Plex VS Emby - Transcoding SHOWDOWN!

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.

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.

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

@Bytemybits kinda missed opportunity to not mention emby can transcode with CPU and GPU simultaneously where as plex is one or the other.

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 :)

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?

I've been using Plex for a long time (since it was only available on Mac) and have been running both simultaneously for 3 years. There are certainly pro's and con's to both. Without going into a ton details, my experience at a high level- Emby is a better player and handles transcoding as well as direct play much more smoothly. From an admin side there is no comparison as far as the controls and level of detail. The flip side is the Plex UI and user experience is much slicker (plex is much nicer IMO). Enough so that it's prevented me from taking the leap to Emby only.

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 !

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.

Obviously emby is better

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'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.

A "ranscoding SHOWDOWN" without 4k HEVC hardware transcoding? What a type of showdown is this? A birthday party for kids?

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.

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.

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.

Moved to Emby after almost 10 years of Plex. Hates Plex’s direction and all their crap.

Requiring the client to buffer the entire file is not great for streaming 4k content imho.

Taking away the ability to skip if it's not yet buffered is a complete deal breaker.

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.

The buffer thing dosnt work like that in emby, you can skip to any point

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

Jellyfin : Watch the battle silently

where did you buy your black shelf?

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)

Emby vs Plex? No no, Jellyfin is the future. The true, free and open-source champion. Test out Jellyfin.

but plex picture quality better than emby!!!

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.

I've rarely used transcoding on emby if anything all it's been 70% Direct Play for me

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

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?

jellyfin vs dim vs emby vs plex !

is wd my cloud ex2 ultra still a viable nas for plex in 2022?

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.

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

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

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 😊

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 ?

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

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

When Plex halts during skipping if you turn on or off subtitles it will make it play again.. Have no clue why..

How about a guide on building a budget "simply nuc" unraid server?

I have two unraid servers... My Main server runs Emby, My Backup Server runs Plex. Equal opportunity in my house lol.

I was hoping for Plex vs Jellyfin.

I have noticed the 'artifacts' can occur with higher bitrates (15Mbps+) when sound is transcoded and muxed back into the stream. But selecting a sound stream that will 'direct play/stream' will have the mkv play fine.

Just use 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.

Would of been nice if you included Jellyfin.

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...