My whole thing with most of the alternatives for Plex it’s almost always their UI looks either outdated or incomplete. That’s easily my biggest hang up. I don’t really care for Plex’s new direction they’ve been taking as of late (focusing on literally anything but the personal media side) but I will probably stick with them until someone else gets an equivalent first party UI
@Paulus Problem is Jellyfin suck at scraping audio metadata. It doesn't group them like Plex does, which s a bit lame but they can still improve on that side
I still primarily use Plex but I think I actually like Emby you are better. I specifically love the video stats overlay during video playback that can be accessed and the dark black background not being overly bright is very appealing as well. Also the overlay on the video for the controls looks nicer than the large bottom part of the screen being consumed Plex interface while watching video. Emby is more subtle and less invasive but still provides the control you need. My Emby use on my Nvidia shield for quite a long time lately has been I'm mounting to checking once a month to make sure the server is still updated because I do prefer Plex in general but I haven't tried Emby, giving it a real test, and a long time. I think it's time I took another look because both are actually quite good.
IMO It's definitley not better to remove skipping forward if it isn't buffered. Those files aren't stored on tapes anymore. If the transcoder can't handle skipping, it needs to be implemented or (in Plexes case) fixed
@@Kathlanus it still fundamentally works on plex though. But yes, fast forward, rewind and resume on plex can pretty busted at times. Especially on android based platforms.
I find a lot of issues with Plex in regards 4k content with subtitles. When I enable the PGS subs, I am screwed. Would this be different on the EMBY? I am running plex on a mini pc atm with a I7 processor and quick sync. Thank you :)
Thanks for the video, I'm always has this though of what to use, I'm using Plex for years and I have plex Pass as well, but I dont know which one to use while I'm outside my house, on vacation for example, to watch movies on mobiles , what do you think? which one are you using for better performance ?
Bro Emby is the best. Emby loads subtitle without reloading video. It looks better (has many themes). Fully local client(works without internet) . Also I dont think most of the people transcode media they direct play on their TV(for the best quality)
Emby can direct play a lot more content that Plex has to transcode. Especially true with advanced audio and graphical codecs. Emby can handle this while Plex requires the subtitles to be overlayed on top of the video. Emby used to do that as well but this doesn't work well or at all with 4K/HDR content.
@@carloayars2175 yes People should really stop shilling for Plex. Shilling for one also encourages monopoly of a product which is not good for competition as well. People should switch to emby and support the devs.. I have both plex & emby premium and plex premium was a waste of money.
How much of a difference do you see vs. the free version with either of these? For me I'm considering Free version with AMD 3800X or same cpu with paid version and RTX 2060. I dunno if it's even really worth going for the paid version. I'm also only streaming to at most 2 TV's which is very very rare.
I've been wondering, Does emby use a regular temp folder or does it use ram for transcoding? Because on plex, using ram speeds things up quite a lot...
Point it where you like - this is a configurable option in the settings. For RAM, you'll need to setup a RAMDisk, but any SSD or NVME will be more than sufficient.
Very nice to see completion in this application space. I am a long time Plex user in fact I think I had plex no more then 1 year after it came out. I now have a 5 TB media collection and Plex handles it like a champ. this video was all about transcoding and it was interesting to here your take on this. I do share my plex with my family in fact i proxied my plex so it was so much easier for family to do this. Now I have a 25 MB upload and I don't limit my users on quality so they can play what ever plays well for them. The one thing that I do that has made the difference has been the content format and make it all MPG4 i use hand brake and that has been the difference but that is my experience. keep up he good content
As a Plex user for over 5 years I have to say I have yet to have any of the issues you talk about in this video. What this really shows is the difference between hardware/software on one server and how it can change the load speeds and so on.
I have had all those issues. I also have them when using other friends servers. I guess you will need to give us all access to your server to prove to us. ;P
""As a Plex user for over 5 years"" Thats why you dont know how good EMBY/Jellyfin is . Emby loads subtitle without reloading video. It looks better (has many themes). Fully local client(works without internet) . ALso loads faster. Not messy UI like plex. Please should really stop shilling for plex too much its bad for competition and over all experience .
Pro Tip: Tdarr for converting your files to h265 is quite the lifesaver. You halve the file size with negligible reductions in video quality. I've already saved 500GB on my NAS this way.
Hi, just wanted to comment that it didn't appear you were actually comparing apples to apples but more like apples to oranges in those test from what I could see but can't be positive. At best it was semi close to even, at worst case you had Emby doing more processing than Plex, Plex had already scanned your files while that wasn't never done with Emby or additional information would have been present on the timeline showing some of the information during playback. On the screens where you select play in Emby you were using multitrack audio and subtitles but your selections for Plex didn't show any criteria at play. To get this out of the way: I'm very familiar with both products having ran them both for years (Plex a bit longer). I'm a former Plex Ninja, but currently work for Emby. I pretty much know both inside and out, as well as what every option (hidden or visible) does and it's effect on other parts of the system. I've got a couple hopefully unbiased observations as well as obviously biased but hopefully helpful suggestions if you truly want to see transcoding differences. Couple unbiased observations: You should mentioned which version of each Server and Client your comparing to make it obvious what's compared. Example Emby is about to release a new server version with long list of improvements to speed (many transcoding related). So a viewing seeing this video next week could easily be confused what you actually tested or when. Plex could release a new version as well so knowing versions tested is quite helpful if not mandatory. Transcoding H.264 and H.265 can be quite different depending on things like audio channel selected or choice of subtitles. Don't take for granted they process the same way. I'm going to go out on a limb with this comment and say you should verify your test files for spec compliance and header timings as I almost guarantee there is a problem with your Back to the Future encode. I mention this because Emby does support random jumping throughout the timeline and it's quite fast. The only time this generally doesn't work is if there's a problem with the encode so it can't calculate what byte range to jump to. It's almost always timing related. When this happens you can often still play files read and processed sequentially by ffmpeg as it handles the problem. But if you take a look at the server log or Emby's ffmpeg log generated for the specific playback it will show you any issues or errors it encountered. A better approach might be to use standard reference files that anyone can download and test on their system as well comparing their performance to yours. That alone provides benefits to your viewers as they can get a good idea of the performance of their system to yours making your additional videos more useful as well allowing them to rough calculate ballpark results on their system based on what you show. Not perfect of course but far better than the SWAG method. :) As touched on above, Emby can jump around at at will to any part of the timeline quickly even for newly added items. Many Plex functions rely on information it has gathered from the file by having completely read every byte of the file during an analysis stage as part of it's overall process. Emby can also read and use optional information it gathers from files but does it much faster looking at data every 10 seconds (user config) in the video. This information in used for multiple purposes including the ability to show you the scene on the timeline give or take 5 seconds which is really helpful trying to find something to re-watch. Same data for chapter locations as well which also can be overlayed on the OSD when you use or hover over the timeline to know what to expect when your "jump" there. None of this information was present in the videos you showed for Emby. So I think it's safe to say the test choices definitely didn't benefit Emby and that it was doing some tasks in real-time it typically may not need to do. I'll just say results could have shown a more drastic difference and leave it at that. Bias Now Showing as I know results but I think still valuable info to think about. Just as or possibly even more important testing would be showing when each system needs to transcode without being forced by a manual resolution change. Example: if a file direct plays with 2 channel audio and no subtitles can it still do that if 5.1 sound is chosen if not supported on the client? How about if you have to use graphical subtitles? Can the server handle these common choices on it's own or does it require transcoding to overlay the subtitles? How much difference does that make for 720/1080 files fps wise with and without graphics subs when transcoding? What about the same tests on 4K/HDR 10-bit files? Do they even play or just bog down the system when graphical subs need overlaying? How about 4K/HDR to 4K/SDR tone-mapping while keeping the existing resolution and bitrate. Can the transcoder do this? That's a super useful feature for PCs not set for HDR display but obviously support resolution higher than 1920x1080. Same for many TVs that can downscale input resolutions to it's native resolution but not handle HDR (pseudo 4K) for better picture quality. Can the transcoder do this type of thing or does it need to downscale the resolution first to make processing HDR easier? Testing these types of things is one thing on PC especially with GPU but quite another on a lower end Celeron with Quicksync many people use. How do any of these test work out in that common environment? IMHO these are the kinds of transcoding tests that are ultimately more important then just speed or a second or two difference loading (assuming it's a tolerable). Knowing what's playable and what's not playable is far more important overall. It's the difference between a single rip to 4K HDR or having to use more storage and time processing a second rip of your media to 1080p or risk not being able to view the media at all. I of course know how some of these and similar tests will turn out and what the capabilities' are of each platform. I won't spoil the results with more said but think you'll find the results enlightening and not specifically one sided. But for good entertainment, throw the Purple Fin server in and test that too. LOL
I haven't run emby in years, and I'm open on doing a video on it if you're open to going in depth with it. I'm easily reachable and think it might be a nice deep dive IMO.
