Music visualization on screen

[EZEd 55]

I never said how I was handling this on this thread but here is my preferred method around Emby's non-native support for visualizations on music playback...
I never got this to work on Samsung app, or Roku app because from what I understand, they can not do what's called concurrent sessions. For this reason and this reason alone, I converted all of my Emby clients to Android or Android TV clients.

Android TV allows multiple apps to run simultaneously so you can start up Emby app and get your music playing then load "home" out to the main menu and get ProjectM running in another session and have both Emby and ProjectM running at the same time.

The downside is that you don't get any song information from music playing in Emby into ProjectM so even if you set ProjectM to always show song information, nothing happens except the nice pretty light-show on the screen.  But at least you get music and a pretty picture.  Same goes for external slideshows.  Emby does have internal slideshow picture presentation but with Android devices you can do the same thing with an external slideshow app and the presentation can be made nicer.  Again you don't get song title/artist information but they do play simultaneous.

I've asked for both native visualization and background image slide-show for music artist in Emby ever since converting over from Windows Media Center and it hasn't shown up correctly yet (definitely greater than 5 or 6 years).  They did have background artist slideshow working right up to version 2.0.33g of Android TV app but then starting with 2.0.48g they screwed it up and it hasn't been right since.  Now they have this big huge display of the album cover art taking up the whole screen and totally trashing ones full-screen view of background/backdrop images in slideshow.

I've asked several times for a toggle switch so that a user can go between the view that they currently get with the full size album art taking up the screen and one where it is reduced in size and moved to the corner of the screen so the backdrop can have most of the screen area, but the pleas have been ignored (for 4 or 5 years now), so it doesn't look like there will be any change in behavior.

It looks like what we have is what we're gonna get.  So I'm moving on and making do with whatever else I can get to work.

Anyway, you can try my remedy above and see if it partially fits the bill.  Not perfect but better than nothing.  Also again the caveat is, I only know it to work for sure on Android and Android TV devices.  Last known, does not work with Samsung or Roku (the other two that I had tried).  I've never had Apple TV devices so don't know the behavior.  I would assume FireTV works just like Android/Google TV but can't verify that either.

Good luck and happy Embying

Edited August 23, 2024 by EZEd