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Emby vs Plex


junadlao

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I love that with the options on emby for supporting hardware acceleration direct streaming and such that my little 70$ rig is able to easily handle the demands of the house. I can actually easily compare this to being as good as a hopper system minus all the annoyances of the hopper ( like not truly owning your recordings and 0 scalability ) With emby and hdhr prime i am able to own and scale up my media system if i need to.

Heck right now i even run a crypto currency miner on my system since it is so under-utilized ( thanks to vaapi support )

If i mine a monero i will be buying lifetime subscription right away ( but at 10-15 hashes/second that might take some time lol )

 

I installed plex but between not having live tv support and how much cpu is required it was a no go for me. The interface is pretty but that doesnt mean much when it runs slow as a dog.

Emby with these themes is really nice and looking very polished to me now. But best of all it runs well with very little lag on nearly anything i do.

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  • 4 months later...
Devdroid

I finally had the time & cash to setup my own media server. Hurray. Using the asus vivomini un68u (8th gen 25W Core i5u, HD620) - it's awesome and very powerful for it's tiny tiny size!

 

I tried both Plex and Emby running side by side running on top of W10. 

 

Couldn't get headless hardware transcoding working properly with Plex+W10 (Tried everything, latest drivers, reinstall, HDMI dummy etc.). . Worked flawelessy with Emby on W10, didn't even need a HDMI dummy. 

 

Kodi integration is far superior with Emby. If you use Kodi, Plex really isn't an option. There is no comparison. 

 

Emby client for Android is better and have more options, such as aspect ratio (no zoom though =/ ). 

 

Emby has better built in subtitle support. Had lots of problems with Plex and subtitles when transcoding. The subtitle add-on "Subzero" for Plex is awesome though and much better than anything available for Emby. I'm using a third party W10 app in order to fetch subtitles from addic7ed and subscene. 

 

Plex is a bit bloated. I didn't care much for the News channel etc. Had to spend some time disabling/hiding that stuff. 

 

 

I'll buy a lifetime emby license after giving it a few more months, but for my setup, Emby proved to be the far superior option. All in all both options are good and powerful depending on your needs and it's great to have a fallback option. 

 

One thing that really surprised me is the lack of features in both Plex and Emby media clients (Android, IOS). Touch support is weak, very few/next to no customisation options for aspect ratio/zoom, pixel ratio, subtitle configuration, adjust audio delay, adjust subtitle delay and so forth. I expected that both the Emby and Plex media clients would have a video player comparable to MX video player or the likes.  And this is why the Kodi integration with Emby is so great, because it gives you all those options. Touch support is still bad within Kodi itself though, but managable considering all the features. 

Edited by Devdroid
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  • 1 month later...
Chyron

I tried out Emby after the News Feed debacle, but I really couldn't use it because 1) mobile sync doesn't show downloaded files in an intuitive or organized manner; and 2) lack of proper audiobook support.

 

Now Plex has seriously flubbed their Android app, which I use all the time. So I will give serious consideration to permanently moving to Emby if you guys can fix audiobook support to a) not show thumbnail art for each and every track/chapter, and b ) queue the whole remaining album/book when a single track/chapter is played; and make downloaded files accessible in a fashion similar (or identical) to the way one accesses on-server content.

 

But primarily the audiobook thing. Don't just be "we'll get to it when we feel like maybe we might perhaps bother eventually, someday." I listen to audiobooks almost every day, and Booksonic/Subsonic has some serious organizational (and UI) flaws. You guys really need to get on this because even though Plex doesn't have a watched status for tracks or store progress at the album level, it still queues the whole book when I click my current chapter, it remembers where in that chapter I last was (if I told it to in the settings), and I can access that book offline from the server in a menu that makes sense.

Edited by chyron8472
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  • 4 months later...
Chyron

I really do have to say, hanging around on the Emby forums is much more enjoyable than being on the Plex forums. This place feels significantly more responsive to user feedback and makes me happy to increasingly participate.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Chyron

Well, the Plex for Roku app just updated, and boy howdy it's a turd on a stick. My Let's Play library is in a "Videos" category (instead of TV Shows, which is what type it is), which wants to use landscape posters instead of portrait ones, so its posters seen in the Web UI are scaled to the point of pixelly blurriness and then cropped. On top of that, my Audiobooks library is bundled with my Music library under the Music category. And accessing the (library selections in the) sub-category  menu lists all libraries for all accessible servers that use that content type.

