Opionion Needed: Switching from Windows to Linux for Emby

[ThermoDust 12]

Has anyone switched from Windows to Linux for Emby? Was there any plug in issues? Any playback issues with trans-coding?

 

Also, what flavor did you go with? Did you install anything extra to make the HTPC Server a better experience?

[thefirstofthe300 292]

I highly recommend switching from Windows to Linux for a server OS simply because Linux is known to be the better server platform.  However, I would like to give you a heads up to read up on Linux filesystem permissions.  One of the most common problems that new Linux users have is the concept of file permission; however, once you are able to grasp that concept, you should find it to be just as simple as Windows permissions (or maybe even simpler).  This article seems to do a pretty good job of explaining it.

 

As far as installing extra stuff to make the HTPC experience better, I personally have nothing other than my media server installed on my server.  You really need to think about your needs and whether your main Emby server also acts as the HTPC (if it is, I recommend installing Kodi and Emby  for Kodi) or whether you just need the server to use all of its horsepower to keep up with transcoding for mobile devices.  Apparently, the latest Emby stable release has added support for disabling a lot or required transcoding for Chrome.  I personally have not really cared about unnecessary transcoding as I just want the system to play my content and I have an overkill server so I can't speak for that.  Playback seems to have been just as good as the Windows server.

 

As far as a server OS, you need to think about what you are looking for in your system.  Do you want stability?  If the answer is yes, go with something like CentOS or Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.  Are you looking for something that is fairly up to date to work with a specific software without a lot of issues?  Ubunt 15.10 or Fedora 23 should work well.

[Deihmos 169]

I cannot think of a single advantage switching to linux provides. Too time consuming.

[djonnie 14]

Although it's running fine on my Rasberry PI 2, on this forum many issues can be found specially with dependencies that are difficult to solve for users that are new to Linux.

[fc7 123]

Although it's running fine on my Rasberry PI 2, on this forum many issues can be found specially with dependencies that are difficult to solve for users that are new to Linux.

 

This is not the case anymore for CentOS and Fedora package. The only dependency conflict may come with sqlite but is not very likely. All the other packages used are coming from the stock distro repos or like in the case of embymagick and sqlite we will provide them.

Edited December 25, 2015 by fc7

[fc7 123]

I cannot think of a single advantage switching to linux provides. Too time consuming.

 

This depends strictly on your environment and you Linux skills. Someone with an average Linux knowledge and with local multimedia libraries can setup Emby in minutes.

Regarding advantages there are a few I can think off right now:

• Smaller OS fingerprint in terms of storage and memory usage. (in a CentOS minimal install you need far more less space in your hdd  to deploy Linux and far less memory than what any Windows version will require).
• You don't need a license to run the software.
• More secure by default than WIndows.
• More efficient in terms of resource handling than Windows.
• You can run many other popular services on the same server (apache? mysql? php? ftp?) just using software ready available in your distro at no extra charge. And believe there are many many excellent pieces of OSS out there that out perform their windows counterparts and many of them are mainstream like Apache.

 

Yet again all this advantages depends on your environment (if you only have Windows machines, then just keep using Windows), if you will need an extra license for your Windows server (which ever version you will use) but most importantly on your Linux skills. If you are new to Linux and your multimedia assets are hosted on the network, then yes switching too Linux can be a painful path to go.

 

Just as an example, I'm running on a mixed virtualized environment. The hypervisor is Hyper-V 2012 R2 (Windows) but the rest of the environments is a mix of Linux and Windows server VMs.

In my case Emby is running on CentOS 7, consuming the multimedia assets from a NFS share on a Windows 2012 R2 file server and being proxied to the internet by an Apache reverse-proxy.

Yet I'm very comfortable with Linux (only use the command line on every server, no GUI) but also with Windows. So bottom line is think about your skills, the time you have to learn new things and what is your environment like.

 

From the Emby point of view it will be almost the same so the other factors mentioned above are more relevant I guess.

 

Just my two cents.

Edited December 25, 2015 by fc7