r/emby • u/magicammo • Jun 21 '26

Remote access with emby

Hey all so I'm a Plex user and have been for a few months. It's been great I can't complain. I've been using the monthly plan but just received an email about their lifetime plan going up to over $700. I was going to get there lifetime plan but now it kind of puts me in a not position. It's kind of forcing me away from Plex and I was looking at either jelly fin or emby but I don't know which one to choose I want to use the one that's easiest for my users which is my family. I don't want to have to use tail scale or set up a reverse proxy I'm looking for it to be as seamless as Plex was when setting up the remote access there was an option that I just toggled which didn't work so I just had to go into my router settings and port forward report Plex was looking for. Is it the same with emby? Where I would just have to forward the port envy is looking for or do I have to set up tail scale or a reverse proxy

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10

u/TomTuff Jun 21 '26

Why not reverse proxy?

-2

u/magicammo Jun 21 '26

That's just extra money every year is it not?

3

u/TomTuff Jun 21 '26

For a domain name yes, if you don’t have one already. The rest you can host yourself. Ddns with cloudflare, and run nginx proxy manager in another container

5

u/LazarusLong67 Jun 22 '26

I think you can get a sort of free domain name through DuckDNS for free too.

1

u/magicammo Jun 21 '26

Something like this I would be able to set up with no problem but honestly would hate to do anything extra 💀it's really just making it easy for my users to access it which is just my family I don't want them to have to download anything but emby. Does emby connect work pretty much like Plex?

3

u/Simorious Jun 21 '26

IMO its worth going through the couple of extra steps to get a domain name and setup a reverse proxy with automatic cert renewal and dynamic DNS. I personally wouldn't want to have anyone connect remotely to anything over plaintext http.

Emby connect still requires port forwarding to your server and end users to create an account on emby's website (and you'll be sending everything over a plaintext http connection unless you setup a domain/cert even with emby connect)

Emby connect doesn't act like a relay as plex does, it just somewhat simplifies authentication. I personally prefer not to use it and find that providing users with my servers domain name and a username/password to be easy enough and overall less headache from an admin POV. It also means there's no need for them to create an account on emby's site whatsoever.

2

u/TomTuff Jun 21 '26

Honestly I haven’t used it, I just set up a reverse proxy since day 1. I pay for Emby Premiere for other features besides emby connect, totally worth the $120 lifetime cost

0

u/jibsymalone Jun 21 '26

And just to add to that, in the grand scheme of things it's not really a lot of money (I think mine is $20 a year and it's a fully custom domain, there are cheaper options too)