The lack of officially supported procedures for enabling secure remote access

[mausfield 2]

IMO this is the only major roadblock for a huge amount of potential Plex refugees. These forums have a bunch of one-off guide using various setups and combinations of tools such as nginx, Windows Server IIS, Let's Encrypt, Certify the Web, Caddy, a bunch of dyndns providers, various cloud-based services, etc. Many are outdated and lack documentation, some broke in the midst of policy changes or changes in enforcement of sending non-HTML traffic through Cloudflare, etc. Point being: it's a mess and doesn't really need to be, and the unofficial guides often use inconsistent language as well as presuming a level of networking fluency that is simply never going to be commonplace among a userbase that Emby, as far as I can tell, does not wish to be purely networking pros/hobbyists.

An official page on the wiki with one or two pathways to secure remote access should be set up, probably with the least amount of external service support as possible to improve stability and prevent it being a new source of troubleshooting for devs. As someone who left Plex and now pays for Emby, lacking provided HTTPS support is totally tolerable with such a guide in place.

[GrimReaper 4739]

General guidelines are laid out in the KB article (including obtaining domain name and SSL cert): Secure Your Server .

[mausfield 2]

Look at me adding to the confusion lol. My mistake, I am specifically talking about reverse proxy setups, which I feel are pretty necessary given the current state of risk on the public internet.

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

21 minutes ago, mausfield said:

IMO this is the only major roadblock for a huge amount of potential Plex refugees. These forums have a bunch of one-off guide using various setups and combinations of tools such as nginx, Windows Server IIS, Let's Encrypt, Certify the Web, Caddy, a bunch of dyndns providers, various cloud-based services, etc. Many are outdated and lack documentation, some broke in the midst of policy changes or changes in enforcement of sending non-HTML traffic through Cloudflare, etc. Point being: it's a mess and doesn't really need to be, and the unofficial guides often use inconsistent language as well as presuming a level of networking fluency that is simply never going to be commonplace among a userbase that Emby, as far as I can tell, does not wish to be purely networking pros/hobbyists.

An official page on the wiki with one or two pathways to secure remote access should be set up, probably with the least amount of external service support as possible to improve stability and prevent it being a new source of troubleshooting for devs. As someone who left Plex and now pays for Emby, lacking provided HTTPS support is totally tolerable with such a guide in place.

Remote is so complex that I doubt that a comprehensive guide is even possible. There are general guidelines and many help topics available but it seems that with all of those there are always exceptions  so that someone posts here nearly every week with problems getting remote access to work.

Follow the guide(s) and try to search the Emby blog help sections and, if you continue to have problems then post here following the guidelines in "How to report a problem" and you will receive all the help you need.

Edited July 12, 2025 by Gilgamesh_48

[pwhodges 2012]

14 hours ago, mausfield said:

Look at me adding to the confusion lol. My mistake, I am specifically talking about reverse proxy setups, which I feel are pretty necessary given the current state of risk on the public internet.

There are multiple topics on using nginx, Caddy and IIS as reverse proxies (not Apache, for some reason).  But a certain amount of internet and network knowledge is required for any such setup, and from my experience this can't be guaranteed.

Paul

[Tank_Killer 7]

I agree, the lack of some type of easy way to secure and encrypt the traffic from emby is definitly missing.  all the ways mentioned are conveluded and difficult to setup for average users.

[ebr 16174]

23 minutes ago, Tank_Killer said:

I agree, the lack of some type of easy way to secure and encrypt the traffic from emby is definitly missing.  all the ways mentioned are conveluded and difficult to setup for average users.

Hi.  We would like to make this easier but also do not want to compromise our mission of keeping your server your server.  Keeping this control in your hands instead of ours does come with some additional responsibilities, unfortunately.

[Neminem 1518]

@Tank_Killer@mausfield that the issue.

Not every setup is equal / similar, it would be impossible to make a guide to fit all.

Some users don't know what network is or care, they have never logged into there router, and are still using the "factory default password"

How would you ever make a guide that fits them ?

Not even speaking of the different router interface, where some might change with each firmware iteration ?

Then there are the different network setup behind the router, OS, Firewall, security software and reverse proxy setups.

etc......

But you could start by making a guide to rule them all

 

Edited July 14, 2025 by Neminem