Do more with your media
With the basics in place, discover what else Emby can do for you.
While one of the key reasons for setting up a media server is to have on-demand access to your personal media collection, don’t stop now. Emby is packed with useful tools and features that can make your media server an even better experience.
Imagine being able to watch live or recorded TV from wherever you are. If you have a compatible TV tuner and back-end installed, then you can integrate into Emby, enabling you to watch television as well as access your media through your media server.
Watch and record live TV
Emby’s Live TV supports one type of tuner natively, HDHomeRun, so if you’re in the market for a new TV tuner, first visit www.silicondust.com to learn more. Alternatively, Emby supports third-party Live TV solutions via plugins, so if you’ve already got TV set up – either on your main media server box or elsewhere on your network – then you may be able to integrate the two together.
Most supported plug-ins are for Windows solutions, but one Linux option has been implemented in the form of TVheadend, and more will follow – eg expect to see MythTV supported in the not-too-distant future. At the time of writing Emby supports an older release of TVheadend (3.4), but check to see if the newer (4.x) branch is supported before setting up your TVheadend server for the first time.
Full instructions for adding TVheadend to your media server can be found in the Download section at http://tvheadend.org. First, verify which version of TVheadend (4.x or 3.x) the plug-in supports, and add the relevant stable repos. Once this is done, install TVheadend by typing sudo apt-get install tvheadend and hitting Enter.
You’ll be prompted to enter a username and password – any will do. Once installation completes, open your browser and go to localhost:9981. Log in, then switch to the Configuration tab and select DVB Inputs underneath it. Your USB TV stick should be listed here, so select it and click ‘Add DVB Network by location…’ Select your country and transmitter (if you’re in the UK, use https://ukfree.tv/ maps/freeview to identify yours on a map, if necessary) and click ‘Add DVB network’. Now untick ‘Autodetect muxes’ and tick ‘Enabled’ under ‘Adapter configuration’. Click ‘Save’, and the initial scan will start – you can keep an eye on it under Information and capabilities or switch to the Services tab to review which channels have been found. Once complete, click ‘Map DVB services to channels…’.
You can monitor the mapping from the Services tab by keeping an eye on the Channel Name column. When it’s complete, you should technically have access. The easiest way to test if your tuner is working is to install Kodi (see p38) followed by the TVheadendPVR plugin, then see if you can watch TV through that.
Once verified, follow the step-by-step guide to set up the required Emby plugin. Look for the green tick next to External Services, which should indicate that the plugin is configured correctly. Open the slide-out menu and then select Live TV. Explore the various sections to verify that you’ve got access from your tuner. If you run into trouble, check out the Live TV section of the Emby forums ( http://emby. media/community) for additional help.
Manage metadata
Emby should – in most cases – have no problems identifying your music, TV shows or movies. You may occasionally come across a
glitch, or you may have other media – such as home movies, photos or even music video – that Emby doesn’t recognise or can’t process. This is where the Metadata Manager comes in – access it from Admin section of the slide-out Emby menu.
The Metadata Manager lets you browse your media by folder – expand it to reveal toplevel information like TV show, movie or music artist. Click this to edit that information. You can manually enter data or click Identify to search the relevant database to see if the application can find a correct match. Click ‘Save’ to enable your choices, or ‘Refresh’ to try to download missing data – an ‘Advanced’ option lets you control how metadata and images are updated. You’ll also see an Images section where you can manage existing images or upload your own.
You can wield the same level of control on music albums and tracks as well as individual episodes for TV shows, too – just click the > next to a name to drill down to the next level. And where metadata isn’t available for downloading from the internet – music videos are a typical case in point – Emby still tries to be helpful, providing appropriate fields for you to fill in depending on the type of media you picked for that section.
Set up multi-user access
One of Emby’s great strengths is that it allows you to give everyone their own customised level of access to the server. This is administered from the Users section under Manage Server. Click ‘+’ next to users and first enter your user’s name. Untick ‘Enable access to all libraries’ if you want to give them limited access to your media, and click ‘Save’.
Once a user is set up, use the Profile tab to link them to an Emby Connected account, if necessary, as well as restrict what control and access they have to various parts of your server. The Access tab enables you not only to restrict access by library, but also to limit their access to specific devices. Parental Control lets you set a maximum age rating such as GB-PG for that user, plus block unrated content by type (and tags). Click ‘Access Schedule’ and you can limit their access by day and time too. Finally, Password allows them to protect their account with a password.
Once set up, users can log into Emby through the web or on a supported device and get a customised view of your server’s content. If they click their user photo and choose ‘Settings’ they can then tweak personal preferences such as what the home screen displays, playback settings and more.
It’s a great way to give everyone in your home their own access to your server. You can also go further and set up special guest access too, emailing an invitation to other users with Emby Connect accounts and giving them access to one or more of your libraries.
Headless access
If you plan to put your server away in a corner somewhere, it also pays to configure it for headless access using SSH. This enables you to securely access and control it via the command line from another PC or device on your network using a suitable app or program (eg one such as Putty on Windows or Serverauditor on an iPad). The recommended server is OpenSSH ( www.openssh.com), but Ubuntu users should visit https://help.ubuntu.com/ community/SSH for a guide to installing and configuring it. If you’d prefer access to the desktop, then configure access via VNC – install the VNC Server ( sudo apt-get install x11vnc ) on your server, then access it via a suitable VNC client (eg Remmina is included with Ubuntu 14.04.3).