EMBY vs PLEX.. the pros and cons

[chrisrobbins1970 82]

I have made the jump from PLEX to EMBY a little over a week ago and here are my HONSETY opinions...

PROS:

  1). Emby just WORKS. Haven't gotten any playbackerrors and neither has the few remote users. 4K movies will play without playbeck errors.

        Movies that I had transcoding on plex are direct play on emby

  2). Extremely customizable

  3.) USER setups, no need of invites or people creating accounts

  4). Updates had two so far and nothing broke

   5). The SKIP INTRO is aesome

   6). A big shout out to LUKE on this forums. He has answered all my questions with in a short amount of time. Might be the BIGGEST PRO that I forgot to list.

 

CONS: (minor)

   1). For me there is NO standalone music player for my android like PLEXAMP

   2). On the ROKU the scrolling through movies; the alphgbet on the side going from # - Z freezes. Have to go from #-M, then from M-Z.

        Do hope they get this worked on. Only happens with movies. On plex there is no issies going from #-Z.

   3). Not all movies have TRAILERS; have to add them on my own. Plex had trailers for ALL the movies

   4). No theme songs on TV series, again have to add them on my own. Plex had them songs for ALL TV Series

 

All in all..I'd advise anyone who is tired of the PLEX updates breaking something or Plex going the way of streaming serivce to switch to Emby..

NOW if I can ALL my remot users to install the apps and use it......

 

 

Edited March 6, 2024 by chrisrobbins1970

[arrbee99 1815]

Cons number 1 -

https://www.symfonium.app/

Not Emby but very good.

Assuming you're referring to your Android phone.

[chrisrobbins1970 82]

I'll give it a try.

thank you

[polaris70 17]

1 hour ago, chrisrobbins1970 said:

I have made the jump from PLEX to EMBY a little over a week ago and here are my HONSETY opinions...

PROS:

  1). Emby just WORKS. Haven't gotten any playbackerrors and neither has the few remote users. 4K movies will play without playbeck errors.

        Movies that I had transcoding on plex are direct play on emby

  2). Extremely customizable

  3.) USER setups, no need of invites or people creating accounts

  4). Updates had two so far and nothing broke

   5). The SKIP INTRO is aesome

 

CONS: (minor)

   1). For me there is NO standalone music player for my android like PLEXAMP

   2). On the ROKU the scrolling through movies; the alphgbet on the side going from # - Z freezes. Have to go from #-M, then from M-Z.

        Do hope they get this worked on. Only happens with movies. On plex there is no issies going from #-Z.

   3). Not all movies have TRAILERS; have to add them on my own. Plex had trailers for ALL the movies

   4). No theme songs on TV series, again have to add them on my own. Plex had them songs for ALL TV Series

 

All in all..I'd advise anyone who is tired of the PLEX updates breaking something or Plex going the way of streaming serivce to switch to Emby..

NOW if I can ALL my remot users to install the apps and use it......

 

 

I agreed with you 100% since I was from Plex. The one more PRO is from Emby I found is this Emby Forum with their devs support are great, especially is Luke. Hope Emby keeps it up.

[chrisrobbins1970 82]

you are absolutley right..I edited my comment to add that...

[vincen 71]

I made same switch from Plex after years using it to Emby one year ago and globally positive although it suffers same issue as Plex: basic features not working and no fix at all (problem of random on music that is annoying as hell for example).

[yocker 1247]

Fix the "auto" quality problem in Emby and i will never ever have to hear/think/worry about Plex ever again and i will be a much happier person for it!

How people can live with and even excuse the bloat and data harvesting in Plex is.. Errr.. PerPLEXing.

[vincen 71]

1 minute ago, yocker said:

Fix the "auto" quality problem in Emby and i will never ever have to hear/think/worry about Plex ever again and i will be a much happier person for it!

Funny to find the same complaints than on Plex forum about auto quality. Lot of people complain about it not working well on both platforms but never encountered the issue

[yocker 1247]

3 hours ago, vincen said:

Funny to find the same complaints than on Plex forum about auto quality. Lot of people complain about it not working well on both platforms but never encountered the issue

Plex has a somewhat working auto quality settings that tries to determine if your connection can handle the bitrate of the movie, plus it asks/warns you when theres problems.
I can understand why people complain about it as it is by far from perfect.

Emby's auto quality is auto in name only. All it does is set the bitrate limit to 4-7mpbs depending on client.
No offense meant to the Emby team but i would basically call the auto quality in Emby a lie.

Other than that, Emby only really need h265 transcoding for me to think it's perfect to me. No bloat, no data harvesting, no ads, no trying to sell other services!

[vincen 71]

1 hour ago, yocker said:

Plex has a somewhat working auto quality settings that tries to determine if your connection can handle the bitrate of the movie, plus it asks/warns you when theres problems.
I can understand why people complain about it as it is by far from perfect.

Emby's auto quality is auto in name only. All it does is set the bitrate limit to 4-7mpbs depending on client.
No offense meant to the Emby team but i would basically call the auto quality in Emby a lie.

Other than that, Emby only really need h265 transcoding for me to think it's perfect to me. No bloat, no data harvesting, no ads, no trying to sell other services!

Thanks for clarification details as it's interesting to know

Regarding h265 I have no problem with Emby transcoding h265 to h264 for example and I don't have GPU decoding avalaible on server !

[yocker 1247]

2 hours ago, vincen said:

Thanks for clarification details as it's interesting to know

Regarding h265 I have no problem with Emby transcoding h265 to h264 for example and I don't have GPU decoding avalaible on server !

Yeah h265 to h264 works fine, its everything to h265 that's the problem.
Transcoding to h265 brings a bunch of benefits, like better tonemapping handling and smaller size.

Transcoding to h264 works fine, great even, and is enough for now but the need for h265 is rapidly approaching as almost all devices support it today and it has good amount of benefits.

[Carlo 4560]

Nvidia GPU's encode faster using HEVC than AVC as well as produce better quality.

With the Auto quality often using only 5 or 6Mbps, the HEVC encodes could be significantly better at that bitrate.
With almost any GPU it should be a no brainer to use HEVC.
It would be even better to use AV1 over HEVC if the server has a GPU that can encode it and the client can play it back.

Carlo

[bfogdb20825 4]

However, I've found that the biggest problem at present is that Jellyfin has a lot of functions that are more advanced than those of Emby, more and better plugins, and fewer bugs than Emby. The only drawbacks, I reckon, are that its playback efficiency is lower than that of Emby and its user interface functions are not as user-friendly as those of Emby.

This gives me a feeling that Emby will always be replaced and surpassed by Jellyfin.

 

Many bugs in Emby haven't been fixed for a long time.

 

The progress of adding new features is also slow.

[vincen 71]

25 minutes ago, bfogdb20825 said:

The progress of adding new features is also slow.

Not really a problem so long all the basics work which is unhappy not true You can't compare too a commercial project like Emby or Plex with a fully open-source project like Jellyfin !

26 minutes ago, bfogdb20825 said:

Many bugs in Emby haven't been fixed for a long time.

+1 on that and here very similar with Plex

[EowynTheHunter 2]

I used Plex for many years, but over time it became frustratingly slow, so I started looking for alternatives even tried Serviio, but that didn’t work out either. About a year ago, I discovered Emby, and I’ve been using it exclusively ever since. It’s fast, stable, and the configuration options are very well thought out. I liked it so much that I bought the lifetime license. I can honestly recommend it works perfectly with my Samsung QE65Q67DAUXXH 65" TV.