{"id":17892,"date":"2017-09-28T10:54:18","date_gmt":"2017-09-28T09:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/home.apeconsulting.co.uk\/adrian\/?p=17892"},"modified":"2017-10-04T21:09:04","modified_gmt":"2017-10-04T20:09:04","slug":"emby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/home.apeconsulting.co.uk\/adrian\/emby\/","title":{"rendered":"emby"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

The first question I’d be asking if I’d read the other Plex \ud83d\ude41 emby:-) blog<\/a> is whether emby is actually a good replacement for Plex, or is it just too much of a compromise? \u00a0Well, ‘out of the box’ so to speak, I’d probably say it wasn’t but it’s not too difficult to add in some of the missing pieces and after a few days configuring and testing I’d say it mostly is.<\/p>\n

One of my biggest issues with the direction of travel for Plex was the need for\u00a0everything\u00a0to be\u00a0connected into a plex.tv account. \u00a0Plex started life as\u00a0local\u00a0media server application, and devices\u00a0connected\u00a0directly to the server. \u00a0To make this easier\u00a0for remote connections, Plex\u00a0introduced\u00a0the\u00a0plex.tv service, which\u00a0at the beginning was\u00a0fine as it took away the\u00a0problems of trying to configure this manually, but still retained the\u00a0ability to configure\u00a0clients\u00a0manually when\u00a0connected to the same network. \u00a0Over time, more and more things have been\u00a0dependant on the\u00a0server and\u00a0clients being connected to plex.tv, with a number of the newer clients (like the ones for\u00a0Apple TV and the new Plex Media Player) only\u00a0working\u00a0through a plex.tv connection. \u00a0Not\u00a0great if you lose internet connectivity, and then find you can’t even\u00a0view\u00a0media content on a server sat on your own local area network. \u00a0Having everything connected to plex.tv also makes it very easy for Plex to collect whatever data they want, by simply updating their privacy policy!<\/p>\n

Anyway, emby has a similar service called Emby Connect<\/a>, but given my experience with Plex, I wanted to avoid this at all costs and set up a direct connection to my\u00a0emby server. \u00a0To\u00a0replicate the functionality of Plex, this also needed to be\u00a0a secure\u00a0https\u00a0connection. \u00a0I already had an\u00a0emby\u00a0jail running on my FreeNAS\u00a0box, and whilst it was a little out of data, I had\u00a0set up similar\u00a0media library shares to the ones I used on Plex, so\u00a0these had been updated in the background\u00a0as new content has\u00a0been added. \u00a0So my first\u00a0step was to\u00a0update\u00a0emby and get it\u00a0set up to connect from an external DDNS. \u00a0I already have a\u00a0few domains, so simply created a\u00a0subdomain\u00a0(e.g. emby.domain.co.uk) directed to my\u00a0home IP address. \u00a0With some changes to port forwarding\u00a0rules on my router, this all worked fine, so now to make it secure.<\/p>\n

I already have a jail acting as an SSL reverse proxy, so it made sense to create the certificates on that and\u00a0map to them from the emby jail. \u00a0I’m not using the reverse proxy as\u00a0I’m using a\u00a0specific\u00a0port\u00a0for\u00a0emby, but\u00a0keeping the certificates in the same place should make\u00a0updating them\u00a0every 3 months\u00a0much easier. \u00a0So\u00a0time for another\u00a0letsencrypt\u00a0certificate. \u00a0I’ve covered this in more detail here<\/a>, but it\u00a0was just\u00a0a case of\u00a0running the following command in the jail:<\/p>\n

certbot<\/span><\/span>certonly<\/span><\/span>—<\/span><\/span>webroot<\/span><\/span>–<\/span><\/span>w<\/span><\/span>\/usr\/local<\/span><\/span>\/<\/span><\/span>www<\/span><\/span>\/<\/span><\/span>–<\/span><\/span>d<\/span><\/span>\u00a0emby.domain<\/span>.<\/span><\/span>co.uk<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This ran without issues and created the\u00a0necessary files in\u00a0the\u00a0letsencrypt\/live\u00a0folder. \u00a0My first problem was\u00a0the format! \u00a0Certbot creates 4 certificate files, all in a .PEM format, but emby wants a single certificate file in a .PFX format. \u00a0A little Googling found the solution:<\/p>\n

openssl pkcs12 -export -out certificate.pfx -inkey privateKey.key -in certificate.crt -certfile\u00a0cacert.crt<\/span><\/p>\n

It should have then just been a case of mapping a folder in the emby jail to the letsencrypt folder in my SSL proxy jail, and whilst this exposed the files, emby didn’t seem to like any of them. \u00a0Some more searching on the emby support forum, and I spotted my schoolboy error and one I continue to make time after time. \u00a0emby simply needed permission to use the file, so a quick chown -R emby:emby certificate.pfx<\/span> and I could connect securely. \u00a0Result!<\/p>\n

I was going to look into redirecting HTTP requests to HTTPS, but then thought it would be easier to just disable the HTTP access in the router. \u00a0I’m only going to be sharing this with family and friends, so can give them some instructions on how to set up.<\/p>\n

So pretty straightforward really, and I now have much more control over my own media server and how users can connect, without using any 3rd party services that might suddenly change their approach to my privacy.<\/p>\n

So what have I found with emby whilst doing all this? \u00a0Whilst it’s very similar to Plex in a number of ways, it’s quite different in some others:<\/p>\n