Validate that emby uses shared folder

[eliduvid 0]

Hello!

I have emby server set up in my local network on raspberry pi. My media library is on '\mnt\mediadrive' and it's working OK.

Now I want to share it with samba in hope of improving streaming performance (I'm really not sure that it will improve something, but a man can try :-))

I set up samba server on the RPi, and now from windows machines on the network '\mnt\mediadrive' is available as '\\<internal_ip>\share\mediadrive' (I checked from file explorer)

Now I put '\\<internal_ip>\share\mediadrive' as "optional shared network folder" for my media library.

 

The questions are:

How do I know are emby clients using samba server?

When it is supposed to be used? Like, streaming/downloading, which platforms?

[Luke 42080]

@cayars

[Carlo 4561]

Hi, only a couple of clients will take advantage of "Direct Play File" where the file can be played off the file system.  Emby Theater for desktop is one and the Android ATV running on a Shield TV is the other.  On the Shield TV you have other setup work to do as well to setup mount points.

This knowledge base article would walk you through the needed changes for this:
https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44002058112-shield-tv-direct-file-access

I don't know about on a Pi, but in general the direct file access is really only needed for very high bit files such as 60Mb plus size 4K HDR files.

If the files are being served up by the same machine running the Emby Server you will gain very little from this.  Where this comes into it's own is when you run the Emby Server on one machine and have files stored on another machine or NAS.  The gain in this setup is the client can access the file directly from the server/NAS verses the Emby Server machine pulling it, then streaming it so there is less networking overhead.

Hope that helps

 

[Luke 42080]

@eliduvid has this answered your question?

[eliduvid 0]

Thank you for response (and I sorry that I haven't responded before myself).

On 7/8/2021 at 4:10 PM, cayars said:

I don't know about on a Pi, but in general the direct file access is really only needed for very high bit files such as 60Mb plus size 4K HDR files.

So in my case I wouldn't see much performance gain, from using this kind of setup. I thought it would help me because when I was playing directly from rpi using ssh it did work better than through theater.