HDHomerun for live TV but I have a cablecard. It works well.
 

BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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hey.. partially due to seeing this thread, i decided to try out emby for the first time. i got it installed on my CentOS 7 server, but it won't recognize any of my movie libraries (all local files). the tv show libraries seem to be fine, but any library that is designated as movies just shows up empty. trying to do a rescan of the library just exits quickly (too quickly). any ideas?
 

pricklypunter

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Nov 10, 2015
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I can't say I had that issue when I last tried out Emby, it found all my Plex libraries fine. I actually had trouble getting Plex to find all my stuff the first time I tried it. It's most likely something to do with naming convention, either at the folder level, or the file level, that's what fixed my Plex issue :)