@@adamb7279 If I can get a response from @Carlo Ayars on this they seem to have a *LOT* of information on Emby that would take me weeks to dig into on my own. Hopefully they will reach out to me and I think it would be an interesting video for sure.
@@ShinyTechThings yea, seems like they have some real in depth knowledge which would be really well received by the user base. Transparency is always appreciated from developers.
I know this is an older video, but have you checked out the manual buffer settings in Plex? I set mine to a minimum of 120 seconds on my crazy old Xeon E3 1350L, and it hangs pretty good. I've also got the transcode speed set to Fastest setting since I don't have Intel QSV.
Does anyone know if it's possible for the film/tv show you're watching can it be thrown to ram so then the hard drive does not have to keep being used.
That will mean that you have to download the entire file to the client for playback. This wil slow the start of playback by a lot. Overall this is a bad idea.
I have a question specifically about the PLEX app on firesticks (not 4K). The app crashes all the time while streaming content from my laptop. Is this a transcoder issue? My laptop is an M1 macbook pro. I haven't paid for the pass so no hardware acceleration I guess. Is Apple tv better?
Awesome Video would love to see Jellyfin make the comparison as well. I would love to see Emby vs Plex on media tagging and collection handling are they equally as good in organizing your libraries? Thanks and keep up the great work
Totally agree, people need to chuck Jellyfin into the mix now. It's been forked for quite a while now, so I would expect it to be quite different to Emby. I thought they were also changing the libraries for the internal stuff.
First off fantastic video and I love the specific details comparing these platforms. This is the good information experienced users like us need to know. As a plex user for well over a decade now I know exactly what you mean with some of these issues..... However around the time Plex decided to cut out the support for plugins they lost me as a user for a little while when they had that horrible Roku Plex UI. Luckily they wised up and started improving the app rapidly and quickly won me back as a user and right now I think Plex is better than it's ever been buuuuut...... A couple years ago I did experiment for a while with Emby. I actually still maintain both a Plex and Emby server on my Nvidia Shield although nowadays my usage of Emby pretty much amounts to checking once a month if the server app needs updated and if it does I do it because I can't bring myself to tear the server down and uninstall it because I like the idea of having it available as a backup if I have future Plex issues. HOWEVER!!!!!...... During my experimentation for a short time using Emby I didn't count on a lot of random playback issues because of whatever Kodak it didn't fully support properly like Plex did and I did have many times where mysteriously I would have bad pixelization of the image on Emby and I almost never have that problem with Plex. It appeared to me that because Plex is far more developed with many more years experience it did a better job supporting all the different types of media codecs I throw at it and hopefully Emby as corrected some of these problems but this has inspired me to give Emby another good try and make it my main platform of choice for a while to better compare the two. I'm pretty positive I will again return to the raining champion in this area Plex........ But for educational reasons this testing must be done.
I realize this discussion is a few weeks old, but I thought I would add my experience with Plex and why I chose Emby. In the fall of 2019 I bought a new Samsung TV and installed the Plex App. Even though my TV was directly connected to the Internet 24/7- every time I shut the TV off and turned it on and started the Plex App- I had to reinstall the Plex App because the App would lock up and say, "you are not connected to the Internet...". The only way I could get the Plex App to work was to reinstall it. Prior to buying the TV I was using Roku and Plex to connect to my server without any issues, I realize that this issue was a Samsung issue and not a problem with Plex. However, I am used to Emby now and really don't see a reason to switch back. I have a 1GB Up/1 GB Down Fiberoptics plan, over 4,000 movies, 1,400 TV episodes, 28,000 songs, 50 music concerts, and a lot of home videos that are available to my 25+ remote users. All of this on a i3-6230, with a 2TB SSD, 32 GB DDR-4, and 80 TB WD Red HD's running on Windows 10. I also have a Quadro P4000 video card that handles most of the transcoding.
Dont both Emby and Plex use FFMPEG to perform transcoding ? mind you they have there own customizations for it, but not so much that it would greatly affect the time it takes. Also Im not experiencing this buffer issue you speak of with Emby, if I skip ahead beyond the buffer, it just goes to that point in the video on a black screen for about 2 seconds and resumes the video from where I selected it. As well, the issue with the start timing may just be the default buffer size between Plex and Emby not the transcode speed (both use the same FFMPEG to do that)
I haven't tried it, so I can't really say, but my first thought about not being able to skip past the buffer is: "wtf, no, what if I want to go to halfway through?" My concern is if play tracking bugs out, or I started watching a movie somewhere else, and I need to fast forward to the middle. Emby, by what you've said here (I haven't checked if there are options or something) would force my hardware to transcode everything up until that point, on top of making me fast forward bit by bit. That would be so frustrating, I'd instantly hate it. That said, are you also saying that plex, when you skip ahead WITHIN the buffer, it also pauses to rebuffer?
What about transcode speed settings? What are the for both? In Plex you got fastest to make my CPU hurt or something song the line. I got Plex in a VM with 10cores and a dedicated 1050 ti assigned to it. I do get the crashed stream once in a blue moon but easy enough to deal with. I have not tested the start/stop speed but to me if feels fairly instant. Change quality is few seconds. I do notice they h265 is a little harder on the hardware. I do optimize movies/shows sometimes to various quality settings especially if it's new and I will definitely watch it
@@IrocZIV Doesnt't matter. You can skip ahead just fine. An extra note that he forgets, and i don't know how plex handles this. But on Emby if you have 2 versions of the same movie (1080P and 4K). And your clients select the 4K but transcode it back to 1080P, the second (1080 version will be loaded to prevent transcoding.
Looks like you have HDR Tone Mapping turned on in Plex. As far as i know this doesn't take advantage of HW Accelleration on a Windows server. And even on a Linux server you have to install additional drivers to take advantage of HW accellerated HDR Tone Mapping. This has potentially a huge impact on transcoding performance especially when comparing it to Emby that doesn't seem to use tone mapping in your test.
Plex does the basics better than the others, but I wish it had some serious competition to prompt improvements. It's just been seeking new users with new features that end up unsupported and deprecated in a couple of years. I want the basics of video and audio to be focused on, make them rock solid.
I just hope one day plex sets the default playback to 1080P instead of 720p for for remote streaming. I have a lot of not tech savvy people that use my server. I have more than enough horse power to transcode but would be nice to have a better viewing experience.
@@shaunrattee224 god forbid too if people have to go into a menu for a quick setting change, it’s like the end of the world. Netflix and Apple this is your fault!
there's a configuration on the server side that puts the ability to automatically adjust the image quality then it's like Netflix adjusting the quality depending on the internet bandwidth
Thank you for this video. I have Emby Premiere and Plex Pass for a number of years now. Mostly use Plex because of the nice UI. I noticed a lot of the buffering issues you mentioned though - mostly with 4k content. Last time I used Emby was on my older server before I had a lot of 4k content. I have a new NUC and just installed Emby on it. Hopefully the 4k performance is smoother. I use an nvidia shield so this should be interesting 😊
lmao Plex has a nice UI? hahaha its looks like sh** yellow and messy. settings page is also messy. Try Emby different themes then you will understand. I also have both premium and Always use EMBY.
Hmmm. re: Emby skipping - strange because each time he clicked on the skip the the timer did increase by 10 seconds and the screen changed as well. If you skip through a scene where everything looks the same you might not notice that it's actually changing...
Good observation. Did you notice he had changed some of the basic defaults as well that affect the way the timeline works? Emby also had subs selected during playback but I saw no subtitles display in Plex. Plex had been given the chance to analyze the files and know the bitrate breakdown of the files probably from having been used and being an existing install. Emby didn't have the optional processing done or you would have scene additional information on the timeline which is only present if that's done. PS Emby is releases 4.7 in a couple day which has tons of speed and GUI improvements including many more transcoding optimizations. Lucky he did the test when he did and didn't use 4.7. :)
How many of you still transcode? At this point when traveling with a Fire TV Stick 4K I can Direct Play back home to my server in South FL. Now I do have GIG Internet and Plex set to 700Mbps up, but I think I can change that to 3-400Mbps and still be fine there. My sis-in-law has a CCwGTV and that does Direct Play too on that (and their internet plan is 200 I think). I'm pretty much in awe of it when I travel and see these results haha. I've toyed with Emby, but like Plex's interface better. Great video even still!
