Emby and plex are probably the two most popular video resource management and playback software (I won't talk about Jellyfin here, after all, it has the same origin as emby. If you don't want to spend money and need to use hard decoding, there is only one option left, Jellyfin, and there is no need to compare). I used plex first, then bought a lifetime membership, and then started using emby and bought a lifetime membership. Now I think it's a big loss. So I reinstall plex every once in a while to see if there are any major changes, after all, I spent a lot of money on the lifetime membership.

I won’t go into details about the specific operating interface and hard decoding effects, after all, there are a lot of articles about it online. Here I will just briefly talk about the differences in usage under my own environment and needs, as well as the reasons why I finally chose emby.

Let me first briefly talk about my current hardware environment. All my resources are now distributed in 5 NAS systems: 2 QNAP and 3 Black Synology. The 2 QNAP hosts store the most frequently accessed resources: such as European and American movies, Asian movies, various TV series, cartoons, etc., while the less frequently accessed resources, such as documentaries, concerts, European and American nostalgic movies, and mainland nostalgic movies, are stored on the 3 Black Synology (I will write a special article to introduce my hardware environment later, it is too complicated).

The two sets of QNAP are:

1. TS453Bmini (4-slot nas, but one slot is an SSD solid-state drive as the system disk, this is to achieve the HDD hibernation mentioned in another article (see:NAS Series Synology NAS HDD Data Hard Drive Automatic Hibernation), so only 3 HDDs are inserted) + TL-D800C (8-slot expansion storage, full of 8 HDDs)

2. TVS-951N (9-slot NAS, 5 3.5 slots, full of HDDs, 4 2.5 slots, 1 SSD inserted as system disk) + 2 TR004 (4-slot storage, full of 4 HDDs).

Because the main and most frequently accessed resources are on these two NAS (plus, unlike the black Synology, this one is white, and the power consumption and noise are indeed much better), so I deployed two sets of emby on these two NAS respectively.

Why do I say so much? I mainly want to explain that my subjective feelings are only suitable for the situation where emby is deployed on my two models of QNAP NAS, and may not be suitable for other environments, so if you have different opinions, don't take it personally.

I personally choose emby for the following reasons:

1. Decoding and transcoding effects

I installed plex and emby on the same nas. In terms of the overall effect (only talking about 2160p/x265 movies compressed from 4k original discs, 1080p x265 has no problem as long as it is not that kind of super high bit rate..), when the official clients of plex and emby are used on the client, emby is slightly better: when both are stuck, emby is not so stuck~. To be honest, I really don’t care about the decoding and transcoding effect now, it’s all nonsense (especially now that many 4k original disc compressed movies are HDR or Dovi, if you really want to transcode, you have to enable HDR tone mapping function, and you need to transcode HDR together if you want to transcode, which is even more unrealistic). So if emby is deployed on a general nas (non-expensive CPU or even high-end nas with independent graphics cards), you don’t have to expect to decode and transcode 4k movies. Of course, if you have some 1080p and 720p or other non-HD sources, it is still completely fine. There is no difference between plex and emby. Of course, it can only support a small number of users at the same time. In the end, local playback is the king.

2. GUI interface

This is also subjective. At first, I used plex's graphical interface and didn't think it was bad. Later, I used emby and found it more to my liking. In fact, it is mainly the style of the page for editing metadata of film and television resources. For example, if you want to edit the information of a drama, if it is emby, it is very intuitive. For example, if you want to modify the information of a drama, emby is very simple. You just need to select the 3 red dots in the lower right corner of the drama:

Then click Edit Metadata:

Then you can start editing:


It's simple and clear, and I like this style. Although the steps of plex are similar, you still need to click the mouse a few times to switch labels when changing some things (I don't remember the details, I haven't used it for a long time, and it may have changed now), so I finally chose emby. Of course, this is not important.

3. Access user management

This is the most important and the most critical reason, which is why all those who sell libraries online, even those for public welfare, use emby: because they can directly create and manage access users locally.

Suppose you have built a video library and want to allow your family and friends to access it. You have two options:

1. If it is plex, you need to tell him/her to register an account on the plex official website (the other party may not know how to register, you have to tell him/her patiently, or you can do it yourself~), then ask him/her to tell you the registered account, then you invite this account and grant access rights, and then you need to ask him/her to log in to the official website and agree to the invitation (if the other party does not know how to log in and agree, you have to tell him/her patiently, or you can do it yourself~), then he/she can access it with his/her own account.

2. If it is emby, you can create an account and password locally, and then tell him (her) to access it with this account and password.

Which one do you choose? So I switched to emby directly, not to mention that emby is also better in the details of login user management.

The final effect of my emby is visible:My demo site