Thinking of coming back to Emby

[theGeek 4]

Hello,

I was an Emby user several years ago (right around the time they stopped calling it Media Browser).  For various reasons I switched to Plex but lately some limitations of Plex are becoming apparent and annoying.  Before I rebuild my library in Emby I'm curious about a few things.

Problem 1) the way Plex handles Subtitles on 4K movies.  This isn't true of every movie as I'm seeing more and more movies simply putting in forced subtitles into the film itself so nothing needs remuxed into the MKV file.  The recent 4k releases of Bourne Identity handle that.  But for films where the subtitles are part of the MKV file it will force transcoding and HDR and 4K are lost.  Black Panther is one that does this during the dream scene and the beauty of the scene is totally destroyed.  I ended up turning them on briefly and turning them off when finished.  But it was still annoying and it interrupted my enjoyment of the movie.  How does Emby handle these situations?

Problem 2) I have one 1080p TV, two 4K TVs, and a 4K Projector, each with an NVidia Shield for streaming.  The 4K TVs use a Sonos Playbar, the 1080p TV just uses its own speakers, and the projector is connected to a pretty nice Denon AVR that supports Atmos, DTS:X, and all of the important HD Audio formats.  The 4K TVs and the projector support HDR and obviously the 1080p TV does not.  If I select the 5.1aac track for the Sonos TVs (to avoid transcoding) they work fine and there are no issues.  If the HD Audio formats are selected (even with audio passthrough enabled on the Shield) it forces a video transcode - even though (with the exception of the 1080p TV) they can support 4K/HDR video.  And before we ask about WiFi/bandwidth issues - everything is hardwired on a gigabit network.  Would Emby force a video transcode in this situation?

Problem 3) this is directly related to the previous issue.  One way to solve the above issue it to just select a different audio track.  The aac 5.1 track works great on Sonos stuff and my TVs can pass on that audio. I can also just select the stereo track for the 1080p TV.  But when I change the selected audio track on one player it changes it for every player.  So I'm constantly selecting a different track every time I sit down to watch something on Plex.  Does Emby allow for device specific selection?

Problem 4) this is probably the least of any issue - my server does not transcode 4K very well, if it all.  So for each 4K rip I have I also ripped the 1080p version.  I use that version for the 1080p TV and for remote streaming.  In Plex I am able to merge the two versions of the same move and just select that based on my specific need.  Does Emby allow the same thing?

I know there's a lot here but I wanted to be as thorough and specific as possible - I know I could just install Emby and give some of these things a try but I have over 1500 movies and dozens of TV shows.  I'd like to get some confirmed information before I spend time messing around with all of that.

Thanks in advance - I hope Emby can solve the problems I'm experiencing... or even if one of the devs came back and said that these are features they are working on.

[ebr 16187]

Hi.  Unfortunately, most of the answers are "it depends".  On the surface of what you are stating, we should handle all of those scenarios well.  However, we cannot be sure of that without looking at exact specifics.

 

My advice would be to try it and then provide specifics about any situation you think isn't being handled properly.

 

Thanks and welcome back!

[rbjtech 5284]

Problem 1) The most compatible way to show 'forced' subtitles is to add them as an external .srt file and simply name the file <identical_name_to_mkv>.forced.en.srt (assuming it's English..).  Unless there is a DEFAULT subtitle file in the MKV, then the external file will always be chosen and display the subs with no transcoding necessary.  I have tested many 4K's in this scenerio and can say Emby has never needed to transcode any of them.

Problem 2) I don't have a shield, so can't comment on this.

Problem 3) Does Emby allow for device specific selection? Not that I'm aware of but this functionality has definitely been requested because as you say, you don't want the last remembered setting, you want a last remembered setting on 'this' device as your main viewing TV will have a totally different video and audio profile to your other TV's.  It is saved per 'user' but the majority will be using the same user profile to keep the watched status synced.

 

 Emby and Plex play nicely together on the same machine (emby will save local meta-data unless you tell it to otherwise) - so as ebr says, try it out.  If it doesn't do everything you need, then post examples and there may be solutions out there we can help you with.  Emby has come a LONG way since the days just after MediaBrowser 

 

 

Edited August 15, 2019 by rbjtech

[Luke 42083]

 

 

Problem 4) this is probably the least of any issue - my server does not transcode 4K very well, if it all.  So for each 4K rip I have I also ripped the 1080p version.  I use that version for the 1080p TV and for remote streaming.  In Plex I am able to merge the two versions of the same move and just select that based on my specific need.  Does Emby allow the same thing?

 

Yes we do.

[Luke 42083]

@@theGeek

 

New Sonos plugin in the Emby Plugin catalog:

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/78020-new-sonos-plugin