To answer the original question, Emby for sure. Look at Plex’s front page right now. Plex isn’t a media server anymore. They’ve moved on from all of us O.G. users, and now they’re chasing the “free live TV!” and “free movies!” aspect of it. You have to scroll all the way down before the media server is even mentioned.
Plex is undergoing a slow death and transformation into yet another Netflix clone. Sure, the interface is pretty (it had better be since they redesign it every few months) but all that time spent on the interface is time spent completely ignoring the most basic of things, like the ability to back up/restore playlists and song ratings. I’ve been waiting for that one for about 3 years now.
So if your concern is your personal media, get Emby. Plex has changed focus.
Just disable all the online rubbish in your account settings and pin the libraries your want in the order you want on your home hub. Posting that info incase it’s of use to you.
Anyhow, for me plex is still my go to media server. I’ve certainly concerns for the future and where plex might go but for now it works perfectly for my needs. Emby and Jellyfin will be my fall back if plex do something I really can’t live with.
It’s not really about whether Plex still works for my use case, obviously I know that I can disable that stuff (and I’ve done it), the real issue I have is that all of the time and effort is being spent developing that stuff.
This comes at the expense of everything else, for example PlexAmp can’t properly cast to any Companion apps and hasn’t been able to as long as I can remember - at least a year. I don’t know what is preventing them from adding casting to PlexAmp, but I can’t imagine it being insanely complex given that so many other Plex apps have it already. They still haven’t done it, but in the past year they have added a bunch of ad-supported junk and all of the interfaces and backend support necessary for that junk to work, which doubtless took a ton of time and effort.
What I’m getting at here is that users like me, who have used Plex for years as a hub for our own media, are no longer a priority. They don’t benefit from people using the program that way (or so they think), they want to get into that big $$ streaming service market. As another example, I don’t think it’s even possible to buy a lifetime PlexPass anymore. They want subscribers/recurring revenue, and us little people who only use it for our digitized CDs just don’t provide that.
