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How is the general perception of emby? They're closed source and US based.
They're not just closed source, they started as the open source project response to Plex. It was promised that they would be open source forever. They lied, slammed the source door shut a few years later and pivoted to a paywall.
There was no discussion with the community or contributors, no alternatives explored, no surveys or polls.
Just a "Sorry we're going closed source" blog post, Jellyfin was forked from them in vengeance.
Well now I'll like Jellyfin even harder
Emby remains in the position Plex used to, pre-enshittification. They’re closed source and have a PlexPass style license, but if you miss the value you got with old-Plex, Emby fills that spot.
For context, Emby used to be open sourced but offered the Emby Premiere subscription for some added features, and the open source half allowed people to just bypass the paywall, so they closed sourced it. Jellyfin is a Fork of Emby pre-closed sourcing.
You should not be recommending them at all for any reason for that. I was there and saw the shit that went down over it.
Emby should be considered a no-go for all purposes.
Oh no I’d absolutely recommend it for anybody switching from Plex. Anybody who liked Plex and the state it was in pre-enshittification will obviously have no qualms with a proprietary solution. If FOSS is your end goal then you’d have a better argument, but Plex refugees are for obvious reasons not a part of that demographic.
Emby is a great product that “Just works” in the same way Plex used to and for that purpose it is head and shoulders above Jellyfin even if it doesn’t have the benefit of being FOSS.
I have had both a Plex and Emby lifetime subscription since around 2018 and relied on Emby for quite a while during Plexs shenanigans 5-6 years ago but still think Plex and Jellyfin are the only true options. Emby is just an amalgamation of the worst qualities of Plex and Jellyfin. It "just works" as a media player in the same way that VLC "just works" but doesn't offer a whole lot outside of that especially nothing that these other two don't offer. Plex is the "polished but expensive and limited" solution and Jellyfin is the "free, some work required, and open" solution.
Emby offers a more robust, polished experience than Jellyfin and it’s just not even close, I’m sorry. You can get sort of close with some third party Jellyfin clients but then you’re split up between multiple apps that look and operate with different design languages depending on whether you’re watching media, managing your server, or listening to music, etc.
With Emby, I get very polished, functional, good looking apps on mobile and Android TV. I can use the Emby IOS app to manage my Emby server, watch TV, Movies, and listen to my music collection. It looks great and works great with no fiddling or plugins needed for basic functionality like intro skip that Jellyfin still does not support without the help of plugins in the year of our lord 2025.
On the Jellyfin side however you have the official Jellyfin app which is just an uglier and more dated looking version of the Emby app, and it can’t play any of my music collection. StreamyFin is much nicer looking than the official app, but you can’t manage your server or play music so you still need the official app also. It also lists your music playlists as libraries, though it can’t play music so you’re just given errors. Now if I want to actually play my music I need a THIRD app, Finamp, which can actually play my music library but it struggles with metadata and needed hours of fiddling to get all the metadata right, but at the end of the day it’s just a fuck ugly knockoff of the music section of the official Emby app.
So the comparison between Jellyfin and Emby for me is, do I want one iOS app that just works, looks great, and functions great? Or do I want three separate apps, 2/3 of which look a college students very first app they threw together in a single weekend, and still end up with less functionality than Emby? Emby being the obvious winner here.
I would love to switch over to Jellyfin but it still just has so far to go before I could consider it a viable competitor to Emby or Plex. Unless Free and Open Source is your ultimate goal, at the expense of both form and function.
That's just putting them on another enshitification train that just happens to be a couple stops back, but is still moving along.
How they went about going closed source was unforgivable and also means they will absolutely have no qualms implementing crappy enshitification type decisions in the future
Emby’s enshittification train isn’t a couple stops back, there’s currently no evidence it exists. Simply having an Emby Premiere license is not enshittification for the same reason it wasn’t for Plex. Even in Plex’s most beloved golden age they had the PlexPass. That is not now nor was it ever an issue. Not every software existence has to be FOSS to provide any value. Emby went closed source and Jellyfin got to pick up the torch from that point on. That is a perfectly reasonable resolution as thats how things are supposed to work, that’s a good thing. Do you see Plex being forked into an open source version? No you don’t.
The first stop was when they went closed, they didn't just go closed peacefully and Jellyfin didn't fork off in a quiet way either
It was a complete betrayal, Emby made promises that they would remain open source forever. They broke that promise in a slow walked plan. It started with "Oh just some of the build scripts will be closed source, but don't worry the rest of Emby will stay open!"
Until one day they slammed that door shut with a no notice relicensing and an "Oh sorry we're going closed source because we just can't make enough money"
There was no discussion with the community, no alternatives explored and it was mainly the arbitrary decision of a single person. It wasn't even discussed with contributors.
Jellyfin was forked from Emby in vengeance, not some sort of planned fork like you're making it seem
Yeah that doesn’t sound like the first stop, that just sounds like internal drama. That just truly isn’t a concern to any end user, nor does it affect the value or usability of the product in any way.
It's very relevant, it directly speaks to how they'll behave themselves closed where they can make crap decisions even easier.
Plex for all its issues, at least was upfront most who jumped on the Plex train did so with the knowledge that it might enshittify and honestly it's not as bad as it could be
A bunch of us who started on the Emby train did so under the pretense that at worst we might have to deal with a paid subscription or support contract type of deal.
That was a lie, I was there 10 years ago when it went down, that's when I pivoted to Plex full time (I had been running both for like a year at that point)
Easier than… what? They haven’t made any yet. Every single thing you say seems to be predicated on some imagined scenario that hasn’t happened. It sounds like you’re bitter about internal drama that in 10 years, an entire decade, has resulted in exactly zero actual negative repercussions for the end user. I would not call that “relevant”.
10 years you’ve been shaking your fist at the clouds yelling “Just wait, you’ll see, they’ll start enshittifying any day now, just you wait” and in 10 years time that hasn’t happened. Maybe it’s time to free yourself of this grudge.