Emby Reviews

Pros- App is gorgeous both on iPhone and on home PC. It really is like having your own Netflix etc. It manages to pull images and info with ease and combines it into a lovely user friendly package that I use daily.
Cons - iPhone app struggles at time to stay connected to Chromecast and Emby ’s ‘remote control’ function regularly fails to connect stopping the using from all forms of program control (skipping, pausing etc). Constant restarts needed over and over again.
Don’t get Emby if you your primary usage will be for music as it you will be very dissatisfied. It can’t manage music at all. Grouping, search and almost all features you get from programs like iTunes or any other similar products are missing or do not work. It’s simply bad.
Connecting outside of your local network is very difficult and to date after many help articles, lots of reading and many attempts I have still been unable to get it to work. It’s a shame because it would be great to be able to use it away from home and would encourage me to recommend it to friends and family. I’m quite experienced with building pc’s, setting up home and office networks etc so for the average computer user I would foresee this being a very difficult solution to implement properly.
Devs - Please keep up the improvements as I would love the above issues be resolved before another suitable solution comes along.
Good luck!

1. You aren’t going to be able to use Emby until you pay. Plex’s app works in a very similar manner. It is nice that both of them will let you download and look at the layout before getting into actual purchase time.

2. this app will give you a couple of purchase options just like Plex does. Monthly/lifetime etc.

3. If you want everything to be free your only real option is Jellyfin. Realize that due to this Jellyfin is behind Plex and this app (you get what you pay for)

As for Emby in general, get connected to your server, test out whether you like this app on a streaming device like Roku (all of this can be done for free). If you like that and want to add premium devices (like Emby) feel free to download Emby , look at how the media is organized, and make your purchasing decision.

The negative...
-I do wish Emby would let me play a minute of content before telling me I need premium. That is one thing I liked more when testing out Plex before buying lifetime.

(Edit) it does give you a minute of playing media without paying. Click the movie and when the pay wall jumps on screen, scroll down and click “play one minute”

This is the this app app for iOS, it gets 5/5 stars because it has worked flawlessly for 3 years and hasn’t had any issues to date that I can remember.

If you don’t have a server license subscription or one time server license purchase, then you have to purchase the this app iOS app to access your own server. The server license is the way to go, then all this app clients across all platforms and any additional users can all use the this app app for free.

This is a review of the this app app for iOS, not the this app server you connect to. this app for iOS works pretty flawlessly and I’ve never had an issue with it. From watching content to using the admin features to add a user or change access it all works as intended. It is regularity updated, and if an issue does happen, reports in the this app forums start coming in and the DEVS are pretty much on top of it.
I have to say the DEVS and forums staff really care about this app and try and answer every question if they can.

The this app Server is not a flawless product. But the this app app for iOS gets 5/5 stars.

What the heck. 1st off i purchased Emby for my iphone. Secondly, I purchased the premium subscription. But now i go to play a movie while offline and get msg that i need to purchase to “unlock features” I get that you guys are trying to pay bills, but gees! Isn’t there something you can put in to deactivate this? Works on everything but the iPhone (iphone is only place I’m seeing this message). Maybe it’s an Apple thing? In any case. Why have this in Emby , if you have to purchase or pay to use the server?? It makes no sense guys.

To the this app Team: Thank you.
This is a truly amazing application. I tried Plex but was dissatisfied with the lack of customization and the requirement of a cloud account. this app has solved my media streaming needs! HDHomeRun support is great, the metadata grabbing is superb, and the transcoding was simple to set up and works well. There are some bugs here and there—but I know full and well the devs are doing what they can to fix everything. I have one feature request, I suppose I need to post on the forum! Regardless, I love this piece of software. It has definitely been worth the $129 for the lifetime subscription! I’m in it for the long haul :)

I agree Plex has more features and looks better. This being said, Plex has far more bugs and security risks. Unnecessary features make Plex hard to navigate and support. this app has full reverse proxy support with SSL. Not sure what all the bad reviews are for. this app is far more robust and plays flawlessly on all supported clients. No talking back to mothership-like servers for user authentication. When Plex API servers go out, which they do about once a month, you can’t access the server remotely which defeats the purpose of plex pass. I am running both and this app is far superior. Don’t let aesthetics fool you into going with Plex!

I’ve been a Plex Lifetime Subscriber for a couple years now and while I had heard about this app, I never really paid much attention to it.
Out of boredom, I decided to try it a few days ago and I’m soo glad that I did. Soo happy in fact that I purchased a Lifetime license and I’m officially migrating from Plex.
this app’s interface is much better than Plex. I love the customization options and it works much better. While Plex syncs instead of straight up downloading, this app downloads and stream media on Emby much better and faster than Plex does.
Keep up the great work devs.

