It works ok, but I’d have to be pretty desperate to make the switch to it (or out of my mind). I added my Sci-Fi Vintage Library (200 items). About 30 minutes later Emby was able to display them all.
If people don’t care for the way Plex handles Movie Extras - just wait until they try Emby. I have a LOT of Extras in that library and all of them are just scattered throughout, according to the names I gave them, in alphabetical order, not associated with the Movies they belong to in any way.
The library displays in a vertical grid in the browser, of course. I haven’t tried a Roku or Fire-TV App. Not sure if I will. I’m not that impressed to tell ya the truth. Not enough to try out a device app with my limited disposable income, for a Media Server it’s very likely I will never use.
I have continued my evaluation of Emby and I have found more than a few glitches that makes me reevaluate it. I no longer feel Emby is a viable alternative for me. It feels like an early beta and I went through that with Plex and I do not need the aggravation again.
Edit: I had not noticed before but another thread that covers the same subject is Plex Pass only so I am copying my last post there to here so there is more detail about why I find Emby lacking.
One more followup:
I do not think I will be switching to Emby. Emby does work OK and it even does a few things better BUT Plex is more reliable and Emby’s glitches are more irritating to me than Plex’s. Since the PC I installed Emby on is not critical for anything else I am doing I will leave Emby active on it to see if, maybe, it stabilizes and becomes less glitchy after some time. If it does then, maybe, I will reevaluate Emby’s viability for my use.
I cannot be a judge for others and the two (Plex and Emby) are pretty close in overall functionality.
One of the glitches I ran into that did play a large part in my decision is that Emby does not handle watched status and partially played episodes well. ex. I played part of an episode and then decided I did not really like it so I marked it watched but it still appeared in the partially watched section. Then I played it again, it did start at the place I abandoned it before, and FFed it through to near the end and the allowed it to play the remaining two or so minutes. After that the next episode appeared in “Next up” but the previous episode still appeared in the partially played continue watching section.
This bespeaks of sloppy programming and I ran into several other obvious glitches like that.
Emby feels like it is a large system in beta test and I went through that with Plex and while Plex feels far from “finished” it is much further along than Emby. If you consider Plex and Emby as premature babies then Plex is far enough along that it is viable outside the mother’s womb but Emby still needs a longer period of being in the womb before there is much of a chance that it can live outside.
BTW: Plex’s privacy issues played no part for me in this except that the outcry here kind of made me want to be sure Plex is the best for me.
I am lowering my rating of Emby to 6.5.
I’m not going to remove Emby. Will keep it around and play with it from time to time.
There are things about Plex that annoy the bejebus out of me, but the base product (overlooking the long-running and basically ignored shortcomings) is just much easier to get up and running, not to mention feels more professional (overlooking the long-running and basically ignored shortcomings).
Emby is - a disaster. If it were the only thing to use I guess you could develop a whole bevy of work-arounds, but it has a long road to travel to be half of what Plex already is (overlooking the long-running and basically ignored shortcomings).
Better the devil you know…
or
You never know how good you have it until you go somewhere else…
or
1/2 broke is better than 3/4s broke…
or
inject your own colorful analogy here…
@JuiceWSA said:
It works ok, but I’d have to be pretty desperate to make the switch to it (or out of my mind). I added my Sci-Fi Vintage Library (200 items). About 30 minutes later Emby was able to display them all.
If people don’t care for the way Plex handles Movie Extras - just wait until they try Emby. I have a LOT of Extras in that library and all of them are just scattered throughout, according to the names I gave them, in alphabetical order, not associated with the Movies they belong to in any way.
The library displays in a vertical grid in the browser, of course. I haven’t tried a Roku or Fire-TV App. Not sure if I will. I’m not that impressed to tell ya the truth. Not enough to try out a device app with my limited disposable income, for a Media Server it’s very likely I will never use.
