What % of Emby users started with Plex?

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

This is unimportant but it came up during a conversation with one of my neighbors. 
I started with Plex although I had a few false starts with older media managers none even remotely looked like a permanent solution for media management. I then started using Plex but they soon showed their true colors and  I abandoned them for Emby. After a few false steps I got Emby set up correctly and have been using it ever sense.

In the conversation I had today the question came up about what app/system we started with and we found that both of us had started with Plex. I then conducted a very informal poll and found that nine out of the 10 people started with Plex as there media manager. The other one started with Kodi but she is much younger than the rest of us. 

I did not run into even one person that started with Emby and that caused me to question what the actual % is. 

I do not really care about the "why" but my curiosity was aroused.

This is probably futile and pointless but, at my age, curiosity is about all I have to keep me active. 

So answer any way you want as, in this case, I really have no preconceived notions about what to expect.
Thanks.

[lorac 118]

Started with Video Browser and have never used Plex. 

[daldana 122]

Since I've been around for awhile, I took the long way around!

WMC-->Kodi-->GBPVR(early name for NextPVR)-->Mediaportal-->Plex-->Emby(in conjunction with ChannelsDVR). I remember when Media Browser was a plugin for WMC...

[ebr 16169]

12 hours ago, lorac said:

Started with Video Browser

Now that's old school  

[ebr 16169]

I started with "MyMovies" in 2006.  Had a 100 Disc DVD carousel before that.

[Q-Droid 989]

I can't really say that I used Plex. On my journey to cut the cord I tested Plex, Kodi, Emby and even tried UMS and Serviio. Although Plex "worked" out of the box I decided to go with Emby.

 

[Gilgamesh_48 1240]

11 minutes ago, ebr said:

I started with "MyMovies" in 2006.  Had a 100 Disc DVD carousel before that.

I can beat that. My DVD carousel had 250 available slots, I still have it btw and even tested it recently, My actual first media manager was a Roku app (on the old N1000 Netflix Player) that I think was called Chandra and it used an Apache server for access. It was clunky and it was very incomplete but it worked. There was no transcoding and the actual formats that worked were very limited but it got me hooked. Starting from where I did has allowed me pretty easy movement through Plex and into Emby as all the media I had and everything I converted was in mp4 containers that would directly play on a Roku. I also gained a LOT of media at about the same time as I started with Plex because one of my uncles had a HUGE media library and left it to me on his passing. Most of my old TV and Movies come from him. 

I would like to chronical my entire evolution through Plex into Emby but I have blocked out a lot of those memories as dealing with Plex was more than a little traumatic. 

[ebr 16169]

2 minutes ago, Gilgamesh_48 said:

I think was called Chandra

Ha.

[GrimReaper 4739]

Discovered the world of Media Servers quite late (perks of living in (at the time) the back a** of the world - though it still somewhat is, but ateast not in IT matters), typical Plex convert here, for my quite specific circumstances/usage case Emby blew it out of the water (both figuratively and literally), though it took me a bit to find it in the first place, lost too much time (and nerves) exchanging punches with Plex. Ah, well, one learns as long as one lives. 

[Neminem 1516]

Started with XBMC on the first modded Xbox then that died.

Then Boxee Box (Boxee Box - Wikipedia) at that time I had 1 TV and 1 usb drive for storage.

Tried the some where in between Media Hub Home Entertainment Storage NAS Server

(LINKSYS NMH305 - MEDIA HUB HOME ENTERTAINMENT STORAGE NAS SERVER USER MANUAL Pdf Download | ManualsLib)

Then jriver media center for a forth night.

Then Plex.

Till they send out there change TOS and wanted my metadata to sell.

And been running Emby since 2017.

Edited September 25, 2025 by Neminem

[all4dom 101]

I started with media browser around 2009 if I rememebr correctly. I have never used plex at all. I was absent for a small period of time & when I came back to this community it was emby. 

[Tremas 197]

I started with Media Portal on a dedicated HTPC with an OTA TV tuner card. It was the do everything box for me in the early 2000s- Audio Media, Video Media, Video Games (steam and emulators), streaming, web browsing with a wireless keyboard, etc. One of my hardware refreshes happened around the time Media Portal was revamping everything to become a full server (version 2) I started checking out emby and Plex. I ran both for awhile, but I preferred emby's flexibility at the time - plus the OTA TV features worked better. 

Now that I think about it, my first REAL taste for what was possible came from a dedicated PC I set up in the trunk of my car running DOS to play MP3s (with an LCD display wired to the dash and a PC numberpad for control). 

[RobWayBro 28]

3 hours ago, Q-Droid said:

I can't really say that I used Plex. On my journey to cut the cord I tested Plex, Kodi, Emby and even tried UMS and Serviio. Although Plex "worked" out of the box I decided to go with Emby.

 

Same..  I tried several and Emby just fit my needs.

[StewieGreen 160]

I started with Boxee Box then Plex then Emby.

[CBers 7450]

I started with MediaBrowser back in 2009.
 

[FrostByte 5392]

Started with MediaBrowser here also.  Think it was MB2 when I started, then MB3 before they changed the name to Emby 4.x.

[tedfroop21 86]

Actually started with an Asus Oplay box,  then WD Live!, then Plex, and on to Emby for many reasons stated above.

Music is a different story. I own a couple Squeezeboxes and have used their software Squeezebox server, which became Logitech Media server and is now developed independently as Lyrion Music server.  Like Emby it has a lot of community built plugins, like the Denon/Marantz AVR Control plugin and radio from around the world.  It is tag based not meta based which makes much of the problems with sorting, tags, genres and behaviours the users problem to sort out.

[Smitty018210 143]

Media Browser plugin for WMC around 2010 I think. 

[adrianwi 279]

OSXBMC briefly before it became Plex, which I then used for about 8 years, until they started forcing authentication, and their approach to privacy became questionable.  I jumped to emby so have been using that now for a similar time, although perhaps it's time to start looking elsewhere again.

[brothom 177]

Tried Jellyfin (didn't want to use Plex) but found it horrible.

Started using Plex and after a few months, the free features were mostly taken away because of the paywall.

Found Emby as a good free alternative, opensource and an active community so here we are I guess. Supports plenty of (internal) users, has no cap on database entries and integrates fine with a bunch of metadata providers.

It's funny though because I also mostly know people who started with Plex and then moved to Jellyfin or gave up all together. None I know use Emby.

Edited January 21 by brothom

[Suliamu 36]

I've started with Jellyfin years ago and got frustrated with slow development (mainly because of the database issues who seemigly nobody was able to fix). When looking into the code myself i first saw that the main contributer on github was Luke (who was working somewhere else, on emby) and that Jellyfin hasn't even removed the traces of emby in the code after all those years. So it was clear that emby is the way to go. 
Have never tried plex and i am not planning to do it.