Emby and Webmin
Stream media and administer your server from your web browser
A MEDIA PLAYER, such as VLC or mpv, will happily open a file on your server remotely. But try skipping back and forth, and you’ll discover that SMB is not a particularly good way to stream media. Especially if you envisage streaming to multiple users. Emby, on the other hand, is a media server that can serve content from your server or DLNA (the most horrible acronym ever created: Digital Living Network Alliance) devices.
Emby delivers streams via HTML5, and it can dynamically compress them according to the current network conditions. Note, however, that this can use a lot of CPU power, so serving a few users simultaneously might result in jittery (or outright stalled) playback. Emby can use GPU acceleration for this purpose, though, provided the appropriate drivers are installed—it currently supports Nvidia NVENC (on high-end desktop graphics cards) and Intel QuickSync (found on most recent CPUs) as an experimental feature. Besides web browsers, your content can also be streamed via apps available for Chromecast, Roku, iOS, and Android. To install Emby, we need to add the appropriate key and repository to APT:
$ wget -qO - http://download.opensuse.org/ repositories/ home:emby/Debian_8.0/Release.key | sudo apt-key add - $ sudo sh -c “echo ‘deb http://download.opensuse.org/ repositories/ home:/emby/ Debian_8.0/ /’ >> /etc/apt/ sources.list.d/emby-server.list”
Then we can update our package lists and install:
$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get install emby-server
Emby is built with Mono, and has many dependencies, but APT should take it all within its stride. Once it’s done, start the service with:
$ sudo systemctl start emby-server
And, if you want it to start on every boot:
$ sudo systemctl enable emby-server
Navigating to http://192.168.1.100:8096 ought to bring up the setup wizard, which will guide you through basic configuration. You’ll want to add your music directory from the Samba section, and ideally have any videos you want to serve filed in a reasonably systematic manner, although Emby is pretty good at sorting things out for you. If you have a USB or PCI TV tuner installed, then Emby can use that to stream live TV to your devices, as well as record it for later viewing. You can optionally set up an Emby Connect account, which makes it easy to access your Emby instance remotely, although this can also be done the traditional way, with the port forwarding and so forth.