Emby allows you to scrub to whatever time you want to on IOS, there is no limitation on skipping through a video, does not matter how much buffer is loaded
Personally, the limited skipping implemented by Emby is a huge negative. I’ve never used Emby, but as I understand it from this video, Emby will not allow me to jump ahead in a video unless the video has been added to the buffer. Pleas correct me if this is false. I was surprised you didn’t conduct a head to head comparison of how many transcode steams at one time Plex/Emby could provide. Transcoding is generally limited by hardware none the less, it would be interesting to see if both products would support the same number of maximum steams.
@@mrsittingmongoose Yes it does. The reason it didn't work here is going to be file related and I'm almost 100% positive about that. Only when the internal streams are wrong with bad header or timing information is this seen. Emby in such case can't calculate a byte range to jump to. Besides these types of tests should use widely available reference files that anyone can download and test with on their own systems. Both H.264 and H.265 files.
Plex, when a video crashes, especially when viewing an x.265 file, restarting the client doesn't do anything, I have to reboot the server to try again. It's horrible
Yes please do more transcoding videos. Also can you do a video on the cheapest best micro PC to get for transcoding. I have a WD EX2 Ultra and it is pathetic at transcoding. One quick question, if I increase my broadband speed to 1Gb down and maybe 300Mb up, do we still need to transcode?
That depends on if the original file's bitrate falls below your 300MB limit and if your files are stream/web optimized. If yes, then you should be able to play the file at original quality if your client's download speed exceeds the 300MB and is natively compatible with the file type you're trying to play. As for the micro PC thing, that's a very broad market and would cost a ton of money to obtain and test every option. What kind of budget range are you looking for?
Transcoding depends more on the power of the player than the speed of your connection. Everybody nowedays has at least 20Mbit down/up. This is higher than most H265 bitrates.
Just letting everybody know the new NVIDIA shield player for Plex is out and all All the problems that had before the player are fixed and all the videos play fine and they don't pause stop and they start quick again
To add - You can skip anywhere you like in Emby by just clicking on the progress bar, if you had enabled preview thumbnails, then you would would also be able to see where you are before you click it - alternatively, you could use the chapters option to skip to fixed points - again with thumbnail previews. As an open Plex sponsor I'm glad you are comparing these but please represent all parties fairly. It will get even more interesting if you start to include tonemapping performance and comparing hardware encoders (QSV vs NVENC/DEC for example) per platform. For further transcoding videos, you should also include subtitles - as they usually show up shortfalls on all platforms.
Transcoding with truenas is still not possible due to jails and their interoperability with the OS (As of months ago when I tried) but using it in Ubuntu server or docker is a use case that's functional.
@@BillForesmanWilliam Don't know about TrueNAS, but on Emby on Windows with a P400 can transcode 4K perfectly fine. De pending on the bitrate you can get 1 to max 3 streams. (Video memory is the main bottleneck)
As a lifetime Plex user this is interesting...i can attest to the closing and losing stream...usually id have to download a new server to resolve it. For some reason every other week i will have to shut down and restart the computer and re sign in again....however the other issues ive never had. The slowness and artifiacts...thats something i never experienced. Ive even transcoded and not seen too much of a delay...from the comments i see than emby might be arguabley worse for my tastes...ill have to think about it.
I have Emby & Plex and use the one that works for any particular file so I don't have to bother with which is "better". They each have had issues over the years so when one is f'd up, I use the other. Pay for them both, competition is good! They Both use FFMPEG so kinda the same with a fancy skin...
Been running an emby server for a few years now. It's used by my family at home and a few friends via PCs, mobile devices and Chromecast with Google TV. I have 3 external users and have good individual controls for each for bandwidth etc. Pretty simple to use. Have yet to see artifacting like you had and you can skip wherever you like on the android apps(and skip to chapters directly). I don't use the web browser version. Never had a complaint or noticed and artifacting, dropouts etc. It's been pretty robust. Only thing I've noticed is that on two occasions over the years, users have been locked out until I reenter their email to their emby user data. It's a weird one but an easy fix. One thing I like about emby is their forum. Devs frequently address issues personally and investigate issues actively. Emby seems to be constantly improving.
Keep in mind Jellyfin is essentially a 4 year old version of Emby Server with very minor changes to functionality from when it was forked. Couple new addons but the "technology" or framework it uses is old and hasn't really been improved. So it's pointless to compare a modern Media Server with one still essentially 4 years old as it will get killed.
Hey Jason, your 10 series sucks compared to my 10850k. It will play 4k transcodes in like 2 sec for me. I can watch my raw gopro hevc 4k60, at work with my s20 in 3 sec maybe. I have a pretty good 5g mobile connection at work. Skipping can take a few more seconds and I have crashed the stream and had to restart at times, restarting was smooth and fast.
You're comparing a mobile processor to a desktop processor and both are 10th-gen. Of coarse you get better results, but you also have a much larger power draw. Most people prefer running media servers on low power machines to save on energy costs.
@@SuperSonicGamer763 you are correct but most people are not gonna use a new pc's for plex, they're gonna use old gaming machines that aren't easy on power anyways.
@@LordMustangGT93 Not necessarily true. A lot of people get along fine using NAS devices from QNAP or Synology or use the Nvidia Shield. A lot of people do use an old laptop or PC as their first server, but it's typically not an ideal long-term solution.
Because Jellyfin transcoder is from the stone age compared to Emby's. Example Some 4K/HDR on Synology NAS can't transcode fast enough using JF to be watchable while Emby can do 3+ streams. Emby can also avoid transcoding in a lot of situations where JF has to. Example: turn on graphical subtitles which Emby can handle while JF has to use the transcoder to overlay it. There is a lot of differences like that. GPU transcoding is way more optimized while JF mainly falls back to ffmpeg to do the work. JF is years behind Plex on transcoding and Emby is farther ahead of JF now then when it was forked and is widening the gap with each new release. That gap widens even more in a couple days with the 4.7 release featuring lots of additional new optimizations that increase speed or remove the need to transcode in the first place. Some people really don't mind supporting software teams with financial support as they get value from it and think it's fair. A single feature such as Guide data from either Plex or Emby can pay for itself and then save you money long term vs $25/year from Schedules direct for similar quality data. It's also not built in and has limitations as well. How about meta-data providers. Using TVDB's new pay API? What's that costing you or don''t you use since it's a pay service? Pay for any subtitles or do you skip that to or use alternate means to aquire that data vs letting the system do it for you automatically based on criteria set? It's quite easy for some people to not only break even in 3 or 4 years on a lifetime license but also to start saving money going forward without additional work to integrate 3rd party services. Emby for example offers free remote one on one remote support to solve any issues quickly and easily without spending days trying to figure out something setup wrong or goofy permissions you swear are correct in docker but use different usernames/groups then the host so don't give proper permissions. These are things many people find of high value and are way beyond normal expectations. One support session that solves a problem you haven't been able to figure out in weeks is a game changer. It's all a matter of perspective on what you consider value and worth. I've personally purchased 5 Plex Passes to support them and 3 Emby Premiere Licenses before I started working for them. One of the Plex licenses was while working for Emby. I like both software packages and want them to both flourish especially as they move in different directions of focus. Same with almost every open source software I use. I likely will never need assistance of any kind from them but I want to support them so they continue to work on the project I like and use. To me it's in my best interest and really a token amount compared to some commercial software. Few hundred a year to Proxmox vs thousands to Cisco or VMWare? No thanks. JF has kind of boxed itself into a corner supporting users who don't feel the same way as I. Your a perfect example actually it would seem. "use X instead of paying Y" mentality. Everyone can't have everything for free. Some people need to put roofs over family's heads and food on the table or they can't continue to produce "free software" and need a "real job". A lot of JF users feel this way because if they were going to contribute it would likely to be Emby anyway to get the better software. (happens every day). It's not just that. Without proper vetting and control you end up with very questionable plugins. Combine that with the notoriety that JF is getting as the pirate site media server of choice and it's not a good thing for long term preservation as vendors, businesses and online app stores want no affiliation and distance themselves from you vs wanting to partner. That's always been one of Plex's really good decisions that have always worked out really well for them. But if vendors and business are starting to distance themselves from you and don't want that kind of affiliation it's not a good thing. Any chances of business sponsorship or cross support grow dim. If you can't get sponsorships, have users who feel things should be free and don't want to financially support you (as a majority) you're in a bad place. When you can't afford to run central repositories, pay for a forum or get one once sponsored by a forum software company featuring their name it's pretty telling. Karma really is a bitch when it comes back and bites you in the ass.