I tried it just to see what it looked like on the Roku and I surprisingly liked the look and a few of the features; like collections and sorting by genre. But it would be a major pain to move all my media and tweak it the way I want; when I’ve spent years getting Plex to do what I want. The big killer for me is that they don’t have an app for the Kindle Fire and my family has five or six of them. I’d never hear the end of it if I moved to a server they couldn’t access.
I’ve dabbled with Emby on and off but never had it configured properly. I’ve now signed up for a month to see if it can replace Plex
server admin is pretty good but quite fiddly to get set up correctly. Plex is definitely easier.
Trakt integration built in and it can sync watched status from trakt to Emby so watched status sticks
The xbox app initially didnt work, but uninstal and reinstall fixed that. You need Premiere for the Theater app though, but it blows the Plex xbox app away. I like how it has upcoming TV as a selection. Not sure how to go to the next episode in a playlist though.
being able to customize the order of libraries is very good and something Plex should investigate. I have my Plex libraries numbered so that they are in my desired order but the way Emby does it is a lot better.
Live TV needs an additional $26 a year on top of Premiere for guide data through Schedules Direct.
Initial library update seems to last forever, and mine aren’t even that big.
Notifications are a lot nicer, no need for PlexPy. Even the xbox app does notifications.
the windows app is still clunky but the Theater app seems to work reasonably well with touch.
The Plex app on the Shield is miles ahead of Emby.
not played with collections etc, and at first sight the sorting and filtering from Plex is better. I’m weird as I filter my movies by unwatched and duration and that doesn’t seem to be possible in Emby.
Not tested outside the house yet with sync etc and still not sure if it can fully replace Plex but it’s come a long way.
@stefanvanruiten said:
Yes we know. Although it’s too little too late. Trust has been broken and isn’t won back that easily by a single crisis aversion post by the CEO.
Well nothing actually changed. There was a proposed policy change to take effect a month from now which has been rolled back before it took effect. That’s kinda the point of the grace period, to catch stuff like this and resolve it.
@Magnus33 said:
There inherent problem is that we have to take them at plex word and the minute you let them have a foot in the door its tends to change quietly later on.
And yet this change was announced, loudly, by email, with a summary of changes up front and not buried under pages of legalese. And then rolled back very rapidly when the faults were identified.
The only certain thing at this point is that plex shall have the hell monitored out of them in terms of the actual telemetry going to the server.
Superb. We need someone watching what they’re doing. Complacency is the enemy, and I look forward to seeing your pcap analysis in the future.
@Eeek said:
You have looked at Emby’s Privacy Policy (which appears to be only related to their website, not the software) and their Terms of Use?
They make no mention of collection of metadata or what they might do with it as it relates to the software.
And section 3(g) of the Emby Terms of Use really confuses me. Limitations on reverse engineering software that claims to be GPLv2 licensed?
I want to mark your post as both insightful and lol, but i can only do one.
I tend to agree i dont think they were planning to sell the data but how they went about it was ill thought out in this day and age.
Regardless of people downloading media which i am sure some do, people now are tried of having their data sold of to others period and want some kind of privacy.
The change in the privacy policy is good they just now need to add it to section F in writing that doesn’t allow for loop holes.
If they didn’t intended to sell the data now or in the future this shall cost them nothing to do and give them much needed good press.
Are you now going to sell our data?
No! God, no! Section F of the Use of Information section of the Privacy Policy does not allow us to sell your data. And we have absolutely zero desire to do so, ever. We’ve updated the summary to make this more clear, but I will state unequivocally here, we will NEVER sell any data, anonymous or otherwise, about your own personal library. To be clear, we will continue to license more and more content for our customers (e.g. our agreement with IVA for trailers and extras, Lyricfind for lyrics, and news publishers related the Watchup integration), and these arrangements call for varying degrees of data sharing with respect to consumption of THEIR content, but again we will never sell or share data related to YOUR content libraries.
Ref: https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-policy-changes/
I don’t know companies nowadays take the liberty to spy on people and make it legal through changing for example Windows 10 EULA or now the privacy changes at plex?
I personal use Linux and try to protect my privacy best as I can.
Plex, I totally disagree with your attempt to spy on your customers/users.
