[Plugin] EmbyCast – A Multi-Message Toolkit for Your Dashboard

[SoliFlix 0]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to introduce a plugin I've been working on: EmbyCast. It lets you send announcements, scheduled messages, countdown/restart warnings and "what's new" notifications to your Emby users — all directly from the server dashboard.

This is an introduction/beta-test thread — the .dll is attached below so you can install it manually and try it out. I'd really appreciate any testing, feedback, and bug reports before this goes any further.

This is also my first attempt at building an Emby plugin (thx claude), and my first post on this forum — so please bear with me if things aren't perfect yet, any feedback is very welcome.

The dashboard has a built-in EN/DE language switch, and every feature works with Active users, All users, or a manually selected list.

Below is a quick tour of what it can do.

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Instant Message

Send a message right now to whoever you choose — active users, everyone, or specific people picked from a live, refreshable user list. You can set an auto-dismiss time in seconds, or leave it at 0 so the message stays on screen until the user closes it themselves.

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Scheduled Message

Queue up a message to go out automatically at a future date and time — handy for announcing maintenance windows or events ahead of time. All upcoming scheduled messages are listed below the form, each with a one-click Cancel option in case plans change.

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Timer & Server Countdown

Built for restart warnings: set a total countdown, pick reminder marks (60/30/15/5/1 min, or your own custom list), and EmbyCast automatically fires off a reminder at each mark, right down to "restarting now." There's a live preview of every message before you start the timer, an optional server action once the countdown ends, and — importantly — the session list is re-checked before every reminder, so anyone who logs in mid-countdown still gets the remaining warnings.

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Media News (manual & automatic)

Announce recently added movies and episodes. Pick which libraries to include, choose whether to include newly added series and/or new episodes, and customize the episode title format with placeholders like {Series name (year)}, {SxxExx} and {Episode title}. You can trigger it manually with Send Media News Now, preview it first, or turn on automatic sending on a chosen weekday and time (e.g. every Friday at 20:00) with a configurable look-back window in days.

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Here's what the resulting message looks like on the user's end — grouped into New Movies, New TV Shows and New Episodes:

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Welcome Message

A message that's automatically sent the very first time a new user logs in — a nice way to greet new members of your server with any info they should know. It can be toggled on/off and edited at any time; existing users get it once when you first enable it, after that only newly created accounts receive it.

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Status & History

Every message the plugin has sent is logged here, complete with per-user delivery status: green means delivered, yellow means pending (the user was offline and will get it at their next login). You can dismiss individual entries or discard the whole history at once, and refresh the list on demand.

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Plugin Updates

EmbyCast checks GitHub for newer releases and lets you install updates with a single click, right from its own settings page — no need to manually download and copy files.

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Installation

1. Download the .dll attached to this thread.
2. Copy it into your Emby Server's plugin folder (e.g. Emby-Server\plugins on Windows, or the equivalent plugins folder on your platform).
3. Restart your Emby Server.
4. EmbyCast will then show up under Advanced → EmbyCast in the dashboard.

Download

EmbyCast.Plugin.dll

GitHub repo: https://github.com/solistvbox-rgb/embycast

Known Issues

• Auto-dismiss time doesn't reliably work. While the field is there and messages can be configured with a dismiss time, in practice it doesn't behave as expected across clients yet. Setting it to 0 (stays until manually dismissed) is currently the safest option.

Credits

This plugin was built with the help of claude.ai. It uses the same SDK patterns as EmbyNotify and EmbyWeeklyDigest, two plugins created by SFTech13, which served as an inspiration and the architectural template for this project — many thanks for that groundwork!

Thanks for checking it out!

[SoliFlix 0]

Update – v1.1.1

New: Tile-based dashboard

• The dashboard is now a grid of tiles instead of one long scrolling page.
• Drag & drop the tiles into whatever order you prefer.
• Live badges show open scheduled messages and an active countdown.
• An "Open items" list below the tiles shows everything still pending (upcoming scheduled messages, active countdown).

Spoiler

 

New: Web-browser-only delivery for Media News

Media News lists can get long — there's now an option to only deliver them to web-browser sessions, where there's room to actually show everything.

New: Scheduled Cleanup

Automatically expires old undelivered messages and old history entries after a configurable number of days, so the plugin's storage doesn't grow forever. 

Get the latest version

Current version: v1.1.1
GitHub: https://github.com/solistvbox-rgb/embycast
Releases: https://github.com/solistvbox-rgb/embycast/releases

EmbyCast.Plugin.dll

Still needs more testing

Work in progress—tested on limited Emby clients. Please report any delivery or timing issues on your setup!