Plugin: Home Screen Companion

[soderlund 167]

New patch release -  Version 4.1.4.0
Download .dll and full release notes: https://github.com/soderlund91/HomeScreenCompanion/releases/tag/v4.1.4.0

Bugfix release

IMPORTANT! 
Minimum required Emby server v4.10.0.17

Release notes

 

Fixes:

• Tagging collection: Fix issue where tagging a collection name containing a comma isn't working (Eg. "1,001 Movies to watch")
• Playlist: Fixed a bug where new items where added to the end of the list, now it correspond with the order of the source.
• Top-list: Fixed an bug with "resume playing" when switching between different versions of the movie (added ffprobe to the .strm files on creation to get playtime etc.)

HomeScreenCompanion.dll

[crusher11 1240]

Is that the same as the version I have installed? 

[soderlund 167]

9 hours ago, crusher11 said:

Is that the same as the version I have installed? 

No, it’s almost the same as the one you helped me test. The top list and playlist fix should be new for you if I remember correctly.

(Although it has the same version number as the test you did, it’s not the same.)

[swenth 42]

On 09/04/2026 at 15:09, soderlund said:

New minor release -  Version 3.3.2.0
Download .dll and full release notes: https://github.com/soderlund91/HomeScreenCompanion/releases/tag/v3.3.2.0

This updates contain some fixes and some requested features. 
Biggest one is that we are now able to build a home section row of selected collections as image below:

 

IMPORTANT! 
Minimum required Emby server v4.10.0.8

Note
Make sure to back up your settings before updating, just in case. 

Note
Included a .NET V6 release, this is for MacOS or legacy support. This version is NOT tested.

Release notes

Improvements/updates

• Added ability to only show selected collections as a Home screen section. This way you can choose one or multiple collections to show on the home screen (no need to display all of them). See below how to set this up
• Cleanup menu
  • Made the tags and collections clickable links to its own view (open in new tab)
  • Added a filter for Tags
  • Added a small popup/hover over the name that simply explains where the tag originated

Fixes

• Fixed an issue in the cleanup where tags for some media types didn't populate the list. (Extras is now included with an "include extras" option.)
• Fixed an issue where blacklist didn't get applied when running a single group sync

UI

• Remade the "Update available" to be dismissible. If dismissed a smaller discreet text will still be visible.

_____________________________________________

 

Below is how to set up a home screen section with selected collections:

Source = local collection / *Select what collections to include* 
Tag = *random tag name* (the selections on what level to tag will be ignored by the plugin) 
Collection tab: leave blank 
Blasklist tab: will probably not work 
**Important!** Home screen section tab: set media type to "Collections", you can play around with all other options

 

Special thanks to @Aleasfor helping out with testing! 

HomeScreenCompanion.dll 738 kB · 7 downloads HomeScreenCompanion_NET6_MacOS.dll 738.5 kB · 0 downloads

Would it be possible in a future to select directly studios  instead of making collections that look like the studios? maybe already possible? thanks

[seanbuff 1396]

Hi @soderlundI've encountered an issue where the HSC plugin doesn't seem to use Source URLs other than the first one.

Example, in my test library I have all 4 Jaws movies.


So I create a new tag called 'Shark Movies' and I want to use 2 MDBList Source URLs which contain Jaws movies.

URL 1: https://mdblist.com/lists/j22kodi/shark-movies (Contains only Jaws 4)
URL 2: https://mdblist.com/lists/cwills75/sharks (Contains Jaws 1, 3 and 4)



Expectation:
When adding both URLs, I expect that it will find 3 x Jaws movies and add them to the Tag 'Shark Movies'

Actual Result:
When using the above URLs in that order, the resulting Tag only contains 1 x Jaws movie (Jaws 4)

It seems the plugin only reads the first URL and does not use any subsequent Source URLs to add the other movies.

