Picking a media player
I’ve been using some iteration of Kodi for a long time on different devices, most recently on a Raspberry Pi 4. (Un)fortunately, sometimes I get the urge to try something new and if I can consolidate the number of devices I use I’m all the more for it.
I have a Samsung smart TV and generally I’m pleased with the speed of it so it was a no brainer to pick a media player that has a native app I can run on the TV itself.
I had a few options to choose from.
Synology Video Station
Video Station was the first test subject because it’s a native app for my NAS and has a Tizen application as well.
But… I found the interface not too user friendly, also Video Station does not support a lot of video codecs I like to use for my home videos. That I created. And produced. Aaanyway… Played around with Video Station a little bit nonetheless, but on to the next one.
Plex
Plex is a great software and I really liked it, but I’m not comfortable with registering on a remote server so I can use something on my local network, also they have an aggressive (at least to me) pricing strategy. Next!
Jellyfin
Jellyfin would be perfect, but they don’t have a Tizen app (yet), otherwise I would have chosen this one. If you feel adventurous you can compile your own Tizen app, I didn’t feel up to it.
Emby
Finally I arrived at Emby. It had all the things I needed: supporting all the codecs, native Tizen app (although you have to install it manually), and a not so aggressive money-making scheme. There is only two things I found so far:
- The app sometimes asks you to consider buying the Premiere version before playing a video.
- You can’t download subtitles when playing a video (it works from the media picker though)
Installing Emby on Synology
You have the option to run Emby in docker, but I chose to run it on the NAS directly.
You can download the Synology DSM 7.x version here.
After installation there is one thing you should do (if you have a lot of files, like me) and that is to increase the inotify limit on your device. Add the script below to the task shceduler to run at boot:
sh -c '(sleep 90 && echo 204800 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches)&'
This should clean up any indexing issues for the Emby server.
Installing Emby on the TV
The Emby Tizen app is not part of the Samsung App Store (or whatever it’s called), so you have to install it manually. Luckily they have a really good, step-by-step guide about the process here The only catch is that you have to repeat the installation once a month because the app is set to expire 30 days after compiling (enforced for USB installs from Samsung’s side). It’s not a big issue for me, because the app is constantly developed and it’s always fun to be on the latest version.
Future
Emby is working fine for me with very few caveats but I’ll change to Jellyfin in a heartbeat if they come up with a working Tizen app.
In the meantime I bought the iPhone/iPad version of Emby to support the development a little (sorry guys, I don’t want to fork out money for a subscription).