@@carloayars2175 all use ffmpeg to activate NVENC or AMD VCE confeats for your long winded, also the players for both is MPV (a fork of mplayer) the ONLY advantage I can see is HDR tone mapping and you really shouldent transcode 4k to begin with thx for failing
@@spagafus prove it, extra build options does not make it different whatsoever, I could build ffmepg with everything enabled under the sun and have plex, emby and jellyfin use the same build which I do anyhow for plex and jellyfin when i wanna poke it
@@SakuraChan00 I know that Emby handles a lot more in our own code then JF or Plex so we rely on ffmpeg far less. We do continue optimizing and rewriting parts of ffmpeg for things we still use it for. But even the way Emby uses ffmpeg is often different. It's a shame Jason used an old version of Emby and not the latest or you would have seen a lot more difference in the videos. Our current version easily has tons of new optimization compared to what he used. Emby doesn't need to use ffmpeg like the others do in current versions and we handle many things quickly and internally without the need for it. New changes will lower it's use even more. We've probably reduced our need to use ffmpeg by close to 50% as a whole. If you can direct play a file vs others having to transcode the same file that's an advantage right? If you do need to use transcoding but can do it 20-30% faster that's an advantage right? How about being able to tone map 4K HDR to 4K SDR vs 4K HDR to 720 SDR, would that be an advantage? How about 4K HDR to 4K SDR using graphical subtitles transcoding 7.2 audio to 5.1 doing 3+ streams on a low end Celeron while other media servers can't transcode one stream to 720 fast enough to play? Would that be an advantage? That's the kinds of differences where talking about here. So yes there is a lot of differences even when we use ffmpeg. Emby supports far more hardware transcoding then just NVENC and AMD VCE including Tegra, Exynos, AmLogic, RealTek, MediaCodec, OpenMax, VAAPI, Quick Sync, DX11VA, OMX, CUVID and probably a couple more I can think of off the top of my head. MPV is ok but has a lot of color space issues. HDR colors are hit and miss but never accurate. It not improved much is regard in 5 years or so. We're replacing Theater completely. The new unified client is faster with the color space issues and doesn't need hand holding or adjusting like MPV does to try and dial it in to work. You shouldn't need to have to do that. Obviously your understanding is lacking. :)
I have purchase Plex and emby , if you lose your internet conetion Plex don't run and emby does ! Ist faster , smart , more easy to use ......and the Choice is clear emby RULES !
Em termos de interface o plex ganha. O visual atual está muito bonito. O problema é que ele ainda trava ao navegar no App da TV de última geração da lg. O emby é mais rápido, mas a interface do emby é feia. Se mudarem para uma interface como do plex, com certeza seria imbatível. Estão atrasados nesta questão.
Umm, no. If direct playing or direct streaming the same file they will be the same. The only way either would look worse then the other is if your transcoding to different resolutions or bitrates.
@@carloayars2175 no , i told in direct bitrate too emby have gain more than plex if you want to see you go to see "Event Horizon" Full bitrate @ 180 mbp . can show u emby player very very bad quality.....
@@artsoonteen I had trouble understanding what you said. But if you're talking about the 2.35 aspect ratio Event Horizon it's only 46.05 mb bitrate and plays just with a beautiful picture. If you have something 180mb it's likely not going to stream depending on client used as it's over the design limit. That could cause it to transcode. But there's no point in trying to stream files with a bitrate that high. It's a disc format made to be pushed out and HDMI port not streamed over Ethernet or Wifi. There's only a few hardware based player that will play something that high but no spec supports it.
plex was chugging along on a highway in the sun with the top down. All the sudden they see an exit to streamville with a population of 1,000 with a big storm cloud over the city. there like hey that's a good place to go. They take the exit and forget to put the top up.
I was an Emby user when I started after I switched to Plex I won't be back, Emby has some things I don't like such as horrible interface, medium and long scanning, thumbnail creation with a small movie collection around 120 movies it takes more than 3 days on to put thumbnail on everything while Plex with a larger collection of 300 movies takes 1 day at most, Transcoding it was not compatible with all video formats like .ts it takes too long to open a video or even on a second device without hardware, the developer looks like it's not professional while Plex looks like a thriving company that will last a long time
Why compare the times if you’re just going to dismiss Emby’s advantage? I’m an avid Plex user, but the only way we can get Plex to change for the better, it call them out on it.
So first off, I can skip ahead with no issues with emby. I just tested it again myself. Something is wrong with his setup. I recently went back and tested emby again. Last week. PROS: -Overall faster -tasks like scanning the library actually work as expected, and don’t take ages -network is much better managed so my users that have shit WiFi have less issues. -their employees actually respond to issues and usually try to fix them. -transcoding is more efficient -transcoding/tonemapping works way better -YOU CAN FUCKING CONTROL WHICH GPU YOU WANT TO USE!!!!(can you tell which problem has pissed me off recently?) -emby doesn’t randomly crash or corrupt it’s database if you look at it funny -emby doesn’t randomly update their clients and break them badly, cough cough shield cough cough CONS: -Emby’s ui sucks butthole. It looks absolutely horrible compared to Plex. This is a massive reason I haven’t switched. I have about 30 users that can barely use Plex. -Emby’s method of sharing libraries is way more difficult compared to Plex’s. Plus my friends would need to pay. I haven’t looked in a while but this is how it was last I looked. -No Tautulli support :( Honestly Emby nailed all the hard stuff. They just need to hire a UI designer to fix their front end and it would be amazing. Or Plex and emby should just exchange notes.
Your friends don't need to play for use of the apps on Emby. The subscription is server based. So if your server has the premiere key installed. all clients can connect and play.
My whole thing with most of the alternatives for Plex it’s almost always their UI looks either outdated or incomplete. That’s easily my biggest hang up. I don’t really care for Plex’s new direction they’ve been taking as of late (focusing on literally anything but the personal media side) but I will probably stick with them until someone else gets an equivalent first party UI
I feel this. I use jellyfin and I run the jellyskin plugin to make it look really clean
@Paulus Problem is Jellyfin suck at scraping audio metadata. It doesn't group them like Plex does, which s a bit lame but they can still improve on that side
@Paulus "there has even been mention that Plex might remove logins all together and make all Plex servers into one big streaming platform"
I still primarily use Plex but I think I actually like Emby you are better. I specifically love the video stats overlay during video playback that can be accessed and the dark black background not being overly bright is very appealing as well. Also the overlay on the video for the controls looks nicer than the large bottom part of the screen being consumed Plex interface while watching video. Emby is more subtle and less invasive but still provides the control you need.
My Emby use on my Nvidia shield for quite a long time lately has been I'm mounting to checking once a month to make sure the server is still updated because I do prefer Plex in general but I haven't tried Emby, giving it a real test, and a long time. I think it's time I took another look because both are actually quite good.
I agree. I use jellyfin but their firestick app is outdated af and so slow. Plex is much faster. Haven't tried emby yet, maybe i will now.
Emby skips beyond the buffer just fine and doesn't crash when doing so.
true
Well have you set buffer sizes of both to same value? That could be the reason Plex took longer to preload before playback.
IMO It's definitley not better to remove skipping forward if it isn't buffered. Those files aren't stored on tapes anymore. If the transcoder can't handle skipping, it needs to be implemented or (in Plexes case) fixed
Skipping forward works fine. On all clients. Both with emby and plex.
@@mrsittingmongoose I have no experience with emby at all. But I do have problems with it on Plex occasionally
@@Kathlanus it still fundamentally works on plex though. But yes, fast forward, rewind and resume on plex can pretty busted at times. Especially on android based platforms.
Now jellyfin. Always nice to have a free option
I find a lot of issues with Plex in regards 4k content with subtitles. When I enable the PGS subs, I am screwed. Would this be different on the EMBY? I am running plex on a mini pc atm with a I7 processor and quick sync. Thank you :)
Thanks for the video, I'm always has this though of what to use, I'm using Plex for years and I have plex Pass as well, but I dont know which one to use while I'm outside my house, on vacation for example, to watch movies on mobiles , what do you think? which one are you using for better performance ?
umm the emby app in andriod lets you skip anywhere in the video and its almost instant
Bro Emby is the best. Emby loads subtitle without reloading video. It looks better (has many themes). Fully local client(works without internet) . Also I dont think most of the people transcode media they direct play on their TV(for the best quality)
Emby can direct play a lot more content that Plex has to transcode. Especially true with advanced audio and graphical codecs. Emby can handle this while Plex requires the subtitles to be overlayed on top of the video. Emby used to do that as well but this doesn't work well or at all with 4K/HDR content.