This can further be seen in the logs for the query (only URL 1 is requested):

Quote

2026-07-26 13:49:08.103 Info HomeScreenCompanionService-0HNNAP2NNJNR4:00000058: http/1.1 POST http://10.1.1.78:8096/emby/HomeScreenCompanion/RunEntry. Source Ip: host1, UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/149.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
2026-07-26 13:49:08.155 Info HomeScreenCompanion: ══════════════════════════════════════════════════
2026-07-26 13:49:08.156 Info HomeScreenCompanion: Home Screen Companion v4.1.4.0  ·  2026-07-26 13:49  (single-entry run)
2026-07-26 13:49:08.156 Info HomeScreenCompanion:   Library: 116 movies, 6 series
2026-07-26 13:49:08.156 Info HomeScreenCompanion: ══════════════════════════════════════════════════
2026-07-26 13:49:08.161 Info HttpClient: GET https://api.mdblist.com/lists/j22kodi/shark-movies/items?apikey=x_secret4_x&limit=1000&offset=0
2026-07-26 13:49:08.528 Info HttpClient: Http response 200 from https://api.mdblist.com/lists/j22kodi/shark-movies/items?apikey=x_secret4_x&limit=1000&offset=0 after 365ms
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion: 
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion: [1/1] Shark Movies [Shark Movies]  (External)
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion:   List: 114 objects · 1 matched in library
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion:   Tag: +0 added, -0 removed
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion: 
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion: ══════════════════════════════════════════════════
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion: Summary
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion:   Tags:          +0 added,  -0 removed
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion:   Done in 0s  ·  Success
2026-07-26 13:49:08.834 Info HomeScreenCompanion: ══════════════════════════════════════════════════
2026-07-26 13:49:08.835 Info HomeScreenCompanionService-0HNNAP2NNJNR4:00000058: http/1.1 Response 200 to host1. Time: 732ms. POST http://10.1.1.78:8096/emby/HomeScreenCompanion/RunEntry. 

Full Emby Server log:HSC_embyserver.txt

Thanks!

[Jdiesel 1471]

I've been using a smart playlist I call "Popular this week" that is filtering by 'Last played' by 'Any user's '<=' '7'

 

It works pretty good for the most part but it registered manually marking an item as played as being watched. So if a user goes through their library and marks a bunch of stuff as watched it gets picked up by the smart playlist.

 

I was trying to thing of ways to avoid these false plays and realized there isn't really a good way to track playback duration natively in Emby. There is the playback reporting plugin that tracks that information and it's db can be interacted with via an API.

 

To retrieve item playback activity from the Playback Reporting plugin, send a POST request to the plugin's reporting query endpoint.

The plugin uses an underlying SQLite database table named PlaybackActivity. You can pass a standard SQLite statement in the CustomQuery payload.

 

Any example using my "Popular this week" format would look like:

HTTP Request:

POST /emby/Plugins/PlaybackReporting/Report/Query?api_key={ApiKey}
Content-Type: application/json

Payload:

{
  "CustomQuery": "SELECT DISTINCT ItemId FROM PlaybackActivity WHERE DateCreated >= datetime('now', '-7 days')"
}

Response: (example)

{
  "Columns": ["ItemId"],
  "Results": [
    ["123456"],
    ["789012"],
    ["345678"]
  ]
}

Once can also create a custom query within the Playback Reporting Plugin and send a HTTP request to run the saved query. For example:

POST /emby/Plugins/PlaybackReporting/Report/Query?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE HTTP/1.1
Host: http://localhost:8096
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "ReportName": "popular this week"
}

 

@soderlund I know it is a pretty niche case but would it be possible to implement something like this? I could see there being other use cases for polling the Playback Reporting Plugin too.

Edited Tuesday at 07:17 PM by Jdiesel

[soderlund 167]

First off, sorry for late answers. There's a lot of things going on i life right now so I have put this project on hold for a while. I will still prioritize trying to fix critical bugs!

