Christmas time soon and I’m tragically going away from ma’ media For normal at home use, Plex does all I need - emby seems to need subscription to play media for more than 1minute.
Out of interest, what do you use?
Plex
Emby
Jellyfin
Other(others do exist I’m sure!)
0voters
I did start with monthly Plex payments (for around 6months), then went to emby (for 6+ months), but now I’m inclined to go back to Plex because it does what I need for free.
Only pinch is I’m going away for Christmas, so I’ll probably pay for 1 months worth of Plex.
I did try jellyfin but it doesn’t seem to install successfully on TrueNAS core. I might try it on my TrueNAS Scale instance sometime.
A handy feature with Emby is the parental time schedule controls and the general flexibility of it, like being able to decide how far forward and backwards you can skip in seconds. Also I found Plex to be less elderly user friendly from my experience… Mind you, they also found Netflix to be confusing!
I paid for plex WAY back when you could still pay once and have all the features forever and it works well enough.
That said, I do like the way Jellyfin is going and have been running it on the same machine as my plex install. I’ll probably end up switching in the future, but I share my media with friends over plex… I’m not looking forward to that conversation.
Plex has been pissing me off more and more. They have been going down hill for many years, but the last year or so especially has been terrible. Now with the forcing your home screen on app players to feature their own ad supported streaming content first and making you click through a few things just to get to your own server has made me quit Plex for good. I have been testing Emby off and on for the past 3 years and I have finally just migrated entirely to that. It has all the same features as Plex does and more, and doesn’t shove ad content down your throat.
When I need access from outside the LAN, just a web server with indexing of a given folder and properly secured login + vlc/firefox or sftp.
On Android it’s very easy to use “Cx File Explorer” to remotely connect to the sftp machine and run mkv/mp4 in the local player. It works perfectly as long as you have good internet.
Of course, it doesn’t require you to download the entire file to start watching or jump on the timeline.
Thanks @retox , I do regret not getting on the lifetime option with Plex/Emby, but we have to try these things eh.
I might look into Jellyfin again sometime, the only downside for me is that probably not the audience for it (can fiddle, but that’s as far as I can go!).
Cheers to you too @Zedicus , does seem like Jellyfin has a popular user base on here.
@EniGmA1987 You’re not down for Plex then, clearly! I haven’t seen any advertising as yet, though I do see their low grade film offerings which are just lame. The setup is a bit weird, way better with Emby. I was generally happier with Emby, but like I say, use didn’t justify cost.
Funnily enough Tim I do the same thing, but for personal video’s and pics! Cx File Explorer is really good for the cost (free!). There’s an iOS version and that works pretty well too. I do find it a bit slow on my android to load videos - that could be my server though.
i used to do almost exactly as @TimHolus did, except i used KODI (back when it was XBMC) as the local player, and honestly that is all a fine solution. it works REALLY well on the internal network and is acceptable from outside.
the only benefits EMBY has is for external use. and at some point i did not want to manage 2 types of installs so i got rid of KODI (KODI does support EMBY as a host, but the effort involved in setup gains nothing overall)
EMBY and Jellyfin are the options to pro/con for a new installation of serving media files. unless you are like 95% local streaming, then i would still just do KODI front ends and a file share back end. Ignore PLEX.
Create a simple website with some html5/JS video player… Easy to use in LAN as well as WAN, access control, nice pictures of video positions.
I used to play around with html5/js video players back when html5 was just starting to be something. Only at the end of the day would you get a worse solution than what is currently available on the market in the form of dedicated solutions.
Just playing the files themselves is fine in most cases. I used to do that for years and years, and only got into Plex type stuff about 5 years ago. The nice thing about these players is it keeps easier track of what episode of a show you are on, can transcode the quality of the video down so when I watch on my phone some place I can watch in 720 and both save data on my phone plan and watch video where service isnt great, plus I have grown to love the beginning credit skipping/
Do I get a feeling the Holus streaming service is in the making?
Yes @EniGmA1987 there are some good features that take it above just playing video files. I was super impressed with it when I had no experience of alternatives, then I found Emby and like it more, the only downside with the latter was a fiddly remote play (needed VPN of some sort).
Never got into Plex because it won’t import DVD archive folders. They need to be single video files and I have no desire to reencode my backed up DVD library.
Plex is actually really good with subtitles now days. When I watch something that has a section in another language that I want to know what they said, I press up on the remote and go to subtitles, click search, and usually the first option it finds works perfectly. This is on an Android TV, IDK if their other platforms have apps up to date enough to support the subtitle search and download from within playing a file. I know it is fairly new, I have only been able to do it for a few months.
Plex also plays much more smoothly when subtitles are used. It used to have all sorts of problems playing the video as it would switch from hardware transcoding or direct play into a software transcode mode, not it uses hardware transcoding always when playing a video with subs enabled.
Emby works really well with OpenSubtitles but you need a subscription to OpenSubtitles Premium to use it. When you add media to Emby server it will auto search OpenSub and download your selected language. I do english, spanish, french, and german.
I was actually able to use the feature in Emby for this to benefit Plex as well. Because Emby downloads them in a standard subtitle format and puts them in the same directory as the media file, Plex will scan that folder and auto associate the subtitles Emby downloaded and make them available on Plex as well without having to do a search and download from within the file while playing.
For normal at home use, Plex does all I need - emby seems to need subscription to play media for more than 1minute.
