emby

Emby (emby) is a self-hosted media server for organizing and streaming personal media libraries (e.g., movies, TV shows, music, and photos) to clients over a network. It typically provides a web interface and native/media-player compatible playback, along with background processing for metadata/transcoding.

Evaluated Mar 30, 2026 (27d ago)
Homepage ↗ Repo ↗ Media media-server self-hosted streaming transcoding metadata
⚙ Agent Friendliness
26
/ 100
Can an agent use this?
🔒 Security
44
/ 100
Is it safe for agents?
⚡ Reliability
36
/ 100
Does it work consistently?

Score Breakdown

⚙ Agent Friendliness

MCP Quality
0
Documentation
30
Error Messages
0
Auth Simplicity
60
Rate Limits
0

🔒 Security

TLS Enforcement
40
Auth Strength
55
Scope Granularity
35
Dep. Hygiene
45
Secret Handling
45

As a self-hosted media server, security depends heavily on your deployment choices (HTTPS/TLS configuration, network exposure, and account management). The provided prompt content does not include specific security controls or dependency/SBOM details.

⚡ Reliability

Uptime/SLA
0
Version Stability
55
Breaking Changes
50
Error Recovery
40
AF Security Reliability

Best When

You want to run your own media server and control storage, networking, and client access for a personal library.

Avoid When

You need guaranteed, well-documented machine-to-machine APIs (OpenAPI/SDKs) or fully cloud-managed uptime/SLA.

Use Cases

  • Self-hosted streaming of movies and TV shows to home or remote devices
  • Centralized media organization with metadata enrichment
  • Transcoding/streaming media to compatible clients

Not For

  • High-scale public streaming platform use without self-management
  • Use cases requiring a simple developer-only JSON API with predictable schemas
  • Integrations that rely on first-party hosted API endpoints (it is primarily self-hosted)

Interface

REST API
No
GraphQL
No
gRPC
No
MCP Server
No
SDK
No
Webhooks
No

Authentication

Methods: Session-based/auth via Emby server access (commonly username/password and/or tokens), but exact method details not provided in the prompt data
OAuth: No Scopes: No

Authentication mechanisms are not explicitly documented in the provided prompt content; score reflects uncertainty and typical self-hosted server auth patterns.

Pricing

Free tier: No
Requires CC: No

Pricing details were not included in the provided prompt content.

Agent Metadata

Pagination
none
Idempotent
False
Retry Guidance
Not documented

Known Gotchas

  • Self-hosted services require network reachability, firewall/NAT configuration, and correct client-server connectivity
  • Media/transcoding operations can be long-running; agents may need to handle timeouts and polling (not described in provided prompt data)
  • Exact API surface, schemas, and error formats are not provided in the prompt data

Alternatives

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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-30.

8642
Packages Evaluated
17761
Need Evaluation
586
Need Re-evaluation
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