Emby and Samba and Usernames

[jonandtice 0]

I am about to install Emby on a headless ubuntu server to serve Kodi clients on Android TV boxes.  I have two questions:

 

1) Everyone in my house has their personal username that I use across the different computers in my house (both Linux and Windows).  Is it recommended to do everything on the server under my normal username or should I create a user for the media stuff and for emby to run as?  The reason I ask is different people would upload content to the Movies, TV Shows, Music and Pictures shares.  So is it OK for the files to be owned by each user or should they be owned by samba's guest user (usually nobody)?

 

2) Does emby create samba shares for each media folder (Movies, TV Shows, etc.) or will I have to create them myself?

[gsnerf 26]

The emby server will only have access to the media files if the user starting the server has read-rights on those folders. If you install one of the default packages provided here, a user named emby wil be created and the service starting the server will use that username. If you want to let your users make the media available to emby by uploading them through samba you have two options:

1. create a share that forces the emby user on write (I don't know if I recommend that)

2. Enforce a group on write that you add to the emby user, possibly use the "users" group for that. In this case it would be ok for the users to actually own the files as long as the group has read-rights.

 

As for samba itself: emby doesn't configure samba in any way. You will have to do that yourself and then add the created samba shares to the library.

I would suggest you also create emby-users matching your regular users so the 'watched' state is persisted on a per-user basis, even when the media files are available for all users.

[jonandtice 0]

Thanks, you've answered my questions very well. But I have more! Mostly because I haven't started the actual install yet.

If I understand you correctly, Emby will only need read access to the files that are uploaded.  Will it need write access to the folder though?  And will Emby need write access to things like nfo files?

Will I add the samba share to the library or will I add the folder path (that happens to be a samba share) to the library?

[jstruebel 1]

My understanding of Emby is that it would only need write access to the folders if you configure it to save metadata/images into the same folders as the media files. I have a similar setup to yours and what I did was to change the default group for the emby user to my users group. I then configured Samba to force all files to have the users group and to be group read/write. Since I primarily upload files from my Windows box through Samba this works well to allow anyone to read/write the files while still preserving information about who uploaded it. Obviously you have to trust your users to not randomly delete/modify files, if not then I would only configure Samba to make files group read.

 

In emby you just add the folder path to the library. I would also recommend adding a path substitution so that clients can read the files through the Samba share and not have to stream from Emby. For example, I have the path /srv/storage shared as the storage share through Samba, so I setup a path substitution from /srv/storage to \\SERVERNAME\storage (I actually used the server IP address, but that requires a fixed IP).

 

Hopefully that helps answer your questions.

[jonandtice 0]

Just to follow up everything is working great with the above information. 

 

Trusted human users belong to the "users" group and between the folder permissions and samba configuration I have it set up to allow full permissions to the "users" and read-only access to everybody else (samba guests included).  If there is ever a user I don't trust, they won't be added to the "users" group but they will still have read access because of the file permissions.  I did not add the "emby" user to the "users" group as I don't need to store nfo files and artwork.  Everything is working great!

[Luke 37254]

Well done!