Windows or Linux?

[jriker1 20]

Maybe simple question but not sure.  I have been running Emby for a long time now on Windows Server.  I am going to replace my entire hardware footprint and debating if I go with a Linux based host OS or Windows again.  Is there an advantage to using Emby Server on Windows vs Linux?  Codec differences?  Performance? etc?  Also I assume it's not recommended to run Emby Server in a virtual over the parent OS?

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

There are reasons, quite valid ones, for using either or neither. As far as your "regular" computer usage I would say that I can make STRONG arguments for and against all the operating systems you mentioned but my recommendation, for Emby at least, is to go with whichever one you are most comfortable with. If your comfort level is about equal or you have reasons not related to Emby to choose the one you less comfortable with then rethink the whole process and, if you come to the same decision then simply do it.

IF it is possible you should try it for a bit and then make your final choice.

I faced that same decision and I ended up staying with Windows. If you take reasonable care and use a good VPN for surfing the extra vulnerabilities that Windows has does not matter much.

The one thing that finally convinced me to stay with Windows has to do with the availability of "special" programs if needed and I found that the odds of finding some program for one time use or to fill a specialized need was much greater if I wanted a Windows based solution that it was for Linux.

I know it is no longer as true as it once was but I have always felt the Windows is for serious usage (with some fun stuff as well) while Linux is for tinkerers. I decided a few years back that I just wanted things to work and that seems more likely under Windows.

Edited December 13, 2021 by Gilgamesh_48

[richt 94]

I've been running two servers for a while now, my original Windows server and I added a Linux server to do a comparison.  So far I haven't found any real differences between the Emby installations for my usage pattern.  My reason for testing Linux is based on the new Windows 11 requirements, which my existing Windows server does not meet.  I know that Windows 10 will remain supported for a while, but sooner or later MS will drop it.  I have no Emby based reason to upgrade the hardware so moving to Linux is under evaluation.  The one thing to note is that Linux systems can be a little more complicated to set up unless you're familiar with the OS.  One the other hand there is lots of support out there for Linux OS's.  I also recently switched my desktop OS to Linux Mint.

Haven't made the switch on the Emby server yet, mainly because I've got many TB's of recordings on multiple hard drives formatted NTFS and there has been some history of problems with Linux and NTFS.  I most likely will want to copy my recordings to drives formatted with a Linux file system and I'm just not ready for that effort yet.

[jriker1 20]

Thanks for the replies.  I'm equally familiar with a number of Linux flavors as I am with Windows.  Didn't hear anything on thoughts about virtual but anyone have experience with running Emby on a virtual environment?  I have a lot of WMV files so playing thru the NVidia Shield Pro is always transcoding which is fine.  Just not sure how well that will perform on a Virtual even on the same server as the array of videos is located.   One thought I'm having is to have a dedicated Proxmox virtualization environment and build some of my current hardware based infrastructure virtually.  When I think about this historically Linux takes less processing power to run per instance so may perform better virtually, but not sure on Emby specifically.

Other side question, how easy is it to migrate Emby Server on Windows to a Linux install?  Including the flag of watched shows/movies.

richt, hear ya on NTFS and Linux and probably add in Samba shares to the mix.  Right now I have Windows Essentials 2016 Server and Microsoft discontinued it so am pissed.  Was the ultimate for backup server, RDP gateway, file sharing, DNS, DHCP, etc.  In a spot where I either continue to try staying with Microsoft (still pissed also about Windows MCE yes it's still limping around in my basement and cablecard), or give up on Microsoft.  Kind of their thing as a business discontinuing things prosumer that they won't get enough adoption from due to the technical aptitude required so they drop them.

[Painkiller88 248]

1 hour ago, jriker1 said:

Didn't hear anything on thoughts about virtual but anyone have experience with running Emby on a virtual environment?

I would not recommend using Emby on a virtual env if you don't have to. I am saying this because of performance, as you know running a VM you are not getting your real hardware and your real performance, especially i mean for transcoding if you have a good GPU, most virtual env don't passthrough them and you get some shared memory GPU shit. So i would not do it if you don't have to do it.

 

 

1 hour ago, jriker1 said:

Other side question, how easy is it to migrate Emby Server on Windows to a Linux install?  Including the flag of watched shows/movies.

There are very good tutorials from emby how to move between systems. It is not difficulty.

 

For me, webservers should run on linux if you are experienced with, and emby is a webserver if you plan do enable external access. This again for me is because linux is more stable than windows, doesn't need to reboot after every update and is way more secure than windows.

Think of ransomware. There is almost no ransomware out there affecting linux systems. If you have your files on a NAS like synology, it is almost impossible the encryption starts right from your NAS, this happens always from some windows client with some permanent SMB connection to the Share.

So this for me is a huge reason to use linux if you can handle it. On the other way, if you are not familiar with linux, you will have some hard times to fix things if something isn't working well.

So if you are experienced enough with linux, i would recommend linux (it also needs less resources than windows) so more power for your streams and transcodings

Edited December 25, 2021 by Painkiller8818

[pwhodges 2012]

8 hours ago, Painkiller8818 said:

If you have your files on a NAS like synology, it is almost impossible the encryption starts right from your NAS, this happens always from some windows client with some permanent SMB connection to the Share.

No ransomware starts from the server, so the server OS is irrelevant here.  The requirement is that the client has a connection to the server (which is pretty common - that's rather the point of a file server).  The most common client vectors for ransomware are Windows and Android.  Obviously the client should not allow the normal user unrestricted write access to a NAS; but writing backups of, say, your financial documents to a NAS would be normal, and these are precisely the kind of things that hurt when ransomware hits - your media can just be re-ripped, which is inconvenient, but virtually always possible.

