Emby

Emby is a personal media server, which has clients for many platforms. It is used to organize personal home media, as well as play back on other devices. There are a large amount of channels that are supported by the community, and can even be used with PVR and Tuner cards to provide TV streaming remotely.

Installation

Install the emby-server package.

Usage

Enable and start emby-server.service.

Access Emby through the browser by navigating to http://localhost:8096/

Write permissions

Emby runs under the user and user group emby using systemd's DynamicUser feature. By default, Emby will have at most read permissions to your media files thanks to systemd's filesystem abstraction.

You might want to give emby write permissions and enable media deletion, local metadata saving, subtitle downloading and more.

You will need to create a dedicated group for your media files, or use one you already belong to, and give it access to your folders like so:

# create the media group
groupadd media

# optionally add your_user to the media group
usermod -aG media your_user

# give ownership of your media files to the media group
chgrp -R media /mnt/media_files

# make the files writeable to the media group
find /mnt/media_files -type f -exec chmod 664 {} +

# make the directories writeable to the media group
find /mnt/media_files -type d -exec chmod 775 {} +

# add the sticky group bit so that newly created directories belong to the media group
find /mnt/media_files -type d -exec chmod g+s {} +

Then extend the unit:

/etc/systemd/system/emby-server.service.d/write-permissions.conf

[Service]
SupplementaryGroups=media
ReadWritePaths=/mnt/media_files
UMask=0002

This will add the emby user to the media group, and enable write permission to the /mnt/media_files directory through systemd. Rinse and repeat for any additional media folders you might have.

Hardware acceleration

Emby supports hardware accelerated transcoding using the GPU. This greatly reduces CPU usage when transcoding, and is for some systems the only option if the CPU itself is not powerful enough.

To check whether hardware acceleration is available, navigate to the transcoding settings in the Emby web interface, and select Advanced under Enable hardware acceleration when available. A list of available hardware encoders and decoders will appear. If nothing is detected, see the following GPU-specific instructions.

Intel GPU

To enable hardware accelerated video transcoding/decoding for Intel GPUs, install the intel-media-sdk package.

Confirm that hardware acceleration is detected with:

ffdetect-emby qsvenc

The output should list detected encoding profiles along with other information.

Nvidia GPU

To enable hardware accelerated video transcoding/decoding for Nvidia GPUs, the proprietary Nvidia drivers are required. Install either the nvidia or the nvidia-dkms package.

Confirm that hardware acceleration is detected with:

 ffdetect-emby nvenc

The output should list detected encoding profiles along with other information.

Troubleshooting

No such file or directory

Make sure directory referenced by ReadWritePaths exists. If it does not exist emby-server.service will fail to start with errors. For example if /mnt/media_files does not exist systemd will try to use it as a mount:

emby-server.service: Failed to set up mount namespacing: /run/systemd/unit-root/mnt/media_files: No such file or directory
emby-server.service: Failed at step NAMESPACE spawning /usr/bin/emby-server: No such file or directory