Emby Theater / Enable Video Player

[JanS48 2]

Greetings I've been using Emby for well over a year now and have experienced 'Drop OFF' so much so that the wife refuses to use Emby for any serious TV viewing.
My AI pal says that this is a common occurrence reported by many.  The symptom: some channels like CNN play and then all of a sudden drop - Emby just returns to the main screen with no warning and nothing in the logs. Personally I think this is an ffmpeg failure - Emby seems reluctant to re-try playing for a blip or major vid change - it just exits where other players like VLC will keep playing.  To that end I found Emby Theater - portable - this allows for a third party video player but unfortunately Emby does not seem to pass the necessary information for VLC to launch. 
If Emby theater offers an external player option, it should reliably pass the stream URL to that player. 
VLC is the most common external player, yet Emby Theater does not pass the correct arguments to it, 
especially in portable mode. 
I'm a retired software engineer and don't mind fixing things my proposed solution :

Emby Shim:
We need to know:

Where system.xml lives

Where externalplayers.json lives

Whether portable mode overrides the standard %APPDATA% path

Whether portable mode uses a relative config folder

Whether portable mode ignores external player settings unless a specific flag is set

Once we know the correct path, we can: code a shim ( I will most likely use a python script )  that will launch VLC for the chosen stream.
I can guarantee it will not drop-out the way Emby does, and VLC 'will' retry automagically for minor stream blips.
 

Other Info:
This happens on Emby Windows and also Emby Linux - Linux seems a tad more stable but not much - it still happens.

You say lets re-create ok - I have a way to do that:  I have also made my HDHR channels play in .m3u format example:
#EXTINF:-1 tvg-id="4.1" tvg-name="WBZ 4.1 CBS" group-title="OTA,Local",WBZ 4.1 CBS
http://192.168.1.255:5004/auto/v4.1
(I bet you didn't know that HDHR comes with a built in streaming server... that works perfectly - uses port 5004)

Anyway if I point Emby to a stream with a very week channel with lots of pixilation in normal tuning when tuning via Emby it will drop at the 1st failure and return to the menu
VLC will keep playing and just wait for the stream to clear.  I need this feature in Emby to avoid Drop-Off - this will be a huge fix for my IPTV playing in Emby.
Once resolved I'll gladly share the 'shim' with the community.
-or- perhaps I'm the one missing something if Emby has a way to let Emby Theater play VLC via the external player.
Does anyone see any issues with creating the Shim ?
Thanks
Jan