I ran Windows Servers alongside Linux professionally for twenty years - they are secure and stable if run by the kind of nerds who also run Linux.

Paul

[Painkiller88 248]

2 hours ago, pwhodges said:

No ransomware starts from the server, so the server OS is irrelevant here.

I would not say that, this depends how users use the server, if it is really only a emby server or if they do other things with this server, like downloading some stuff use the emby server for playing video games etc.

Emby Server does not mean every home user has a Windows Server OS installed.

I am an IT guy and you wouldn't believe how much crap people and also companies do on their servers.

I saw people having the same server they use as a web server for a dedicated game server eg. counter-strike etc, or use RDP connections without restrictions or VPN needed, just public for everyone.

If you are also in the IT for 20 years you know exactly how customers handle their servers and they don't bother about security.
This is the reason i am always explaining things for users with no knowledge. You cannot assume that the users have any prior knowledge.

Fact is most ransomware is written for windows as i wanna get as many people as possible so thats why attackers write ransomware and other shit for windows os in most cases

Edited December 25, 2021 by Painkiller8818

[pwhodges 2012]

3 hours ago, Painkiller8818 said:

If you are also in the IT for 20 years you know exactly how customers handle their servers and they don't bother about security.

46 years until retirement..  And yes, I've seen all the bad practice.  But the one time we had GCHQ contact the university to say there had been an intrusion that they wanted us to leave in place for them to investigate, that was on a Linux cluster...  (GCHQ were seeing the traffic, but the users had not picked up on any indications of bad behaviour).

Paul

[Squash_Konrad 0]

While Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 10 for free, are there any changes on this subject?
(Which system is better for Emby Server — Windows or Linux?)

I'm asking this because my current hardware doesn’t support Windows 11, and I’m considering switching to Linux to avoid paying Microsoft annually for Windows 10 security updates.

What do you recommend at this point? Which system is better for running Emby Server: Windows or Linux?

[pwhodges 2012]

The one you are most comfortable managing, and which has effective drivers for your hardware.

Note that there are ways to install Windows 11 on many unsupported systems.

Paul

[qazwsx10 7]

On 8/3/2025 at 1:17 AM, pwhodges said:

The one you are most comfortable managing, and which has effective drivers for your hardware.

Note that there are ways to install Windows 11 on many unsupported systems.

Paul

So going to bring this thread back up. I'm in the process of moving my server to it's own dedicated build, but it will be on an Intel Celeron G3930. So Windows 11 isn't supported on it (and I'm unsure if it's too old even for an unsupported system).

I've also never utilized Linux in my entire life. Thoughts on if it would be difficult to learn Linux or any other ideas/thoughts?

[Luke 42077]

If you're going to start with Linux, Ubuntu is probably the easiest way to do it.

[qazwsx10 7]

1 minute ago, Luke said:

If you're going to start with Linux, Ubuntu is probably the easiest way to do it.

Thanks Luke! Would you say it's difficult learn to install and setup? This will be dedicated almost purely for Emby, so once everything is up and running I think the only thing I will do is just drop new files onto the drive daily/weekly. Any tutorials you'd highly recommend?

[Luke 42077]

Hi, no, not difficult, but I'd probably spend time playing with it and getting to know it before depending on it for your emby install.

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

23 minutes ago, qazwsx10 said:

Thanks Luke! Would you say it's difficult learn to install and setup? This will be dedicated almost purely for Emby, so once everything is up and running I think the only thing I will do is just drop new files onto the drive daily/weekly. Any tutorials you'd highly recommend?

It is my opinion that it is generally a mistake to try to learn an operating system while installing a server. 
There are lots of pitfalls that impact servers that Linux does not make it easy to understand what is wrong when things go haywire. There are permission issues as well as other issues that are easy for people that understand Linux but are very different for people coming from a Windows environment.

However it very possible to learn Linux quite quickly and setting up a server is a good way to do that but it is practically guaranteed that you will have several false starts.

I am currently using Windows 10 on my server and it does not support Windows 11 so I am sticking with 10 for now but I may, like you, need to install Linux in the future for my system but I am not looking forward to it and, so far, I have not heard anything that would make me think that there is any real downside as most, nearly all, of the hype about the dangers of staying with Windows 10 after Microsoft support ends is from Microsoft itself trying to force people into more expensive hardware and software. 

I may find a true danger in the future but Windows 11 is out of the question so i will move to Linux if it turns out that there is a good reason to move from Windows 10 but, for now, Windows 10 is perfectly adequate for me. 

Edited October 7, 2025 by Gilgamesh_48

[rhodges 49]

I recommend running Emby in a docker. Then for the host, if you are using just a server (no GUI or anything), then Debian or Ubuntu. I like Debian because it isn't bleeding edge. As long as it has support for all your hardware. If you are latest and greatest hardware, then Ubuntu might be better.

Keep in mind if you use docker (or whatever), how you'd expose your storage into the container. If you want real time library monitoring, etc.

I actually run Debian 13 in a VM on proxmox. Then in that VM I run docker and Emby is one of the many docker containers I use. In my docker compose file, I have a volume mounted over samba to my storage server (but if everything is local, you could just use a bind/volume mount).

Unless you are familiar with Linux, you might struggle with permissions. So, in the end, go with what is comfortable.

No license for Debian, docker or anything and none of the "upgrade to windows 13 otherwise you'll end up getting hacked because we don't want to support you". With docker, your stuff is pretty much self contained so you can bring up a new docker server, copy data over and go.