Private streaming server with Raspberry Pi and Emby on Docker

Today’s smart homes are plenty with a lot of connected devices that make your life easier. Your media files are often hosted in online services that make privacy concerns when listening about security. Raspberry PI and Emby can give you an alternative solution to host your files locally at home and get them streamed to your devices.

This guide will show you how to create a personal media streaming server with Raspberry PI and Emby.

We’ll use also a USB device to collect our media files to be streamed. This device will be simply a flash disk in my test, but the procedure is the same for a USD Drive. An alternative option could be using a NAS. To have a working configuration, we’ll erase the USB disk, to take care to have an empty one or you could lose all existing data inside it.

What Is Emby

As described on its official website, Emby aims to bring together personal videos, music, photos and live television. It is installed as a server and can be accessed from an app or web browser. It also allows streaming your media to DLNA devices or Chromecast to simplify connection. Emby is also compatible with a number of apps. Within Emby’s main features, we can find the following (ref. emby features list):

• Stream Live TV to any device, manage your DVR, and enjoy your library of recordings
• Sync your personal media to smartphones and tablets for easy offline access
• Emby organizes your content into easy and elegant presentations
• Easy web-based tools help you edit metadata and images, search for subtitles, and more.

It has also parental control so that you can easily control what your children are watching and filter content. Emby also owns apps for Android and iOS. Usually installing apps on smartphones may require from you permissions on your device and files, of course. If your main concern is getting the less as possible data on cloud/third-party apps, you can use Emby from your browser. Otherwise, if you can accept installing apps on your devices, you can also try this software that surely adds offline capabilities to your private streaming service.

For this tutorial, I’m also going to show you how to setup and external USB storage for your Emby. This will allow you getting more space at a cheaper price compared to getting a very large micro SD card.

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