Thats what i’ve learned in last couple of years which i stick with Emby as my centralized media server solution.
I have come the way from using Kodi, where i am one of the admins behind kodinerds.net, till today. But while Kodi is a superb piece of software when it comes to customization and flexibility, it is mainly focused on beeing a stand alone media player. When you have a central storage for your media and you want a number of independent clients which synchronize etc, Kodi ist not the solution for you. Okay you could (unofficial) hook it up a MariaDB Database, but that does not solve all the problems. There is for example no easy to install and maintain Version of Kodi for iOS, you cant transcode your stuff for roadwarrior use etc.
So in 2017 i began searching for an alternative. There was Plex and Emby at the time. Honestly after the latest security breaches etc. i am happy that i didnt chose Plex back than, i chose Emby. In the beginning with the Kodi Addon, later i switched mainly to Android TV with their apps. November of 2018 i purchased a lifetime license from them to support the project. In December 2018 Jellyfin was forked from Emby, while Emby was going closed source. The reasons where pirating and the fact that there were too little community contributions to the code. At least thats what the Emby dev’s are telling. Normally that would have been the point where i walked away from Emby, but i just spend 100€ for a license and there was no good alternative. Jellyfin was a nice idea but they only could fork the server. Most of the Emby Clients where closed source anyway.
I tried to be part of the Emby community, just like i did with Kodi, but something felt wrong all the time. The people in the forum where not really helpful, most of the where simply arrogant. When you had a feature request the standard answer was (and is) „oh great idea maybe we add it in the future“. And that’s the status for years than.
Also the response to bug reports is the same. For example i had a problem with the Wake On Lan feature with one of their clients. The problem was already known. They solved it three years after the initial report and nine months after i gave them detailed instructions. Problems with the sorting of TV Series are open for maybe two years now.
The treatment of third party plugin developers is also really bad. There was no good developement documentation for years. The Server code is closed source so you couldn’t take a glimpse into that. Most of the community developers resigned and moved on, for example the developer of the TVHeadend Plugin. The plugin now i supported directy by the Emby Team, surprise it didnt got better. I have done two plugins for Emby, what i’ve learned: other devlopers there are no help, and many users dont bother to read a single paragraph you write in your documentation.
It is simple, although the Link into their forum says Emby Community, it is not more than a support forum for a paid piece of software and people act like that. Community dev’s are treated badly by the users and by the admins, thats why so many have moved on.
How bad the admins treat the community devs can simply be seen by a single example. I have reworked my Telegram notification plugin. Not because i like the Emby Community so much, but to tinker around with Codeberg and to see how LLM’s could be helpful while coding.
After i have released a new version of my plugin i wanted to alter my starting post to reflect that change, but i couldn’t edit it. I ask multiple time for the right to edit my startingpost by myself and that is what i got:
I was kind of shocked. So they mistrust their users and community dev’s so much that they are not allowed to edit their own posts. Okay we do the same in the Kodinerds Forum but only for absolutely new users to reduce spam and not because we are feared of our long lasting members. As Admin of a „Community“ i would make my thoughts about what went wrong in the past. But like i said that is no community but a customer support forum.
For me my way is clear. I will try to update one last plugin of mine and than i will simply stop contributing there, but not delete my account, so no other could overtake it. In the past days i have also learned that there are some german user with a political attutide in that forum that i think is really fucked up. So it is better for my to step away from there anyway.
I think i will give Jellyfin a shot than. Community wise it couldnt get worse.