@@carloayars2175 yes People should really stop shilling for Plex. Shilling for one also encourages monopoly of a product which is not good for competition as well. People should switch to emby and support the devs.. I have both plex & emby premium and plex premium was a waste of money.
How much of a difference do you see vs. the free version with either of these? For me I'm considering Free version with AMD 3800X or same cpu with paid version and RTX 2060. I dunno if it's even really worth going for the paid version. I'm also only streaming to at most 2 TV's which is very very rare.
Skipping forword works fine in Emby, not sure how you tested this??
I've been wondering, Does emby use a regular temp folder or does it use ram for transcoding? Because on plex, using ram speeds things up quite a lot...
Point it where you like - this is a configurable option in the settings. For RAM, you'll need to setup a RAMDisk, but any SSD or NVME will be more than sufficient.
Very nice to see completion in this application space. I am a long time Plex user in fact I think I had plex no more then 1 year after it came out. I now have a 5 TB media collection and Plex handles it like a champ. this video was all about transcoding and it was interesting to here your take on this. I do share my plex with my family in fact i proxied my plex so it was so much easier for family to do this. Now I have a 25 MB upload and I don't limit my users on quality so they can play what ever plays well for them. The one thing that I do that has made the difference has been the content format and make it all MPG4 i use hand brake and that has been the difference but that is my experience. keep up he good content
As a Plex user for over 5 years I have to say I have yet to have any of the issues you talk about in this video. What this really shows is the difference between hardware/software on one server and how it can change the load speeds and so on.
I have had all those issues. I also have them when using other friends servers. I guess you will need to give us all access to your server to prove to us. ;P
""As a Plex user for over 5 years"" Thats why you dont know how good EMBY/Jellyfin is
. Emby loads subtitle without reloading video. It looks better (has many themes). Fully local client(works without internet) . ALso loads faster. Not messy UI like plex. Please should really stop shilling for plex too much its bad for competition and over all experience .
BTW plex 5 years is pretty noob.
Pro Tip: Tdarr for converting your files to h265 is quite the lifesaver. You halve the file size with negligible reductions in video quality. I've already saved 500GB on my NAS this way.
What happens to the audio and hdr?
@@39zack audio gets converted according to your settings in the conversion tree diagram thingy (very technical I know). HDR I don't know.
@@39zack depending on the plugin you can change codecs and encodings but that's far beyond my usage of the default conversion tree
500GB is really nothing anymore.... my Plexserver is at 46TB at the moment.
@@JohanYlinenjarvi typical HEVC conversations save about 30-50% storage space
Hi, just wanted to comment that it didn't appear you were actually comparing apples to apples but more like apples to oranges in those test from what I could see but can't be positive. At best it was semi close to even, at worst case you had Emby doing more processing than Plex, Plex had already scanned your files while that wasn't never done with Emby or additional information would have been present on the timeline showing some of the information during playback. On the screens where you select play in Emby you were using multitrack audio and subtitles but your selections for Plex didn't show any criteria at play.
To get this out of the way: I'm very familiar with both products having ran them both for years (Plex a bit longer). I'm a former Plex Ninja, but currently work for Emby. I pretty much know both inside and out, as well as what every option (hidden or visible) does and it's effect on other parts of the system. I've got a couple hopefully unbiased observations as well as obviously biased but hopefully helpful suggestions if you truly want to see transcoding differences.
Couple unbiased observations: You should mentioned which version of each Server and Client your comparing to make it obvious what's compared. Example Emby is about to release a new server version with long list of improvements to speed (many transcoding related). So a viewing seeing this video next week could easily be confused what you actually tested or when. Plex could release a new version as well so knowing versions tested is quite helpful if not mandatory. Transcoding H.264 and H.265 can be quite different depending on things like audio channel selected or choice of subtitles. Don't take for granted they process the same way. I'm going to go out on a limb with this comment and say you should verify your test files for spec compliance and header timings as I almost guarantee there is a problem with your Back to the Future encode. I mention this because Emby does support random jumping throughout the timeline and it's quite fast. The only time this generally doesn't work is if there's a problem with the encode so it can't calculate what byte range to jump to. It's almost always timing related. When this happens you can often still play files read and processed sequentially by ffmpeg as it handles the problem. But if you take a look at the server log or Emby's ffmpeg log generated for the specific playback it will show you any issues or errors it encountered.
A better approach might be to use standard reference files that anyone can download and test on their system as well comparing their performance to yours. That alone provides benefits to your viewers as they can get a good idea of the performance of their system to yours making your additional videos more useful as well allowing them to rough calculate ballpark results on their system based on what you show. Not perfect of course but far better than the SWAG method. :)
As touched on above, Emby can jump around at at will to any part of the timeline quickly even for newly added items. Many Plex functions rely on information it has gathered from the file by having completely read every byte of the file during an analysis stage as part of it's overall process. Emby can also read and use optional information it gathers from files but does it much faster looking at data every 10 seconds (user config) in the video. This information in used for multiple purposes including the ability to show you the scene on the timeline give or take 5 seconds which is really helpful trying to find something to re-watch. Same data for chapter locations as well which also can be overlayed on the OSD when you use or hover over the timeline to know what to expect when your "jump" there. None of this information was present in the videos you showed for Emby. So I think it's safe to say the test choices definitely didn't benefit Emby and that it was doing some tasks in real-time it typically may not need to do. I'll just say results could have shown a more drastic difference and leave it at that.
Bias Now Showing as I know results but I think still valuable info to think about.
Just as or possibly even more important testing would be showing when each system needs to transcode without being forced by a manual resolution change. Example: if a file direct plays with 2 channel audio and no subtitles can it still do that if 5.1 sound is chosen if not supported on the client? How about if you have to use graphical subtitles? Can the server handle these common choices on it's own or does it require transcoding to overlay the subtitles? How much difference does that make for 720/1080 files fps wise with and without graphics subs when transcoding? What about the same tests on 4K/HDR 10-bit files? Do they even play or just bog down the system when graphical subs need overlaying? How about 4K/HDR to 4K/SDR tone-mapping while keeping the existing resolution and bitrate. Can the transcoder do this? That's a super useful feature for PCs not set for HDR display but obviously support resolution higher than 1920x1080. Same for many TVs that can downscale input resolutions to it's native resolution but not handle HDR (pseudo 4K) for better picture quality. Can the transcoder do this type of thing or does it need to downscale the resolution first to make processing HDR easier? Testing these types of things is one thing on PC especially with GPU but quite another on a lower end Celeron with Quicksync many people use. How do any of these test work out in that common environment?
IMHO these are the kinds of transcoding tests that are ultimately more important then just speed or a second or two difference loading (assuming it's a tolerable). Knowing what's playable and what's not playable is far more important overall. It's the difference between a single rip to 4K HDR or having to use more storage and time processing a second rip of your media to 1080p or risk not being able to view the media at all.
I of course know how some of these and similar tests will turn out and what the capabilities' are of each platform. I won't spoil the results with more said but think you'll find the results enlightening and not specifically one sided. But for good entertainment, throw the Purple Fin server in and test that too. LOL
I haven't run emby in years, and I'm open on doing a video on it if you're open to going in depth with it. I'm easily reachable and think it might be a nice deep dive IMO.
@@ShinyTechThings Id like too see thid
@@adamb7279 If I can get a response from @Carlo Ayars on this they seem to have a *LOT* of information on Emby that would take me weeks to dig into on my own. Hopefully they will reach out to me and I think it would be an interesting video for sure.
@@ShinyTechThings yea, seems like they have some real in depth knowledge which would be really well received by the user base. Transparency is always appreciated from developers.
@@adamb7279 I agree
I know this is an older video, but have you checked out the manual buffer settings in Plex? I set mine to a minimum of 120 seconds on my crazy old Xeon E3 1350L, and it hangs pretty good. I've also got the transcode speed set to Fastest setting since I don't have Intel QSV.
Does anyone know if it's possible for the film/tv show you're watching can it be thrown to ram so then the hard drive does not have to keep being used.
That will mean that you have to download the entire file to the client for playback. This wil slow the start of playback by a lot. Overall this is a bad idea.
I have a question specifically about the PLEX app on firesticks (not 4K). The app crashes all the time while streaming content from my laptop. Is this a transcoder issue? My laptop is an M1 macbook pro. I haven't paid for the pass so no hardware acceleration I guess. Is Apple tv better?
Taking away the ability to skip if it's not yet buffered is a complete deal breaker.