 

So there we go. The shoe has dropped, and Plex goes to the bottom of my Roku channels, and Emby comes up to the top.

 

Sure, Emby has some niggles with its UI, but they aren't game breaking like this bug-ridden monstrosity.

Edited by chyron8472
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Chyron

Thanks for the feedback.

 

They really are minor niggles for me. For example, the "My Media" thumbnails are an appropriate size in the Web app, but in the Android app or Roku app they're too large. Devil-in-the-details kinds of things that make Emby feel not as polished as it could. However, the attitude of the dev team makes it feel to me like those issues will go away if just given time and the right kind of feedback from the community. I don't know how many ways to say or how many examples to give that the Emby devs actually listen to the community in a way that feedback actively affects development of the software, whereas the Plex devs just do whatever they dang well please regardless of user feedback or how many man-hours it ultimately wastes on nonsense nobody wants.

Edited by chyron8472
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ginjaninja

 

 

Well, the Plex for Roku app just updated,

i do like the ability to add 'recently played tv' widget to home screen.

 

Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

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Chyron

I'm going to keep saying this until it happens: I really hope Emby has some semblance of multi-file audiobook support in their upcoming v3.6 stable release. I can't drop Plex without it. I want to drop Plex. Please give me an excuse to drop Plex. I will give Emby all the monies going forward and as much word-of-mouth advertising as I am able, so please implement this, please.

 

I don't mean to be a jerk to the Emby devs by constantly nagging about this, but I seriously am wanting to respond to this crazy Plex UI nonsense by applying a dropkick and a raspberry to their software, but I can't yet and it's bothering me.

Edited by chyron8472
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Chyron

not entirely true,

Plex has the option to setup scheduled tasks between a start window and a stop window

 

Where as Emby is limited to every xyz interval (in hours) and does not have this hard start/stop window setting as Plex does I.e for library scan you only have options for every xx hours and upon application start etc.

 

I checked into this, and you can set specific start and stop time windows for individual tasks in Emby.

 

rb3cYFW.png

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PrincessClevage

I checked into this, and you can set specific start and stop time windows for individual tasks in Emby.

 

rb3cYFW.png

gee that must of been an old post and emby has update these features since
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  • 2 weeks later...
Chyron

My family and I were driving up to my in-laws this evening, and we decided to turn on Christmas music. Well, for whatever reason, I opened Plex (for Android, v6) and found an album to listen to. When I tapped a track to start playing, it took somewhere around 15 whole seconds to start, which is and has been kind of normal for Plex for as long as I can remember. Plus it takes some time after each song to start the next one in the queue.

 

After that album, I switched to Emby. You know what... when I tapped a song, It immediately started playing, and time between queued tracks even seemed gapless.

 

I'm telling you. Night and day. The "Now Playing" page on Plex for Android is prettier than on Emby for Android, but my gosh is Emby fast. Blazingly, blisteringly fast.

Edited by chyron8472
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  • 3 weeks later...
Chyron

The more I poke around Emby, the more I like it.

 

For one thing, I love the responsiveness of the devs. Not long ago, I complained that, while on Emby for Android in portrait mode, the items in the "My Media (small)" section on the Home Screen didn't fit right. And you know what? Now they're fixed.

 

I installed the recent server beta (v.3.6.0.84, currently) and now I can have inline collections for Movies, TV Shows, Music, and probably Audiobooks (I don't know about the last one yet---My libraries are still being scanned after the update and that one hasn't populated yet). Inline collection settings are also independent from each other, both per library and per user.

 

Libraries now have multiple "mount points" that are configurable per user. That means I can have a single "Movies" library that points to these folders for me, this folder for my wife, and that folder for my daughter---but it's still just the one library on the backend. I don't need to have a different "Kids Movies" library anymore if I prefer not to.

 

Media playback is freaking fast. Oh my gosh, is it fast. I don't even have that great an upload speed from my house, but remote playback speed and responsiveness is all flavors of impressive.

 

Emby has been dumping buckets of nfo metadata files into my media folders. Because I told it to. But now that means if I ever have to rebuild my libraries, repopulating the (even custom) metadata will be a snap.

