Emby and Play-Fi App

[Islandtime 0]

I'm fed up with Plex crashing and am considering a switch to Emby to stream music via Play-Fi and video via Roku.

I'm wondering if anyone is using Emby with Play-Fi?

If yes with the Play-Fi Android app see your Emby music playlists ?

Thanks,

Jim

[Luke 40079]

Hi, if it's just standard dlna then it should work fine.

[Carlo 4552]

The Play-Fi app will be able to access Emby and work fine but you won't be able to use other Emby apps and "cast" to it.

Edited August 9, 2020 by cayars

[Luke 40079]

58 minutes ago, cayars said:

The Play-Fi app will be able to access Emby and work fine but you wan't be able to use other Emby apps and "cast" to it.

Why not?

[Carlo 4552]

Play-Fi is it's own service and protocols. Play-Fi has apps for different devices and native support for many receivers that support Play-Fi. The Play-Fi app and service doesn't speak Emby, nor does Emby speak Play-Fi so I don't see how you could cast to it. Play-Fi can pull from DLNA or UPnP to use as a source for it's streaming just as it can pull from Amazon Music, Spotify, SiriusXM, Radio.com, Tidal, etc so Play-Fi can make use of Emby Music via DLNA as a source for it's use.

 

[Islandtime 0]

19 hours ago, cayars said:

The Play-Fi app will be able to access Emby and work fine but you won't be able to use other Emby apps and "cast" to it.

But will it see Emby playlists?

According to DTS tech support it won't see Plex playlists because they're not in a standard format. They haven't responded RE Emby.

 

Thanks

 

[Carlo 4552]

I honestly don't know if it can use Emby Playlists. If it doesn't work, it's possible the playlists could be written a different way for Play-Fi.  It would probably depend on how much difference there is between the current playlist and what it wants/needs to see.

Have you tried creating a playlist to try it yet?

[Luke 40079]

Playlists are exposed via dlna so they might work just fine.

[Islandtime 0]

4 hours ago, cayars said:

I honestly don't know if it can use Emby Playlists. If it doesn't work, it's possible the playlists could be written a different way for Play-Fi.  It would probably depend on how much difference there is between the current playlist and what it wants/needs to see.

Have you tried creating a playlist to try it yet?

I have to install Emby to try it. That will be a job for one night this week.

Are you getting a lot of folks coming over from Plex?

 

[Carlo 4552]

Yep, and it seems we're seeing more and more people in the forums commenting about moving from Plex, or trying Emby because of something Plex did.  Seems they are moving more and more away from local media and subsidizing things with ads they provide.  For some people with smaller libraries the "extra" content is probably welcome but for others it's just noise and detracts from the system they are trying to build.

No one system will likely ever meet everyone's needs so it's pretty common to see a lot of people try both systems before choosing or changing systems.

[Islandtime 0]

19 hours ago, cayars said:

Seems they are moving more and more away from local media and subsidizing things with ads they provide.  For some people with smaller libraries the "extra" content is probably welcome but for others it's just noise and detracts from the system they are trying to build.

That pretty much sums it up for me, along with the fact that Plex is becoming increasingly buggy.

A recent update now has my server crashing every night. Since it's a dedicated media server I got clever and scheduled an auto-reboot each night as a work around. No joy, no matter what time I set it for the server has crashed by morning. In fairness to Plex they've tried to offer support, but it's a shotgun approach. I'm looking at eight hours of installing drivers and C++ libraries if I follow everything they've suggested on top of all the hours I've already spent on this.

That's a lot of time to fix a buggy upgrade with no clean way to step back to a previous version. I'm kicking myself for not creating a restore point before installing the upgrade...