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.
Emby is a little more funky (been demoing it for a month, still haven’t tried Premiere yet) to get use to, but I would say works as well as Plex, client wise. Might even have less issues. Regardless of that, what is REALLY nice about Emby is the support they have on the forums. I had some issues with Collections (which is actually handled by a third party plugin, and the Emby staff responded and had a fix for me within a few hours. Did I mention it supports collections? lol.
Its definitely requires more technical know how though. Live TV is better than Plex in my opinion (they have a damn guide), but you need to pay for a third party guide data as far as I can tell or use XML options.
Ive been running both Plex (plex pass) and Emby (premiere) side by side on the same server for about a month.
My main client is the a PS4. Plex is great Emby is terrible all other clients (android and firetv is all ive tried) are basically the same as the web app.
Live tv on Emby is great Works on all clients for all users (at least in my home network). Live tv on Plex well sure…
Emby has a grid! Important for some folks, it also has a guide much like Plex. Options anyone? But as noted you need to pay a 3rd party or use your own XML.
Dvr on Emby is mostly better. At least i can use all 4 of my tuners, on Plex i can only use two. Since version 1.6 Plex has gotten seriously unreliable.
Emby has a built in option to convert to MP4 or MKV on the fly as well as post processing. I haven’t tested either. I just use MCEBuddy after the fact.
Emby definitely has some quirks like the watched status. Refreshing the web app fixes it but… i haven’t tested the watched status where other users are concerned but i don’t believe it works correctly, or rather as i think it should.
Emby is a little more in depth to setup but not hard by any means.
As noted above you actually get help on the forums from the devs not just the community!
@teshiburu said:
The emby apps are a laughable joke!
Have you tried playing ac3 files in a FireTV 2 or MiBox with Plex? Have you tried Plex’s UWP and Xbox apps? Have you tried syncing on Android lately? Or listening to more than 7 songs?
Plex apps LOOK a lot more polished but there are lots of playback issues unresolved. I’m seriously considering Emby, running both side by side for now…
@rsava said:
I keep trying Emby (I am not switching but always like to keep up on things) and I am still not that impressed. Now I do not have a “Premier” account so maybe that is why, but it really is not ready to compete.
I have a feeling they will feel a sudden influx of cash for development.
They need it!!
That is assuming they do not spend it on more booze or “other” mood enhancers.
Half the time I cannot even get into the web app to manage my libraries and more than half of when I do their second rate software freezes on the library page requiring a server restart to actually view my libraries. That restart also only works about half the time.
I am just going to leave my Emby install alone for a couple of days just to see if it might be too busy to allow access. I NEVER had this kind of problem with Plex.
Maybe a little anonymous loss of privacy is well worth actually having a software platform that works.
As it was posted at least a hundret times before: we, the users, don’t think that Plex is headed in the right direction any more. We don’t need news integration, we don’t need cloud, we don’t need Alexa, we need a stable, bug-free media server.
One thing I do appreciate with Emby is that you can order your libraries how you see fit and also customize their icons (actually you can customize a lot of icons like genre etc etc. It’s the little things that bother me most about Plex, and on the Apple TV both apps seem the same for stability. Emby has the little things. They might not be as polished but everything they implement seems to be implemented the correct way any normal human would assume (live tv has a guide, ordering libraries, users, offline viewing/online viewing, collections etc etc).
I do believe Emby has plans to add video players to some apps as well, making transcoding not needed, for what it’s worth.
As it was posted at least a hundret times before: we, the users, don’t think that Plex is headed in the right direction any more. We don’t need news integration, we don’t need cloud, we don’t need Alexa, we need a stable, bug-free media server.
Ummm…you took that completely out of context. He was referring to the possibility of Emby seeing an influx of dollars because of cranky Plex users migrating. Reading all the words in a thread is helpful.
@teshiburu said:
The emby apps are a laughable joke!
Have you tried playing ac3 files in a FireTV 2 or MiBox with Plex? Have you tried Plex’s UWP and Xbox apps? Have you tried syncing on Android lately? Or listening to more than 7 songs?
Plex apps LOOK a lot more polished but there are lots of playback issues unresolved. I’m seriously considering Emby, running both side by side for now…
Just back from a holiday where i watched over 5 hours of synced media on my travel, along with streaming music nearly every day for a few hours…
Cant say ive had any issues with the FireTV either?
