Emby preroll setup: the steps Emby's docs leave out

A customer who runs Emby walked me through his setup once, because I could not find a straight answer anywhere. I make intros for a living and I had to ask the person buying one how his own server played it.

Emby's documentation for this is the thinnest of the three big media servers, and I think that is the main reason people give up on the feature. The feature itself is fine once it is set up. For this article I went back through Emby's help page and its forum to see what is actually written down.

So this is an Emby preroll setup with the missing parts filled in, and a note on where each part came from.

Emby calls it Cinema Intros

To set up an Emby preroll, open Cinema Intros in the server dashboard, tick Movies or Episodes, put a folder path in Custom intros path, run a library scan and check that Enable Cinema Intros is on in each app. It needs Emby Premiere, and Emby plays one clip from that folder per playback.

Nothing in Emby is labelled preroll, and the feature used to be called Cinema Mode. The screenshots on the current help page are named cinemamode1.png to cinemamode6.png, and Emby's Trailers article still talks about "the Cinema Mode plugin". If you only search the forum for Cinema Intros you miss most of the older threads, and the older threads are where a lot of the answers are.

What you need before you start

• An active Emby Premiere subscription on the server. Cinema Intros is on Emby's list of Premiere features. The help page itself only mentions Premiere under internet trailers, which is misleading. A free user asked on the forum in January 2019 why his custom intro would not play, having read the settings page exactly that way, and staff told him the whole thing is a Premiere feature.
• One intro file that already plays properly on the device you actually watch on. Emby's page gives no required format, resolution or length, so I am not going to invent one.

The setup, in order

Keep Emby's Cinema Intros page open in another tab. It is short, but the setting names below are taken from it.

1. Make a folder just for intros and put one clip in it. The setting takes a folder, so even a single file needs its own. I would keep that folder away from your movie and TV folders. That is only my caution and Emby's page says nothing about it. In an August 2025 forum thread, a user who had created his intros folder inside the same media folder as his movies and TV shows got a random episode from one of his shows before the film. He moved the folder out and nothing played at all. Then it started working, with nothing changed, and nobody in the thread worked out why.
2. Open Cinema Intros in the server dashboard. It is off by default. The first control reads "Enable Cinema Intros for:" and has two checkboxes, Movies and Episodes. Tick Movies and leave Episodes for later. Emby decides what counts as a movie from the content type you chose when you created the library.
3. Enter the folder in Custom intros path. You do not have to add the folder as a library as well. A long-standing forum contributor said so in a 2022 thread, and nothing in the documentation contradicts him. Save the page.
4. Run a library scan. This is the one instruction Emby marks as important: "Make sure to run a library scan after adding new intro files." It applies every time you add or swap a clip, which is easy to forget three months later.
5. Check the switch in the app. In the Emby app you watch on, click the user icon in the top right and open App Settings, then Playback. Scroll down to Enable Cinema Intros. Emby says its TV apps have this on by default. Check it anyway, on every device.
6. Play a film and give it time. If trailers are set up they come first, and the trailer count defaults to two, so your intro may not be the first thing on screen.

Step 5 is where I would expect most "it does not work" reports to end up, because that switch is out of the admin's hands. When a user asked in 2025 how to force intros on for everybody, Luke from the Emby team replied that "it can't be forced enabled on the server", that the apps enable it by default and that it would only be off if the user disabled it. It still means you can have a correctly configured server and one TV in the house that never shows the intro, and nothing in the dashboard will tell you which TV.

One line of grey text

I wanted to know how Emby chooses when the folder holds more than one file. The text of the help page does not say, and the answer turned out to be in a screenshot. Under the Custom intros path field, in small grey helper text, it reads: "A folder containing video files. A video will be randomly selected and played after trailers." I searched the page's own text for "random" and for "after trailers" to be sure, and neither appears anywhere outside that image. Those two facts decide how you prepare your files, and you only get them by squinting at a picture of a text box.

Emby plays one custom intro per playback and you do not get to pick which. If you want a studio ident followed by a "phones off" card in a fixed order, the only way I know is to join them into a single video before it goes in the folder. That is also the only workaround anyone offers in a forum request to play more than one intro, which was opened in June 2018. Staff replied that October that they were monitoring it for feedback. I cannot find any sign the behaviour has changed since.

The "after trailers" half I like. It puts the intro right up against the film, which is where a studio-style ident belongs.

I also think the random pick suits a house library better than it first sounds. Media server owners rarely order a single intro from me, they order a set, and a folder that deals one out each night is a good home for a set, since nobody has to maintain a list.

Codec intros, and what the tag trick might do

There is a second field called Codec intros path. A file in that folder plays before the film when its name, minus the extension, matches the film's video codec, audio codec, audio profile or a tag. Emby's examples are h264.mp4, ac3.mkv and dts-hd ma.avi, plus a film tagged "waffle" picking up waffle.mpg. You can read a film's codec names on its detail screen in the web app.

The obvious use is a Dolby or DTS trailer in front of the films that carry that audio. The tag match interests me more, because it looks like the nearest thing Emby has to giving particular films a particular intro. Going by the waffle example, a tag on your prestige dramas and a matching filename should put a custom HBO style intro in front of those and nothing else. I have not tested that on a server, so treat it as my reading of Emby's own example.

Leave this field empty until a plain custom intro plays.

Where Plex and Jellyfin differ

Plex takes file paths where Emby takes a folder. In Settings, Server, Extras you list the full path to each pre-roll, and Plex's Extras page says paths separated by commas all play in order while paths separated by a semicolon mean one is chosen at random. So Plex gives you both a fixed sequence and a random pick. Emby gives you the random pick only. Do not paste Plex's separator syntax into Emby's field, it wants one folder.

Jellyfin has no built-in setting at all and does it with a plugin, which I covered in my Jellyfin preroll setup guide. Its official plugin list describes Local Intros in a single line.

Which means I should walk back my opening a little. On a strict word count Jellyfin's documentation is thinner than Emby's. But Jellyfin tells you up front that you are installing a plugin and need to go and read about it. Emby's page looks complete, and you can follow every word of it and still miss that Premiere covers the whole feature, that the pick is random and that each app has its own switch. I find that harder to forgive than a page that is obviously short.

The clip itself

Since Emby states no file requirements, all I can tell you is what I deliver: MP4 or MOV, in HD or 4K, with no watermark. If you want something from my intro catalogue in front of your films, test one file on your actual TV before you order six.

Check the text limit before you get attached to the wording. The HBO style takes a title of up to eight characters and an optional subtitle of up to sixteen, so a long server name has to be cut down first. Sending too much text is the most common mistake I see on any order.

If nothing plays

Go back through Premiere, the Movies tick, the library scan and the app switch on that exact device, in that order.

If intros used to work and then stopped, look at what you installed recently. In a May 2022 thread the cause turned out to be a third-party plugin, and the intros came back once it was uninstalled.

Episodes I am less sure about. In a 2021 thread, intros played before movies but not before episodes on a Fire TV, while the same server played them fine in the web app, and the thread closed without a fix from staff. That may well have changed since. If you tick Episodes, test an episode on the television itself before you assume it works.