 

On 7/11/2026 at 4:15 AM, swenth said:

Would it be possible in a future to select directly studios  instead of making collections that look like the studios? maybe already possible? thanks

At the moment no, its not possible. You have to first set up a collection and then use the options to display selected collections. 
This might be something for the future to implement an "automatic studio" row where the user can type in what studios to show. It still has to create the collection i believe, so to manually set it up one time for each studio might be worth the hassle. 

I wont promise anything but I will keep it in mind   

 

On 7/26/2026 at 6:12 AM, seanbuff said:

Hi @soderlundI've encountered an issue where the HSC plugin doesn't seem to use Source URLs other than the first one.

Example, in my test library I have all 4 Jaws movies.


So I create a new tag called 'Shark Movies' and I want to use 2 MDBList Source URLs which contain Jaws movies.

URL 1: https://mdblist.com/lists/j22kodi/shark-movies (Contains only Jaws 4)
URL 2: https://mdblist.com/lists/cwills75/sharks (Contains Jaws 1, 3 and 4)



Expectation:
When adding both URLs, I expect that it will find 3 x Jaws movies and add them to the Tag 'Shark Movies'

Actual Result:
When using the above URLs in that order, the resulting Tag only contains 1 x Jaws movie (Jaws 4)

It seems the plugin only reads the first URL and does not use any subsequent Source URLs to add the other movies.

This can further be seen in the logs for the query (only URL 1 is requested):

Full Emby Server log:HSC_embyserver.txt

Thanks!

Thanks for the report! 

I will look into this as soon as a get the time. I'm currently in the process of moving to a house so i already have my hands full.. But this is a major thing that i will try to fix asap! 
I know I have tested this when I built the function, must have got broken somewhere along the way. 

As a workaround for now (if using tags), you could set up two different entries but use the same tag-name. Emby wont know the difference and see them as the same. 
If also using the home screen section function , only set up for one of them and it should still show all of them. 

 

On 7/28/2026 at 9:11 PM, Jdiesel said:

I've been using a smart playlist I call "Popular this week" that is filtering by 'Last played' by 'Any user's '<=' '7'

 

It works pretty good for the most part but it registered manually marking an item as played as being watched. So if a user goes through their library and marks a bunch of stuff as watched it gets picked up by the smart playlist.

 

I was trying to thing of ways to avoid these false plays and realized there isn't really a good way to track playback duration natively in Emby. There is the playback reporting plugin that tracks that information and it's db can be interacted with via an API.

 

To retrieve item playback activity from the Playback Reporting plugin, send a POST request to the plugin's reporting query endpoint.

The plugin uses an underlying SQLite database table named PlaybackActivity. You can pass a standard SQLite statement in the CustomQuery payload.

 

Any example using my "Popular this week" format would look like:

HTTP Request:

POST /emby/Plugins/PlaybackReporting/Report/Query?api_key={ApiKey}
Content-Type: application/json

Payload:

{
  "CustomQuery": "SELECT DISTINCT ItemId FROM PlaybackActivity WHERE DateCreated >= datetime('now', '-7 days')"
}

Response: (example)

{
  "Columns": ["ItemId"],
  "Results": [
    ["123456"],
    ["789012"],
    ["345678"]
  ]
}

Once can also create a custom query within the Playback Reporting Plugin and send a HTTP request to run the saved query. For example:

POST /emby/Plugins/PlaybackReporting/Report/Query?api_key=YOUR_API_KEY_HERE HTTP/1.1
Host: http://localhost:8096
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "ReportName": "popular this week"
}

 

@soderlund I know it is a pretty niche case but would it be possible to implement something like this? I could see there being other use cases for polling the Playback Reporting Plugin too.

Yeah I see the issue and I agree with you. Those movies should not be included in the last played. 
Really appreciate your way to solve this, I'll look into this when I have more time to dig into this. Will take some time though since I have a lot going on i life right now. 
It's going on the to-do list!