Any other Plex to Emby migrants?

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IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 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?
When you add your movies library, does it see all the folders inside it? How do you have your movies named/organized? In individual folders by Movie name (ie. Avengers Endgame (2018))?
 

BLinux

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When you add your movies library, does it see all the folders inside it? How do you have your movies named/organized? In individual folders by Movie name (ie. Avengers Endgame (2018))?
Yes, when i first create the library, I navigate to my movies folder (/data/media/movies) and I can see the files and directories inside it, but of course, I want to choose the parent directory so it will find everything in there.

my movie files are organized in 2 ways, either a folder with the movie file in it, or just a movie file in the top level directory. PLEX has no problems with this. Does Emby require otherwise? The files are all named in a way that PLEX can figure out what it is, I was hoping Emby wouldn't have a problem with that... would hate to have to rename all those files.
 

BLinux

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what do the logs show?
nothing that useful. it shows entries like this:

2019-08-01 02:09:17.944 Info LibraryMonitor: Watching directory /data/media/movies

where it appears to be monitoring the folder, but then nothing else referencing that path or anything within it.
 

BLinux

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ok, after a month of dorking around with emby, i've decided it's not for me. glad i tried it, but just too many issues compared to PLEX.

i did finally figure out the problem with emby as to why no movie files were showing up in the library. it turns out, if the file scanner encounters certain conditions (that PLEX handles just fine), it completely aborts everything. in my case, I had a sub-folder with permissions 000, which I had set to exclude a copy of a movie I encoded with some experimental settings and didn't want PLEX to pick up. PLEX would just ignore it and continue on detecting other movie files. emby will completely abort the entire library scan and not even leave a log messages about the issue. i could have 1000 movies and a sub-folder with 000 permissions and it will not scan the other 999 movies. I had to discover this the hard way by adding a movie one by one and trying a rescan until i found the folder that broke it. to work around the issue, i created a separate folder, and symlinked all my movies except for the sub-folder with 000 permissions. and then emby started to populate my movies into the library. however, after finally scanning my movie collection, i found that emby's movie detection algorithm just wasn't as flexible as PLEX; it had a hard time with several movies that I had to manually identify; things like the Star Wars series. Even worse, was that for a select dozen or so movies, it was not able to identify at all, even manually, it would not show an entry for certain obscure movies; yet going to the movie databases I could find the movie meta data. clearly something is wrong with emby. lastly, emby also had a lot of problems with srt subtitles on several occasions. as a some times software developer/ consultant myself, the lack of logging for most of the error conditions above is also really troubling.

the last 2 issues have no work around, so at that point, i decided emby is not for me at this time. i may try it again in a couple of years perhaps. i don't have any gripe with PLEX at this time, but having heard that emby uses a lot less resources, was more responsive during playback interaction, etc., I was hoping it would work better for me and was going to buy a lifetime subscription.
 

casperghst42

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Sep 14, 2015
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ok, after a month of dorking around with emby, i've decided it's not for me. glad i tried it, but just too many issues compared to PLEX.

the last 2 issues have no work around, so at that point, i decided emby is not for me at this time. i may try it again in a couple of years perhaps. i don't have any gripe with PLEX at this time, but having heard that emby uses a lot less resources, was more responsive during playback interaction, etc., I was hoping it would work better for me and was going to buy a lifetime subscription.
I also ran into a few quirky bits with Emby, and moved back to Plex. I really would like Emby to be as "good" as Plex, but as you say; maybe in a couple of years.
 

IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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I'm sorry to hear you've had such issues. I have not had any of the issues you've mentioednbut I only use Emby on the Nvidia Shield (my main TV) and on Android mobile. I also sync offline files to my Surface tablet at times. With those clients I've had no issues. I still have Plex though for all my users because they are used to Plex and Plex definitely has the more polished apps now that they have pushed out Uno to all platforms.

I'll be really happy once the rest of the Plex apps have good 4K detection logic like the Roku app does. For now I use a script in Tautulli to prevent. any 4K streams where the video is being transcoded.