TL;DR - Emby has live TV support with a guide, a “coming up” section for shows in the server, Rotten Tomatoes rating in the app, suggestions and rating “I like this” in the app, hardware acceleration support and much more. Why are these basic things not in plex? It hurts to know these things are on emby but not my favorite app.
So I’ve been a happy plex pass customer for a few years now and in the past couple months me and my family decided to cut the cord and have plex become our main content source. It wasn’t until then that certain problems presented itself that makes it harder than we thought. Problems like learning about upcoming show or recommendations and curation, server reliability, and live TV. I randomly gave emby a test run to see what it was like but didnt expect much. What was I greeted with? RottenTomatoes support, Curation and recommendations in the app at first glance blew me away. The app on the fireTV was pretty and it was feature rich. Meanwhile my Plex app still has a bug that requires me to force close it just to get into it for months on the fireTV.
You might be saying to yourself “Why doesn’t he just switch then?”. Well that’s a fair question and I want to switch but Plex is where I’ve been for several years, its so well established that it has third party support with great software like Ombi and PlexPy. I just need Plex to get its **** together and add these missing features.
Well Plex has both DVR and Hardware decoding/encoding in beta (plex pass) right now so we know they are almost here.
Not sure what clients you are running but I have Rotten Tomatoes ratings in my Plex clients.
Short of the hardware decoding, Plex has always done a better job of transcoding (resource wise) than Emby. Emby overtook Plex when it released hardware encoding but now that Plex has it in beta it is again better resource wise.
Emby is nice but not up to Plex in most areas. I run both servers myself but all my users are setup on Plex not Emby. I was using Emby for DVR and Live TV but now I’m only using Emby for Live TV and using Plex for DVR functions as the integration is a bit better IMHO.
So Plex is much further along then you thought it was.
@cayars All of my clients are FireTV. I don’t see the RT ratings, I have a 1-5 star rating on each but I’m not actually sure where those ratings are pulled from but I assume its not RT or IMDB since they use a different system. The hardware transcoding part really doesn’t apply for me since I built my system for CPU transcoding anyways but I just thought to mention it.
The most important missing feature is the suggestions and how emby handles it is great. I wish maybe we could tie in with IMDB or something for suggestions on plex. I know DVR is in the works and hopefully it turns out as great as Emby did it or even better with the recording features.
With this bug that plagues the fireTV and gripes with curation I felt really salty that I am missing these things on plex.
@hthighway I really don’t like how plex handles plugins with channels, it seems pretty clunky most times and rather it be built in. Right now I’m counting the minutes until DVR leaves beta and hopefully it has a live tv feature.
I had another look at Emby recently, and for me Plex is still ahead, mainly on the client side. Yes, Emby has live TV, but the Roku client is still old and clunky (although apparently they’re working on a new design), the Xbox app is paid and the Windows 10 store app is still very clunky (although chapter support is nice).
@Rsslone, just curious but how do you use the “I like this” in Emby? By that I don’t mean the implementation but the use behind it.
Or put another way how do you use the LIKE or NOT LIKE functionality? What does it gain you?
I personally don’t really care about ratings to much. Everyone has different thoughts on how they would rate a movie. For example Some of my favorite movies are rated a 2 and movies that rate 4 stars I think kind of suck. So it’s all opinion at best.
@cayars Well it wouldn’t be for me exactly but I host the content for three different households other than mine and a couple of them came to me with concerns about being able to find new shows and having suggestions even for content on my plex server. That’s why that feature is super useful in my case.
I also understand the flaws of a rating system but I use it as a guide what is worth my time 9 times out of 10. See what I did there xD
I understand what you are saying but how would this functionality give you anything more than what you can do with Plex today? Plex has a rating system and you can use it for filtering. Now granted it might not be the rating system we would all prefer but it’s there and does work.
So for example a user can filter movies based on not watched then sort by highest rating. This functionality is currently in Plex.
@Rsslone said: @cayars Well it wouldn’t be for me exactly but I host the content for three different households other than mine and a couple of them came to me with concerns about being able to find new shows and having suggestions even for content on my plex server. That’s why that feature is super useful in my case.
I also understand the flaws of a rating system but I use it as a guide what is worth my time 9 times out of 10. See what I did there xD
I’m a long time Plex user who has been also using Emby for a number of months now. I use the apple tv clients. I love Plex, but one thing Emby has implemented which I find critical, is cast lists for TV shows, even guest appearances for specific episodes. When one searches performances by a particular actor, all results are displayed, not just movies. I can’t understand why Plex would ignore this apparent basic feature/function.
There are alot of “duh” features that Emby has that I wish Plex had. I am still having a hard time figuring out how to get Rotten Tomatoes on my library. Plex is riding a fine line at least for me, I might stay with plex solely because of its third party support with PlexPy and Ombi.
@kcdh said:
I’m a long time Plex user who has been also using Emby for a number of months now. I use the apple tv clients. I love Plex, but one thing Emby has implemented which I find critical, is cast lists for TV shows, even guest appearances for specific episodes. When one searches performances by a particular actor, all results are displayed, not just movies. I can’t understand why Plex would ignore this apparent basic feature/function.
I think you’ll like what’s coming. We don’t publish roadmaps or give ETAs, so sorry I can’t be more specific. But we have talked about a UI refresh in the community roundtables, so stay tuned.
@kcdh said:
I love Plex, but one thing Emby has implemented which I find critical, is cast lists for TV shows, even guest appearances for specific episodes. When one searches performances by a particular actor, all results are displayed, not just movies. I can’t understand why Plex would ignore this apparent basic feature/function.
This is one of the things they removed at some point and almost caused me to dump Plex. I know I’m not the only one that feels this way. I use Kodi on several tablets which I have 4TB portable drives connected to because of its support for local media and I love playing with the cast and director links.
@kcdh said:
I’m a long time Plex user who has been also using Emby for a number of months now. I use the apple tv clients. I love Plex, but one thing Emby has implemented which I find critical, is cast lists for TV shows, even guest appearances for specific episodes. When one searches performances by a particular actor, all results are displayed, not just movies. I can’t understand why Plex would ignore this apparent basic feature/function.
I think you’ll like what’s coming. We don’t publish roadmaps or give ETAs, so sorry I can’t be more specific. But we have talked about a UI refresh in the community roundtables, so stay tuned.
I think you guys should publish a roadmap for reasons like this. I am now dual hosting Plex and Emby and I’m having a real tough time choosing between them. Plex has an advantage on transcoder options and library content matching but emby has more features like TV guide / DVR and a better looking interface with RT and better themes, even live backgrounds and theme music for movies. Do you think the UI updates and whatnot will come within the next couple months?
@kcdh said:
I’m a long time Plex user who has been also using Emby for a number of months now. I use the apple tv clients. I love Plex, but one thing Emby has implemented which I find critical, is cast lists for TV shows, even guest appearances for specific episodes. When one searches performances by a particular actor, all results are displayed, not just movies. I can’t understand why Plex would ignore this apparent basic feature/function.
I think you’ll like what’s coming. We don’t publish roadmaps or give ETAs, so sorry I can’t be more specific. But we have talked about a UI refresh in the community roundtables, so stay tuned.