Awesome Video would love to see Jellyfin make the comparison as well. I would love to see Emby vs Plex on media tagging and collection handling are they equally as good in organizing your libraries? Thanks and keep up the great work
Please add Jellyfin! JF is open source and its beautiful!
i have used it in the past and i like it so much more then plex
Totally agree, people need to chuck Jellyfin into the mix now. It's been forked for quite a while now, so I would expect it to be quite different to Emby.
I thought they were also changing the libraries for the internal stuff.
Jellyfin also plays AV1 files. Plex said fat chance of that ever happening from them.
is wd my cloud ex2 ultra still a viable nas for plex in 2022?
First off fantastic video and I love the specific details comparing these platforms. This is the good information experienced users like us need to know.
As a plex user for well over a decade now I know exactly what you mean with some of these issues..... However around the time Plex decided to cut out the support for plugins they lost me as a user for a little while when they had that horrible Roku Plex UI. Luckily they wised up and started improving the app rapidly and quickly won me back as a user and right now I think Plex is better than it's ever been buuuuut......
A couple years ago I did experiment for a while with Emby. I actually still maintain both a Plex and Emby server on my Nvidia Shield although nowadays my usage of Emby pretty much amounts to checking once a month if the server app needs updated and if it does I do it because I can't bring myself to tear the server down and uninstall it because I like the idea of having it available as a backup if I have future Plex issues.
HOWEVER!!!!!...... During my experimentation for a short time using Emby I didn't count on a lot of random playback issues because of whatever Kodak it didn't fully support properly like Plex did and I did have many times where mysteriously I would have bad pixelization of the image on Emby and I almost never have that problem with Plex.
It appeared to me that because Plex is far more developed with many more years experience it did a better job supporting all the different types of media codecs I throw at it and hopefully Emby as corrected some of these problems but this has inspired me to give Emby another good try and make it my main platform of choice for a while to better compare the two.
I'm pretty positive I will again return to the raining champion in this area Plex........ But for educational reasons this testing must be done.
5:18 did it actually switch or just keep playing at the first bitrate and while playing up it to the higher bitrate
Plex downloads to my tablet still don't work properly, and everyday you open it there's new bloat. Switching to Emby or Jellyfin haven't decided yet.
where did you buy your black shelf?
I realize this discussion is a few weeks old, but I thought I would add my experience with Plex and why I chose Emby. In the fall of 2019 I bought a new Samsung TV and installed the Plex App. Even though my TV was directly connected to the Internet 24/7- every time I shut the TV off and turned it on and started the Plex App- I had to reinstall the Plex App because the App would lock up and say, "you are not connected to the Internet...". The only way I could get the Plex App to work was to reinstall it. Prior to buying the TV I was using Roku and Plex to connect to my server without any issues, I realize that this issue was a Samsung issue and not a problem with Plex. However, I am used to Emby now and really don't see a reason to switch back. I have a 1GB Up/1 GB Down Fiberoptics plan, over 4,000 movies, 1,400 TV episodes, 28,000 songs, 50 music concerts, and a lot of home videos that are available to my 25+ remote users. All of this on a i3-6230, with a 2TB SSD, 32 GB DDR-4, and 80 TB WD Red HD's running on Windows 10. I also have a Quadro P4000 video card that handles most of the transcoding.
Dont both Emby and Plex use FFMPEG to perform transcoding ? mind you they have there own customizations for it, but not so much that it would greatly affect the time it takes.
Also Im not experiencing this buffer issue you speak of with Emby, if I skip ahead beyond the buffer, it just goes to that point in the video on a black screen for about 2 seconds and resumes the video from where I selected it.
As well, the issue with the start timing may just be the default buffer size between Plex and Emby not the transcode speed (both use the same FFMPEG to do that)
@Bytemybits kinda missed opportunity to not mention emby can transcode with CPU and GPU simultaneously where as plex is one or the other.
I haven't tried it, so I can't really say, but my first thought about not being able to skip past the buffer is: "wtf, no, what if I want to go to halfway through?" My concern is if play tracking bugs out, or I started watching a movie somewhere else, and I need to fast forward to the middle. Emby, by what you've said here (I haven't checked if there are options or something) would force my hardware to transcode everything up until that point, on top of making me fast forward bit by bit. That would be so frustrating, I'd instantly hate it.
That said, are you also saying that plex, when you skip ahead WITHIN the buffer, it also pauses to rebuffer?
what about Plex vs Emby vs Jellyfin ?
Jellyfin forever.
What about transcode speed settings? What are the for both? In Plex you got fastest to make my CPU hurt or something song the line. I got Plex in a VM with 10cores and a dedicated 1050 ti assigned to it. I do get the crashed stream once in a blue moon but easy enough to deal with. I have not tested the start/stop speed but to me if feels fairly instant. Change quality is few seconds. I do notice they h265 is a little harder on the hardware. I do optimize movies/shows sometimes to various quality settings especially if it's new and I will definitely watch it
How odd, I've been using Emby for about a year and a half and I can skip forward past the buffer line no problem.
Do you transcode, or watch at native res?
@@IrocZIV both and I've always been able to skip forward... Very weird.
@@IrocZIV Doesnt't matter. You can skip ahead just fine. An extra note that he forgets, and i don't know how plex handles this. But on Emby if you have 2 versions of the same movie (1080P and 4K). And your clients select the 4K but transcode it back to 1080P, the second (1080 version will be loaded to prevent transcoding.
@@Stargate-command really? Holy cow that's a feature I didn't know existed!!!
@@seeingblind2 I’m fairly certain Plex does the same, considering you can get it to transcode files on demand in advance.
Looks like you have HDR Tone Mapping turned on in Plex. As far as i know this doesn't take advantage of HW Accelleration on a Windows server. And even on a Linux server you have to install additional drivers to take advantage of HW accellerated HDR Tone Mapping. This has potentially a huge impact on transcoding performance especially when comparing it to Emby that doesn't seem to use tone mapping in your test.
Emby vs Plex? No no, Jellyfin is the future. The true, free and open-source champion. Test out Jellyfin.
I've been Emby'd for quite a few years... I don't remember why I chose it over plex, but I'm happy with it.
Yeah I tried Jellyfin for a few days, then moved to Emby. Night and day difference, even with having to pay. It's worth it.
Jellyfin : Watch the battle silently
Plex does the basics better than the others, but I wish it had some serious competition to prompt improvements. It's just been seeking new users with new features that end up unsupported and deprecated in a couple of years. I want the basics of video and audio to be focused on, make them rock solid.
I just hope one day plex sets the default playback to 1080P instead of 720p for for remote streaming. I have a lot of not tech savvy people that use my server. I have more than enough horse power to transcode but would be nice to have a better viewing experience.
isn't there a setting for that on the server side?
@@bigbigspoon Yes,
but the client on the streaming device will still default to 720p unless people go in and set remote streaming to original.
@@shaunrattee224 god forbid too if people have to go into a menu for a quick setting change, it’s like the end of the world. Netflix and Apple this is your fault!
there's a configuration on the server side that puts the ability to automatically adjust the image quality then it's like Netflix adjusting the quality depending on the internet bandwidth
Thank you for this video. I have Emby Premiere and Plex Pass for a number of years now. Mostly use Plex because of the nice UI. I noticed a lot of the buffering issues you mentioned though - mostly with 4k content. Last time I used Emby was on my older server before I had a lot of 4k content. I have a new NUC and just installed Emby on it. Hopefully the 4k performance is smoother. I use an nvidia shield so this should be interesting 😊
lmao Plex has a nice UI? hahaha its looks like sh** yellow and messy. settings page is also messy. Try Emby different themes then you will understand. I also have both premium and Always use EMBY.
Hmmm. re: Emby skipping - strange because each time he clicked on the skip the the timer did increase by 10 seconds and the screen changed as well. If you skip through a scene where everything looks the same you might not notice that it's actually changing...
Good observation. Did you notice he had changed some of the basic defaults as well that affect the way the timeline works? Emby also had subs selected during playback but I saw no subtitles display in Plex. Plex had been given the chance to analyze the files and know the bitrate breakdown of the files probably from having been used and being an existing install. Emby didn't have the optional processing done or you would have scene additional information on the timeline which is only present if that's done.
PS Emby is releases 4.7 in a couple day which has tons of speed and GUI improvements including many more transcoding optimizations. Lucky he did the test when he did and didn't use 4.7. :)
The buffer thing dosnt work like that in emby, you can skip to any point
How many of you still transcode? At this point when traveling with a Fire TV Stick 4K I can Direct Play back home to my server in South FL. Now I do have GIG Internet and Plex set to 700Mbps up, but I think I can change that to 3-400Mbps and still be fine there. My sis-in-law has a CCwGTV and that does Direct Play too on that (and their internet plan is 200 I think). I'm pretty much in awe of it when I travel and see these results haha. I've toyed with Emby, but like Plex's interface better. Great video even still!
