Some questions from a long time Plex user

[Aevaris 8]

Hi all,

I've used Plex for nearly 10 years and decided to give Emby a try. I've been using Emby for about a day (after spending about two days setting it up. This wasn't all Emby setup. This gave me an excuse to try building a new VM, test some not-directly-related stuff out, etc). Overall, I am enjoying Emby and will continue to run it for awhile. If it continues to overall run smooth, I will likely dump Plex over Emby.

 Some background: I run Plex (and now Emby) on an Ubuntu VM. would put myself under a "Linux enthusiast" category, so will note that I am not a "Linux administrator". I'll defer any Linux specific questions since this is the WIndows forum, however, I want to share my general experiences (some of which may be some Linux clumsiness on my part).

First, my questions. Further below is my impressions and background for anyone interested.

Questions:

• What do I lose by not allowing Emby write permissions at the media data location? My servers have historically been segregated from my data, so I've typically kept read-only permission on the data files themselves. One of my new focuses is data longevity as rebuilding the metadata is a nightmare following a server rebuild. If I backup the default Emby metadata location and my data isn't going to change name/structure, is there any value in the "save metadata to media location" options that I am missing?
• Does Emby "read" .nfo or local metadata first? I meticulously manage my music via ID3 tag but one area I've not done much management is my visual media. I'm wondering if I made local NFOs with another software/source, if Emby would read them (similar to what I do with my music).

My first impressions and exploring Emby background:

The Good

• The reason I am exploring migrating away from Plex is that I've not seen any real significant change in Plex in a long time. With the death of Google Play Music, I went looking for a new music library manager and didn't like any of the options. Plex is a terrible music management software (doesn't read id3 tag ratings, doesn't have song-level genre support, does whacky "group" genre calculations, etc). I was excited to see Emby do better in this space.
• I am also excited to see (limited) audiobook support. I had created something very similar to what is available out of the box in Emby in Plex too. The limited out-of-the-box support shows an intended development path for Emby which is great to see.
• More stable config and metadata (seemingly. Havent tried yet, but results from my searches indicate folks have done this with success). Due to playing around with VMs, I tend to migrate servers from time to time when I find something new to try which means I need to rebuild my server (I've migrated from physical to physical servers, physical to virtual, want to try Docker sometime, etc). Plex has no ability to migrate servers. Even copy and pasting it's metadata directory doesn't work. This means a complete rebuild of anything local (e.g. collections, redownload of all metadata, sort order customizations, etc).
• I appreciate a lot of the small touches (e.g. seeing the various important file paths in the server manager), the metadata manager, and the configurability.

The Not-As-Good

• A few parts of Emby feel a little more "clunky" than Plex.
  • The UI doesn't update when changes are made (e.g. adding an item to a collection in a library that has group by collection enabled requires you to re-navigate to the library to see the changes reflected)
  • I've only used it limitedly, but there are times on the mobile app I feel like I have to go back and forth trying to make things work. For example, sometimes I push "play" and nothing happens or push play twice and then the media plays but sometimes the state doesn't change so I still have a "play" button in the app but the content is playing so I can't pause it now. This is usually resolved by going back and re-opening the media and then trying again. I've not robustly used the mobile app since my first day, so it is possible this was metadata still downloading / server is busy kind of a problem.
  • The first day, I was unable to chromecast. It was late, so i didnt get a chance to look at the logs, but things worked on my phone (on and off network) and on my PC on network. I am using my DDNS Let's Encrypt cert as my SSL cert for Emby. To do this, I am presenting my DDNS URL on a custom port and then using a reverse proxy to forward to my Emby server. This issue resolved itself by the time I woke up with no changes on my part. So not sure exactly what the issue was.

[Carlo 4561]

Hi, if you media directories are read only you won't be able to store graphics, bif/thumbnails and NFO files with the media but other than that shouldn't cause any problems other than not being able to delete files from within Emby (sounds like you don't want this anyway).

Emby will pull limited info from the NFO but mainly uses it for IDing the media.

You'll have no issues migrating Emby from box to box once you get the hang of it. https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001159936-backup contains some information about 1/2 down on manually backup/restore process.

Emby is constantly being updated and the apps are improving in small ways all the time. The devs have been steadily improving things like caching that you mention.

Your DLNA issue might have just been that you didn't give the new server time for everything on your network to find each other.

[Aevaris 8]

Thanks for the quick response cayars. Glad to hear about the server migration. That and Plex's music awfulness really make Emby shine comparatively. The signs of continued development is definitely a piece that attracted me to Emby. I look forward to see where it goes over the months and years. I'll probably decomission my Plex server if things are still going well in a few months

[Aevaris 8]

Actually, one more related question. Does the Metadata savers option in libraries apply to only saving local (with media) metadata or does that control general metadata? Meaning, if I uncheck it (to avoid flooding write permission errors), would that prevent any local data or does that only change the location of the local metadata?

[GrimReaper 4756]

3 minutes ago, Aevaris said:

Actually, one more related question. Does the Metadata savers option in libraries apply to only saving local (with media) metadata or does that control general metadata? Meaning, if I uncheck it (to avoid flooding write permission errors), would that prevent any local data or does that only change the location of the local metadata?

If you uncheck it, it would only be stored in one "central" metadata folder, usually under Emby's programdata folder, but you can choose custom location as well. 

[vdatanet 1618]

What client devices do you use? For music, the latest beta version of Android Mobile even supports Hi-res audio playback on devices that support that. It also supports gapless audio playback. Two cool features for music enthusiasts.

[Aevaris 8]

5 hours ago, vdatanet said:

What client devices do you use? For music, the latest beta version of Android Mobile even supports Hi-res audio playback on devices that support that. It also supports gapless audio playback. Two cool features for music enthusiasts.

Thanks for letting know about that. I'll check it out.

Client devices are typically just our Android phones. I've only begun exploring music via a media server in the last few weeks. My wife and I had previously synced our music with MusicBee to our phones and let Play Music serve as the platform (and then used Plex for other media). However, with the death of Play Music, Google has made it more difficult to do that with YT Music which shows the direction their going. So, I went exploring and naturally started with Plex as it was what I did everything else with. Such a terrible experience before I even got started and, while PlexAmp is a neat idea for them, their underlying problems with how they handle music show no signs of change.

In my few days of experience, Emby seems much more what I was looking for in the music space and seems comparable in the audiobook and video media space. In a few googlings around I've done while I set things up, I also really like seeing the engagement and involvement of the Emby team across time. I work in software support professionally, so I am glad to see a company who has identified that good software can only reach its full potential with good support.