Set up your server
Discover how to set up your Emby media server on a variety of devices.
Your streaming media setup requires two components: a server and one or more clients. The server is what powers your media streaming library, and you then access it through a variety of clients depending on what platform – desktop, mobile or smart device – you’re connecting from.
We’ve chosen Emby ( http://emby.media) as our media server. It offers a polished user interface, adds lots of useful detail to your media by downloading metadata and artwork via internet “scrapers”, and includes extra features such as multi-user access and playback on a wide range of devices. Upgrading to the Emby Premiere option (prices start from £3.99 a month) gives you lots more choices, including live TV and DVR facilities, as we’ll see shortly.
Ideally you’ll install the server portion of Emby on an always-on 24/7 device. A good, low-powered choice is a Raspberry Pi 3 or a compatible network attached hard drive, such as one from QNAP or Synology. The advantage of a NAS over the Pi is that the storage is built-in, but if you have a NAS that doesn’t support Emby, you could always use it to store your media on and connect to it through your Pi.
Emby can also be installed on a laptop or desktop running Linux. Your server PC doesn’t need to be new – just make sure it either has a 2GHz dual-core CPU or a graphics card or chip that supports hardware-accelerated decoding – most recent chipsets from AMD, NVIDIA or Intel support this. We’d also recommend 4GB of RAM, and suggest your PC is connected to your router via Ethernet for the best possible network connection. Basically, if it’s less than eight years ( that’sjust2009!–Ed) old, it should be powerful enough.
Installation is straightforward enough. Instructions for a range of Linux distros can be found at https://emby.media/
linux-server.html – if you’re running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the following commands will suffice: $ sudo sh -c “echo ‘deb http://download.opensuse.org/ repositories/home:/emby/xUbuntu_16.04/ /’ > /etc/apt/ sources.list.d/emby-server.list” $ sudo apt-get update Store to the list of repositories in the App Centre (see www.qnapclub.eu for instructions), then installing the pre-requisite Qmono package followed by Emby itself.
Whichever way you go about installing Emby, managing and accessing your server is done in the same way: through your web browser via http://localhost:8096 (if you install it on your NAS or headless device, set it up and administer it remotely by replacing ‘localhost’ with the hostname or IP address of your server: http://192.168.35.2:8096, say). If it’s successfully installed and running, you’ll find yourself at the setup wizard page. Turn over to get things moving…
“Ideally you’ll install the server portion of Emby on an always-on 24/7 device”