Emby allows you to scrub to whatever time you want to on IOS, there is no limitation on skipping through a video, does not matter how much buffer is loaded
You should have added jellyfin to this.
raising Transcoder default throttle buffer will greatly enhance forward scrubbing, set mine to an insane 960sec lol
Personally, the limited skipping implemented by Emby is a huge negative. I’ve never used Emby, but as I understand it from this video, Emby will not allow me to jump ahead in a video unless the video has been added to the buffer. Pleas correct me if this is false.
I was surprised you didn’t conduct a head to head comparison of how many transcode steams at one time Plex/Emby could provide. Transcoding is generally limited by hardware none the less, it would be interesting to see if both products would support the same number of maximum steams.
This was false information. Skipping forward works perfectly fine on emby. In all clients.
@@mrsittingmongoose Yes it does. The reason it didn't work here is going to be file related and I'm almost 100% positive about that. Only when the internal streams are wrong with bad header or timing information is this seen. Emby in such case can't calculate a byte range to jump to.
Besides these types of tests should use widely available reference files that anyone can download and test with on their own systems. Both H.264 and H.265 files.
jellyfin vs dim vs emby vs plex !
Plex, when a video crashes, especially when viewing an x.265 file, restarting the client doesn't do anything, I have to reboot the server to try again. It's horrible
Perhaps you can test which Plex clients can/can't direct play Dolby Vision/Atmos content?
Any client not connected to a TV or other device licensed to decode it since the information is "passed through".
Yes please do more transcoding videos. Also can you do a video on the cheapest best micro PC to get for transcoding. I have a WD EX2 Ultra and it is pathetic at transcoding. One quick question, if I increase my broadband speed to 1Gb down and maybe 300Mb up, do we still need to transcode?
That depends on if the original file's bitrate falls below your 300MB limit and if your files are stream/web optimized. If yes, then you should be able to play the file at original quality if your client's download speed exceeds the 300MB and is natively compatible with the file type you're trying to play.
As for the micro PC thing, that's a very broad market and would cost a ton of money to obtain and test every option. What kind of budget range are you looking for?
Transcoding depends more on the power of the player than the speed of your connection. Everybody nowedays has at least 20Mbit down/up. This is higher than most H265 bitrates.
@@SuperSonicGamer763 it's mbps not MB
@@rudysal1429 Sorry, was tired when I wrote that. You're right. Should be a lowercase "b".
I can't believe Emby wont let you skip ahead... wow... so glad I found plex so many years ago and have been a lifetime sub since around 2013...
That is not correct, but okay whatever
You can absolutely skip ahead. I literally just did it while watching this video. This guy is just a clown and has no idea what he is doing.
I was hoping for Plex vs Jellyfin.
Nice review. Hopefully Plex will take heed and fix skip ahead feature.
hmm next test is more for the end user, but interface and features i would say
Just letting everybody know the new NVIDIA shield player for Plex is out and all All the problems that had before the player are fixed and all the videos play fine and they don't pause stop and they start quick again
Emby > Plex (and has been for a little while)
Requiring the client to buffer the entire file is not great for streaming 4k content imho.
How about a guide on building a budget "simply nuc" unraid server?
To add - You can skip anywhere you like in Emby by just clicking on the progress bar, if you had enabled preview thumbnails, then you would would also be able to see where you are before you click it - alternatively, you could use the chapters option to skip to fixed points - again with thumbnail previews. As an open Plex sponsor I'm glad you are comparing these but please represent all parties fairly. It will get even more interesting if you start to include tonemapping performance and comparing hardware encoders (QSV vs NVENC/DEC for example) per platform. For further transcoding videos, you should also include subtitles - as they usually show up shortfalls on all platforms.
Would of been nice if you included Jellyfin.
Moved to Emby after almost 10 years of Plex. Hates Plex’s direction and all their crap.
next testing between on the fly transcoding x265 -> x264 and overall x265 -> x265 performance
Plex VS Emby on Truenas and whether or not transcoding works with something like a P2000 card
forget transcoding 4K
Transcoding with truenas is still not possible due to jails and their interoperability with the OS (As of months ago when I tried) but using it in Ubuntu server or docker is a use case that's functional.
@@seeingblind2 truenas scale might?? It's based on Linux
@@BillForesmanWilliam Don't know about TrueNAS, but on Emby on Windows with a P400 can transcode 4K perfectly fine. De pending on the bitrate you can get 1 to max 3 streams. (Video memory is the main bottleneck)
I have two unraid servers... My Main server runs Emby, My Backup Server runs Plex. Equal opportunity in my house lol.
When Plex halts during skipping if you turn on or off subtitles it will make it play again.. Have no clue why..
I've rarely used transcoding on emby if anything all it's been 70% Direct Play for me
As a lifetime Plex user this is interesting...i can attest to the closing and losing stream...usually id have to download a new server to resolve it. For some reason every other week i will have to shut down and restart the computer and re sign in again....however the other issues ive never had. The slowness and artifiacts...thats something i never experienced. Ive even transcoded and not seen too much of a delay...from the comments i see than emby might be arguabley worse for my tastes...ill have to think about it.
Jellyfin.
A "ranscoding SHOWDOWN" without 4k HEVC hardware transcoding? What a type of showdown is this? A birthday party for kids?
I have Emby & Plex and use the one that works for any particular file so I don't have to bother with which is "better". They each have had issues over the years so when one is f'd up, I use the other. Pay for them both, competition is good! They Both use FFMPEG so kinda the same with a fancy skin...
jellyfin 💪
Been running an emby server for a few years now. It's used by my family at home and a few friends via PCs, mobile devices and Chromecast with Google TV.
I have 3 external users and have good individual controls for each for bandwidth etc. Pretty simple to use.
Have yet to see artifacting like you had and you can skip wherever you like on the android apps(and skip to chapters directly). I don't use the web browser version. Never had a complaint or noticed and artifacting, dropouts etc. It's been pretty robust.
Only thing I've noticed is that on two occasions over the years, users have been locked out until I reenter their email to their emby user data. It's a weird one but an easy fix.
One thing I like about emby is their forum. Devs frequently address issues personally and investigate issues actively. Emby seems to be constantly improving.
Great job Jason. Strange I haven't experienced the seeking thing with Emby, but now I'm going to try it out.
You gotta try jellyfin
Keep in mind Jellyfin is essentially a 4 year old version of Emby Server with very minor changes to functionality from when it was forked. Couple new addons but the "technology" or framework it uses is old and hasn't really been improved. So it's pointless to compare a modern Media Server with one still essentially 4 years old as it will get killed.
nice... emby on shield?!?!?
Can you do Jellyfin vs Plex
*FIGHT!* 👊🏻
Hey Jason, your 10 series sucks compared to my 10850k. It will play 4k transcodes in like 2 sec for me. I can watch my raw gopro hevc 4k60, at work with my s20 in 3 sec maybe. I have a pretty good 5g mobile connection at work. Skipping can take a few more seconds and I have crashed the stream and had to restart at times, restarting was smooth and fast.
You're comparing a mobile processor to a desktop processor and both are 10th-gen. Of coarse you get better results, but you also have a much larger power draw. Most people prefer running media servers on low power machines to save on energy costs.
@@SuperSonicGamer763 you are correct but most people are not gonna use a new pc's for plex, they're gonna use old gaming machines that aren't easy on power anyways.
@@LordMustangGT93 Not necessarily true. A lot of people get along fine using NAS devices from QNAP or Synology or use the Nvidia Shield.
A lot of people do use an old laptop or PC as their first server, but it's typically not an ideal long-term solution.
Obviously emby is better
just use Jellyfin instead of emby so you dont have to pay to transcode and use your hardware
Because Jellyfin transcoder is from the stone age compared to Emby's. Example Some 4K/HDR on Synology NAS can't transcode fast enough using JF to be watchable while Emby can do 3+ streams. Emby can also avoid transcoding in a lot of situations where JF has to. Example: turn on graphical subtitles which Emby can handle while JF has to use the transcoder to overlay it. There is a lot of differences like that. GPU transcoding is way more optimized while JF mainly falls back to ffmpeg to do the work. JF is years behind Plex on transcoding and Emby is farther ahead of JF now then when it was forked and is widening the gap with each new release. That gap widens even more in a couple days with the 4.7 release featuring lots of additional new optimizations that increase speed or remove the need to transcode in the first place.