I’m running a Plex server was checking for an alternative. Installed the this app Docker, added the music folder and let it scan. Downloaded the this app iOS app and .... well, you’d think that the index on the right would allow you to quickly scroll to an album or artist, but fat luck with that. It’s only there for decoration, apparently. Lame! I understand that they need to make money somehow, but the ‘free’ version doesn’t even let you stream music. For now, this isn’t a particularly attractive alternative to Plex. It’s as expensive and doesn’t have the features that Plex has, or the user base. Developers, cut the lifetime cost in half and we can talk; also fix the iOS bugs. Thanks

Works smoothly and haven’t had any major issues, the only minor issues I’ve had with it is that when i press the home button it switches servers when all i wanted to do was go home of the current server I’m on. And the other trouble i have is that on occasion the play/pause control of lock screen wont work with this app and pause/play. There issues which i don’t have a problem living with but it would be nice to see them fixed. But other than that it works very nice

I used to be able to cast a video to my TV with Chromecast which turns the phone into a remote, with video playback controls on the Lock Screen and volume control through the phone’s buttons. This was such a great feature, why was it removed?

Now when I use Chromecast, I constantly have to reconnect to my tv every time I leave and return to the this app app on my phone. It’s a really frustrating user experience.

I’ve been using this app Premium for a little over a week now, and everything is working extremely well. The issues I had with Plex for files straight up not appearing in the library (the library is hosted on a FreeNAS SMB share) isn’t an issue with this app - everything is present as it should be. this app hasn’t had any trouble with 4K HDR (Dolby Vision) MKV files either. Recommended!

First of all, I have to thank Luke for his timely response to all the issues on forum. I tried Plex and this app, loved the this app interface. I love the fact that I can customize my home screen and the 4k content playback is smooth, Emby deserves 5 stas. I just purchased the lifetime membership and I wish there were referral bonus because I referred 3 of my friends and they love it too :-) Keep up the great work!!

this app is great.

The only two things I dont like are: 1) you have to subscribe to download your own content on Emby , but if you open the the server in safari which functions almost identically to Emby it’s free. Kinda strange. 2) There is no PiP function in Emby , but this feature is also available when it’s opened in safari.

Overall this app is a great and I use it all the time.

Ever since the new update Emby crashes when trying to play a movie

Had an issue not getting a channel (noticed only after a day of signing up/ only channel I watch) emailed them asking if they could fix it, they got back to me the next day and said it was fixed........ well the problem was not fixed so emailed them again letting them know that the issue was still there. They got back to me saying “this is not at&t, we don’t have to deal with you” and canceled my account........ well okay then all I wanted was the issue fixed. I was not rude at all, so if you ever have a problem they probably will not help and just cancel you....

this app for iOS is able to handle 99 percent of the media files I throw at it. Only thing missing is integrated support for comic books CBZ and PDF reader so I can use it to read my collection of graphic novels and magazine. A music visualizer plugin or screensaver would also be nice in order to have something to look at while listening to music.

In general Emby is great, but I recently upgraded to the iPhone X, and the are some glaring shortcomings. When playing a video the home bar is persistent. This didn't happen when using this app through Safari. Also when playing a video, the controls at the bottom are partially cut off, making them more difficult to access. Please fix this!

When I open a video on this app it says “unlock this feature unlock this feature with a small one time purchase(at 4.99) or with an active this app premiere account(at 6.99$).” .I don’t understand what it mean ,”unlock this feature wiith a small one time purchase(at 4.99)”1.Does it allow to play all video in this app for a month or all lifetime at 4.99$.2. Or it means it play only this one video at 4.99$ . 3. I don’t want monthly this app subscription,I need lifetime access. Does this app have a lifetime subscription ?what its cost?

On the iPad, this is by far the best looking this app app out there. The layout is even better than the PC look and a million times better than what it looks like or functions on Kodi. The only thing that would make Emby absolutely perfect would be the ability to launch a movie on any Kodi client on my network (PC, Mac, or Shield). Now with that I would pay for a lifetime license.

Why does it not allow me to have The right art work when the title correct and also have a option to never scan folders because if it’s complete then it’s scanning for no reason like for example if you have no more movies in your collection or if it’s a complete series etc thanks for providing this program

Running on unraid server with gpu transcoding for more than a month and everything is great so far. Sharing it with few coworkers and they enjoy my media collection. Once infinite scroll and movie counter is implemented it'll be perrect. Might not be the best UI but does the job. I'm sure it will be improved.