 

I mean, sure, there are plenty of ways in which Plex looks "cooler", but I'm having a lot of fun poking around and having this "hey, I didn't know I could do that." sort of feeling with Emby. There are also a lot more ways to customize the experience with Emby---such as specifying which navigation tab to open by default on which library for which user---and that customization can entirely be made by me, and is not left up to my users to fiddle around with especially when they wouldn't know what they're doing messing with it.

 

Also, I know the Roku app needs some work, but the Emby devs have already said they know that and will get to it. And when they say they'll get to it, I believe them. As opposed to Plex, who usually say nothing at all; and if Plex does get to it, it's usually only some of it, and then they only get to it when they get to it, which is probably after getting to other things nobody wants. 

Edited by chyron8472
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Gilgamesh_48

In what way?

 

Well one way is the way Plex handles alphabetical browsing in movies. 

In Plex when browsing you are presented with your movie library with a alphabet on the right side and you can select a letter and then scroll forward or backward but in Emby if you select a letter you can only scroll forward and you have to back out and choose a different letter to go backward in the list.

 

This makes a difference because in Plex if you have a large library and you want to go to say one of the last "S" movies you just choose "T" and move back a few movies while in Emby you must choose "S" and scroll through all the "S" movies.

 

That just makes Emby look clumsy.

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arrbee99

I guess inline collections would be a collection actually showing up as one item  (e.g. 'Alien Collection') in the Movie section (or wherever) and not as the individual movies ?

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Chyron

In what way?

 

Admittedly in my subjective opinion:

  • I like the navigation bar on the left in Plex Web. Emby does have something similar, but the text in Emby is smaller, there's a lot more wasted real estate, and you can't pin it onscreen.
  • I'd prefer portrait posters over landscape thumbnails on the Home Screen. Thumbnails take up considerably more real estate, especially on mobile.
  • The (normal) "My Media" section icons are too large on mobile. They're the same size as the other thumbnails, which as I said take up too much real estate.
  • Movie posters are larger on screen than I would like. I have found myself more than once zooming out on my browser a couple clicks to adjust their size, which allowed more posters to fit. Plex has an ability in-app to resize them.
  • Horizontal scrolling has a bug where you can scroll infinitely to the right, onto however many number of blank pages.
  • The navigation bar at the top is a bit wider than I think is necessary
  • The Now Playing screen for audio on Emby, I think, doesn't look very nice. The playback controls are very small and bunched together and the album art is tiny.
  • and when you click/tap on one of the playback controls for either audio or video, the control you accessed stays highlighted until you touch something else, rather than reverting back to normal.

Among some other things, I'm sure.

 

They're nitpicks, to be sure, and they're subjective, but they're things I liked about the Plex Web UI and Plex for Android v6 UI that I prefer over Emby.

Edited by chyron8472
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Chyron

I guess inline collections would be a collection actually showing up as one item  (e.g. 'Alien Collection') in the Movie section (or wherever) and not as the individual movies ?

 

Yes. I call it "inline collections" because I've heard other people call it that. I've also called them "nested collections". But either way, I'm referring to having collection entries show up on the main library page, listed together with other items that are not in collections. In the current beta, and presumably the upcoming stable release, nested collections will be available for movies, TV shows, music albums, music songs, and probably audiobook albums. Each navigation tab's and user's "display collections" setting is independent, instead of one all-encompassing checkbox in the dashboard.

Edited by chyron8472
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arrbee99

Yes. I call it "inline collections" because I've heard other people call it that. I've also called them "nested collections". But either way, I'm referring to having collection entries show up on the main library page, listed together with other items that are not in collections. In the current beta, and presumably the upcoming stable release, nested collections will be available for movies, TV shows, music albums, music songs, and probably audiobook albums. Each navigation tab's and user's "display collections" setting is independent, instead of one all-encompassing checkbox in the dashboard.

 

Thought so. It is quite useful, though I still have the separate My Media Collections item as well. You can never have too many options...

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arrbee99

Well one way is the way Plex handles alphabetical browsing in movies. 

In Plex when browsing you are presented with your movie library with a alphabet on the right side and you can select a letter and then scroll forward or backward but in Emby if you select a letter you can only scroll forward and you have to back out and choose a different letter to go backward in the list.

 

This makes a difference because in Plex if you have a large library and you want to go to say one of the last "S" movies you just choose "T" and move back a few movies while in Emby you must choose "S" and scroll through all the "S" movies.

 

That just makes Emby look clumsy.

 

True, though it does vary between applications. You can do exactly as you describe in Theater, for example. Inconsistent then ?

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