Some people really don't mind supporting software teams with financial support as they get value from it and think it's fair. A single feature such as Guide data from either Plex or Emby can pay for itself and then save you money long term vs $25/year from Schedules direct for similar quality data. It's also not built in and has limitations as well. How about meta-data providers. Using TVDB's new pay API? What's that costing you or don''t you use since it's a pay service? Pay for any subtitles or do you skip that to or use alternate means to aquire that data vs letting the system do it for you automatically based on criteria set? It's quite easy for some people to not only break even in 3 or 4 years on a lifetime license but also to start saving money going forward without additional work to integrate 3rd party services.
Emby for example offers free remote one on one remote support to solve any issues quickly and easily without spending days trying to figure out something setup wrong or goofy permissions you swear are correct in docker but use different usernames/groups then the host so don't give proper permissions. These are things many people find of high value and are way beyond normal expectations. One support session that solves a problem you haven't been able to figure out in weeks is a game changer.
It's all a matter of perspective on what you consider value and worth. I've personally purchased 5 Plex Passes to support them and 3 Emby Premiere Licenses before I started working for them. One of the Plex licenses was while working for Emby. I like both software packages and want them to both flourish especially as they move in different directions of focus. Same with almost every open source software I use. I likely will never need assistance of any kind from them but I want to support them so they continue to work on the project I like and use. To me it's in my best interest and really a token amount compared to some commercial software. Few hundred a year to Proxmox vs thousands to Cisco or VMWare? No thanks.
JF has kind of boxed itself into a corner supporting users who don't feel the same way as I. Your a perfect example actually it would seem. "use X instead of paying Y" mentality. Everyone can't have everything for free. Some people need to put roofs over family's heads and food on the table or they can't continue to produce "free software" and need a "real job". A lot of JF users feel this way because if they were going to contribute it would likely to be Emby anyway to get the better software. (happens every day).
It's not just that. Without proper vetting and control you end up with very questionable plugins. Combine that with the notoriety that JF is getting as the pirate site media server of choice and it's not a good thing for long term preservation as vendors, businesses and online app stores want no affiliation and distance themselves from you vs wanting to partner. That's always been one of Plex's really good decisions that have always worked out really well for them.
But if vendors and business are starting to distance themselves from you and don't want that kind of affiliation it's not a good thing. Any chances of business sponsorship or cross support grow dim. If you can't get sponsorships, have users who feel things should be free and don't want to financially support you (as a majority) you're in a bad place. When you can't afford to run central repositories, pay for a forum or get one once sponsored by a forum software company featuring their name it's pretty telling.
Karma really is a bitch when it comes back and bites you in the ass.
@@carloayars2175 all use ffmpeg to activate NVENC or AMD VCE confeats for your long winded, also the players for both is MPV (a fork of mplayer) the ONLY advantage I can see is HDR tone mapping and you really shouldent transcode 4k to begin with thx for failing
@@SakuraChan00 But they don't use the very same ffmpeg... Yes, ffmpeg in Emby really is special...😉
@@spagafus prove it, extra build options does not make it different whatsoever, I could build ffmepg with everything enabled under the sun and have plex, emby and jellyfin use the same build which I do anyhow for plex and jellyfin when i wanna poke it
@@SakuraChan00 I know that Emby handles a lot more in our own code then JF or Plex so we rely on ffmpeg far less. We do continue optimizing and rewriting parts of ffmpeg for things we still use it for. But even the way Emby uses ffmpeg is often different. It's a shame Jason used an old version of Emby and not the latest or you would have seen a lot more difference in the videos. Our current version easily has tons of new optimization compared to what he used. Emby doesn't need to use ffmpeg like the others do in current versions and we handle many things quickly and internally without the need for it. New changes will lower it's use even more. We've probably reduced our need to use ffmpeg by close to 50% as a whole.
If you can direct play a file vs others having to transcode the same file that's an advantage right? If you do need to use transcoding but can do it 20-30% faster that's an advantage right? How about being able to tone map 4K HDR to 4K SDR vs 4K HDR to 720 SDR, would that be an advantage? How about 4K HDR to 4K SDR using graphical subtitles transcoding 7.2 audio to 5.1 doing 3+ streams on a low end Celeron while other media servers can't transcode one stream to 720 fast enough to play? Would that be an advantage? That's the kinds of differences where talking about here. So yes there is a lot of differences even when we use ffmpeg.
Emby supports far more hardware transcoding then just NVENC and AMD VCE including Tegra, Exynos, AmLogic, RealTek, MediaCodec, OpenMax, VAAPI, Quick Sync, DX11VA, OMX, CUVID and probably a couple more I can think of off the top of my head. MPV is ok but has a lot of color space issues. HDR colors are hit and miss but never accurate. It not improved much is regard in 5 years or so. We're replacing Theater completely. The new unified client is faster with the color space issues and doesn't need hand holding or adjusting like MPV does to try and dial it in to work. You shouldn't need to have to do that.
Obviously your understanding is lacking. :)
I have purchase Plex and emby , if you lose your internet conetion Plex don't run and emby does ! Ist faster , smart , more easy to use ......and the Choice is clear emby RULES !
Em termos de interface o plex ganha. O visual atual está muito bonito. O problema é que ele ainda trava ao navegar no App da TV de última geração da lg. O emby é mais rápido, mas a interface do emby é feia. Se mudarem para uma interface como do plex, com certeza seria imbatível. Estão atrasados nesta questão.
but plex picture quality better than emby!!!
Umm, no. If direct playing or direct streaming the same file they will be the same. The only way either would look worse then the other is if your transcoding to different resolutions or bitrates.
@@carloayars2175 no , i told in direct bitrate too emby have gain more than plex if you want to see you go to see "Event Horizon" Full bitrate @ 180 mbp . can show u emby player very very bad quality.....
@@artsoonteen I had trouble understanding what you said. But if you're talking about the 2.35 aspect ratio Event Horizon it's only 46.05 mb bitrate and plays just with a beautiful picture. If you have something 180mb it's likely not going to stream depending on client used as it's over the design limit. That could cause it to transcode.
But there's no point in trying to stream files with a bitrate that high. It's a disc format made to be pushed out and HDMI port not streamed over Ethernet or Wifi.
There's only a few hardware based player that will play something that high but no spec supports it.
plex was chugging along on a highway in the sun with the top down. All the sudden they see an exit to streamville with a population of 1,000 with a big storm cloud over the city. there like hey that's a good place to go. They take the exit and forget to put the top up.
On the matter of skipping, if I can't jump to the part of the video I want to see, that software/service is not for me
I was an Emby user when I started after I switched to Plex I won't be back, Emby has some things I don't like such as horrible interface, medium and long scanning, thumbnail creation with a small movie collection around 120 movies it takes more than 3 days on to put thumbnail on everything while Plex with a larger collection of 300 movies takes 1 day at most, Transcoding it was not compatible with all video formats like .ts it takes too long to open a video or even on a second device without hardware, the developer looks like it's not professional while Plex looks like a thriving company that will last a long time
First, S*** it Nate.
First
Why compare the times if you’re just going to dismiss Emby’s advantage? I’m an avid Plex user, but the only way we can get Plex to change for the better, it call them out on it.
So first off, I can skip ahead with no issues with emby. I just tested it again myself. Something is wrong with his setup.
I recently went back and tested emby again. Last week.
PROS:
-Overall faster
-tasks like scanning the library actually work as expected, and don’t take ages
-network is much better managed so my users that have shit WiFi have less issues.
-their employees actually respond to issues and usually try to fix them.
-transcoding is more efficient
-transcoding/tonemapping works way better
-YOU CAN FUCKING CONTROL WHICH GPU YOU WANT TO USE!!!!(can you tell which problem has pissed me off recently?)
-emby doesn’t randomly crash or corrupt it’s database if you look at it funny
-emby doesn’t randomly update their clients and break them badly, cough cough shield cough cough
CONS:
-Emby’s ui sucks butthole. It looks absolutely horrible compared to Plex. This is a massive reason I haven’t switched. I have about 30 users that can barely use Plex.
-Emby’s method of sharing libraries is way more difficult compared to Plex’s. Plus my friends would need to pay. I haven’t looked in a while but this is how it was last I looked.
-No Tautulli support :(
Honestly Emby nailed all the hard stuff. They just need to hire a UI designer to fix their front end and it would be amazing.
Or Plex and emby should just exchange notes.
Your friends don't need to play for use of the apps on Emby. The subscription is server based. So if your server has the premiere key installed. all clients can connect and play.
@@Stargate-command isn’t there a device amount limit though?
@@mrsittingmongoose contact ebr from there forums , he will help u on this, default limit is 25 though