Love Letter To Emby

[blgentry 49]

I've spent the last handful of years using different media servers.  I've used the two big ones for at least one year each.  I had settled on "P" a while back since it seemed more stable than "K".  But was never exactly what I wanted.  I saw a reference to Emby and decided to give it a quick try and see how it handled my library.

 

I was immediately impressed by both the server management and the client for Nvidia Shield (AndroidTV).  Managing metadata from the server was pretty easy.  The "identify" button was such a welcome feature to find in the menu!  Cover art was easy to work with and had a really nice set of sources for new art.  In short, really decent metadata management at the server admin level.

 

The AndroidTV client seems fairly nimble.  The number of button presses required to change sorting is fairly small.  The two most common sorting options (alphabetical and by import date) are right at the top of the sort button.  Awesome!  Filtering is actually quite useable and has all of the obvious criteria that I could think of.  The alphabet on the side is easy to get to and quick to navigate with.  The entire client feels faster than others I have used from competing products.  ...and then I watched a movie.  "Is that sharper than I remember it?  No, it can't be.  But it is.  This looks better than "P".  How have I not been getting full quality?  This is awesome!"

 

After noticing that each movie had many images as "assets", I set Emby to store them next to the movie files themselves.  I like to have everything associated with my media in the same spot.  Which led me to notice that having ALL my movies in the SAME folder wasn't great.  So I did a weekend project to move all movies into their own individual folders.  I also fixed the naming of all of my media to include the year and thus make them all uniquely identifiable.  This was extremely satisfying, even if it didn't really involve Emby.  I used TinyMediaManager, which turns out to be awesome as well after you learn a bit about it.

 

At some point I found the "organize by collections" button and checked it.  I was so happy when it made all of these automatic collections.  Dirty Harry,  Harry Potter, Star Trek, Die Hard... all organized into their own containers and ordered by release date.  That's EXACTLY what I wanted all this time.  But P and K made it so clunky and hard to do.  With Emby it was all automatic.

 

Shortly after, I figured out that I had many duplicate versions of movies.  Many of them were not exact duplicates though.  Things like "Drumline - Theatrical" and "Drumline - Extended Version".  I figured out how Emby does "movie versioning" and honestly I'm not a fan.  But Emby has a convenient button to "ungroup movie versions" which I used.  I then decided I need to make collections for each of these movies with multiple versions.  It was incredibly easy to create a collection and add movies to it.  Just like it should be!  Collections are really a killer feature of Emby for me.  My library has never looked so good and never been so correctly organized.

 

As I was cleaning up my collection with help from Emby and TMM, I figured out that I had a handful of movie "extras" I had ripped from Blu-ray and DVD a long time ago.  Files that I had honestly lost track of.  I had never had a good way to present movie extras or to group them with their parent movies.  Emby impressed me again with the ease of making an "extras" folder and then simply automatically showing me all the extras right inside the movie screen for that movie.  This is one of those events where after you've seen it, you wonder why it isn't like this on all systems.  It's so easy and elegant.  My favorite two design paradigms.  This has changed my media acquisition workflow.  For years now I have been ripping discs and simply ignoring the extras because I couldn't organize them.  No more!  Now I can rip all the extras and keep them with the parent movies, ready to see any time.  This is something I missed from the days of DVD players and physical discs:  All the extra content that added richness to the movie experience.  Now I have it again.  I don't know how "huge" this is to my movie experience, but it is a sea change.  It's brought back something that I thought I'd never have again.  

 

Early on I subscribed to Emby Premiere.  I did this to support the developers and to try out a couple of features that looked compelling.  The Cover Art plugin makes movie and TV posters look like disc cases.  Blu-ray's look like Blu-ray cases.  DVD rips look like... you guessed it, DVD cases.  This alone is a HUGE feature.  Before this I had to click on each movie to see what the resolution was (DVD or BluRay).  Now I can tell just by the case "wrapper".  This detail really makes my collection more accessible to me.  Premiere is worth having for this feature alone.

 

I was excited to try the "Cinema Intros" feature as well.  This shows one or more trailers before your movie.  Trailers that should be similar in theme to the movie you are about to watch.  In practice this feature is a little rough.  Mostly due to the sources of the trailers, which are frequently poor quality, or in a foreign language, or have some other issue that make them unappealing.  I think with a better source of trailers, this could still be a really neat feature to have.  I'm still experimenting with it.

 

I'll say it again:  My movie and TV collection has never been this well presented before.  Emby has helped that happen and Emby is the final presentation (the Emby clients) which support all of this organization.  I'm very excited about this and have told all of my friends that are interested in home media servers.  Is Emby perfect?  Not yet.  But it's the best media server product I've ever used.

 

Thanks Team Emby!

Brian.

[Luke 37071]

Hi, we’re glad to hear it. Thanks for the feedback !