No plugin API exists for adding a button to Emby's player or item
detail page (confirmed by an Emby developer on their own forum, and
by research since). The only way to reach that would be patching
Emby's shipped web client files directly - outside the plugin,
breaks on every image update, needs manual reapplication. Not worth
the ongoing cost, per discussion.
New direction: a standalone app with its own player. Reads Emby's
catalog/streams directly from the browser (no plugin, no menu
integration fights); a small Node backend only coordinates party
membership and relays playback state over WebSocket - it never
touches a media byte. Auth is Emby-only, as chosen: the browser signs
in against Emby directly and this backend validates whatever token it
gets handed by asking Emby itself (GET /Users/{userId}), never seeing
a password.
Control model changed too: now that we own the player, host controls
playback and everyone else follows (event-driven play/pause/seek +
a 3s heartbeat, drift-corrected on the follower side) - the old
plugin's "everyone keeps their own controls, shared reference
position" was specifically a concession to nudging pre-existing Emby
app sessions we didn't control, which no longer applies.
- server/: Express + ws backend (party lifecycle, WebSocket protocol,
Emby token validation)
- client/: plain-JS/ES-modules frontend (login, search, item detail,
party player) - no build step
- Smoke-tested locally end to end against a stubbed Emby URL: server
starts, routing/auth-gating works, error handling degrades
gracefully (network failure, invalid token) - see the session
transcript for the actual browser test run
- docs/architecture.md rewritten around the new design, including why
the plugin was abandoned and a fresh "assumptions to verify" list
(CORS between this app's origin and Emby's is the biggest unknown)
- src/WatchParty/ (the Emby plugin) kept as-is for reference, no
longer the active direction
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Design: coordinate parties on top of Emby's existing session
remote-control commands (SendPlaystateCommand) rather than building a
new player. Each member keeps their own Emby app/controls; the server
periodically corrects drift and mirrors pause/unpause against one
reference member's reported position.
- src/WatchParty: plugin skeleton (BasePlugin, IServerEntryPoint,
IService/[Route] API, in-memory party store, drift-correction loop)
- web/control-panel: plain HTML/JS/CSS companion page to create/join
parties and resync, served by the plugin itself
- docs/architecture.md: full design, sources consulted, and an
explicit list of SDK details that still need verifying against a
real build (no .NET SDK / Emby SDK assemblies available in this
environment to compile against)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
