My Music and Home Cinema Setup

It’s fairly simple. Uses Roon for music and Emby for Movies/TV. Emby also does music, but Roon is so much better. Once Roon 1.2 is out, I suspect I may be able to switch out PiCorePlayer…

More background on how I arrived at this setup is here:

I liked your article, Geoff. I’m similar in that I use Roon for music and Plex for home theatre. I have heard of emby but haven’t taken the time to try it out for my own comparison but I will now. My priority for music is an equal mix of sound quality and software experience. Roon and HQPlayer and some carefully selected audio stuff give me that for music. For movies my priority is picture/sound over software by a fair margin and I am getting that with Plex for sure. Do you find much difference in these areas between the two?

Thanks, Jeremy. Up to this point, I’ve had both Plex Server and Emby Server running side-by-side on my Windows server. I’ve been running the Windows client apps from both Plex and Emby on my Windows PCs and phone, but for our home cinema experience, I’ve been mostly using the old Plex Home Theater client on the HTPC.

The Plex HT client has been fine, but Plex has now stopped further development of it, and is developing the Plex Media Player as its replacement. PMP is very much a work in progress, and as I said in my article, it doesn’t really support my MCE remote.

To be honest, I have not done careful side-by-side comparison of the picture/sound quality of the old PHT versus the new Emby Theater client. The latter seems to work well enough for me, so unless I run into problems, that’s the client that will be staying put on the HTPC for the time being. I did run into an issue with anamorphic DVD rips not having the correct aspect ratio, but (a) I only have a few such movies and (b) there’s a workaround for that while the developers stamp out the bug.

I’ll continue to keep Plex running on the server and check back now and then to see if PMP has matured sufficiently, but for the moment, the Emby ecosystem is my primary vehicle for movies/TV watching.