Emby

Emby is a media browser (personal videos, music, photos and live television). This article will show you how to install and configure Emby on a slot.

You'll need to execute some commands via SSH to use this software. There is a separate guide on how to connect to your slot via SSH. Commands are kept as simple as possible and in most cases will simply need to be copied and pasted into the terminal window (then executed by pressing the Enter key).

Emby is closed source software which means they may place limits on future usage. An open source alternative is Jellyfin.

Table of contents

Installation

Install Emby by logging in via SSH, then copying and pasting the following script:

wget -O ~/install.emby.sh https://bitbucket.org/feralio/wiki/raw/HEAD/src/wiki/software/emby.install.sh && bash ~/install.emby.sh

This script will output a success message alongside the URL to access Emby. Emby will take about five minutes to start up and then present a "Welcome to Emby" wizard. Emby's own documentation on Running the Startup Wizard can help answer any wizard-specific questions you might have.

You must complete this wizard immediately to secure Emby.

Required settings

You are encouraged to configure and make Emby your own. You must take the following settings into consideration:

Library – path: When picking a library path it can be tempting to select the whole or large parts of the slot. This can trigger a lot of long lasting scans as every file needs to be checked potentially on every change. You should aim to minimise non-media content in any selected library folders.
Network – Local http port number: This port should be left the default "8096" as it's used to talk to other parts of your slot.
Transcoding: Video transcoding require a lot of CPU. You should minimise the need to transcode by picking video quality that matches what you can stream.

Starting, stopping and restarting

This section covers the Emby process—starting, stopping and restarting it. It also covers checking if the main process is running, in case that becomes necessary.

start: You cannot start Emby manually. Wait five minutes for it to auto-restart.
check running: pgrep -af emby
stop: pkill -x EmbyServer
kill (force stop): pkill -9 -x EmbyServer
restart: pkill -x EmbyServer Then wait five minutes for it to auto-restart.

Updating Emby

The executable and associated files to run Emby can be found under ~/.config/feral/ns/containers/docs-emby/app. If this folder is missing the latest version will be downloaded and Emby will be restarted.

You can use an SFTP / FTP client to delete the folder. Or alternatively you can run the SSH command: rm -r ~/.config/feral/ns/containers/docs-emby/app

You can also replace this folder with a specific version from an official Emby release. You will need to select the emby-server-deb_version_amd64.deb (server, debian, amd64) asset and then extract it to to the "app" folder. This can be done with the SSH command dpkg -x emby-server-deb_version_amd64.deb ~/.config/feral/ns/containers/docs-emby/app (replacing version with the downloaded asset version).

If you find this folder doesn't exist and Emby is definitely running then you likely installed Emby using a previous version of this guide. To address this, first ensure Emby's auto-restart is disabled (usually done by ~/.cronscript.sh) and then run the install script to get the newer set up.

Uninstall

The following SSH commands will uninstall Emby from your slot. You do not need to run them if reinstalling.

rm -rf ~/.config/feral/ns/containers/docs-emby ~/install.emby.sh ~/.nginx/conf.d/000-default-server.d/emby.conf
/usr/sbin/nginx -s reload -c ~/.nginx/nginx.conf 2>/dev/null
pkill -9 -x emby
echo Uninstalled.