Setup fails on Windows Server 2025

[szalkerous 2]

When attempting to install the Windows Emby server on a clean Windows 2025 Standard install on a Dell PowerEdge rack server (Intel Xeon based), the setup.exe immediately fails.

Install log contains the following:

The following properties have been set:
Property: [AdminUser] = true {boolean}
Property: [InstallMode] = HomeSite {string}
Property: [NTProductType] = 3 {int}
Property: [ProcessorArchitecture] = AMD64 {string}
Property: [VersionNT] = 6.2.0 {version}
Launching Application.
URLDownloadToCacheFile failed with HRESULT '-2146697208'
Error: An error occurred trying to download 'https://embydata.com/downloads/server/release14/MediaBrowser.Server.Installer.application'.

 However, if I put that exact URL into the Edge browser, it resolves fine.

Anyone else run into this?

[Luke 43002]

Hi, is windows fully up to date?

[szalkerous 2]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

Hi, is windows fully up to date?

Yes, here's the OS details:

Edition          Windows Server 2025 Standard
Version          24H2
Installed on     8/13/2026
OS build         26100.33296
Experience       Windows Feature Experience Pack 1000.26100.275.0

Also since this is a server OS, Desktop Experience is installed, as well as the DX runtimes. Plan was to use the nVidia Tesla A2 (Driver v610.88) for transcoding.

(I originally planned to use Docker, but it seems on a Windows OS that's a bit of excessive overhead just for the convenience of containerization...but I admit I'm fairly new to the hosting side of Docker. That's why I'm just going to install direct.)

Edited Tuesday at 08:36 PM by szalkerous
Extra clarification

[szalkerous 2]

Just to throw this out there, my current Emby install sits on a Netgear ReadyNAS but those systems are EOL'd and unsupported, so I wanted to migrate over to a more resilient setup. That said, the ReadyNAS still works fine, so I'm not in a rush. (Also, datacenter SAS storage isn't the cheapest thing right now  so it will be a bit of time before I can migrate my whole library across...)

Any advice you do have is greatly appreciated, I just want to prove the viability of this solution before I go broke on storage.

[Luke 43002]

Hi, on windows I would suggest grabbing the portable download from our website. this will bypass the installer altogether:

https://emby.media/windows-server.html

I would not try Docker on windows because we have not tested that at all.

[szalkerous 2]

Thanks Luke. Marked that as the answer.

If you need any help debugging the installer, let me know. Tenured full-stack C/C++ and .NET engineer here.

Good to know about the Docker situation. Would be cool to have a native Docker image using process isolation mode for Windows-on-windows convenience, especially since I think a good chunk of Emby is in .NET (but I haven't kept up with that sort of thing in a while), and as I mentioned earlier, I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to the actual docker hosting for production use (versus a development sandbox). 

-sz