ThemeFetcher - Farshad | Movie & TV Theme Music

[farshadyaghi 1]

Hi everyone,

I’m sharing ThemeFetcher - Farshad, an Emby Server plugin that fetches missing theme music for movies and TV series.

The DLL is attached to this post. This is an initial community release, and feedback is welcome.

What it does

• Saves the finished audio as theme.mp3 in the movie or series folder.

• Preserves existing themes, including other supported audio formats and files in theme-music.

• Provides configurable duration, batch limits, retry intervals and provider options.

• Runs through Emby’s Scheduled Tasks, with progress and results in the server log.

Theme sources

• ThemerrDB: TMDB IDs, with an IMDb fallback for movies.

• Plex TV themes: TV series with TVDB IDs.

• TelevisionTunes: optional title search for TV series.

• Internet Archive: optional search for matching theme tracks.

• Local audio extraction: optional last fallback that extracts an audio excerpt from the media file. This may contain dialogue rather than the actual theme.

ThemerrDB and Plex are enabled by default. The other options are disabled by default.

Required tools

Install these on the machine running Emby Server. They are not included in the attached DLL.

• FFmpeg, with the libmp3lame encoder — required to convert audio to MP3.
  https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

• yt-dlp — required for ThemerrDB’s YouTube downloads. Use a current official standalone executable.
  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases

• Deno — used by yt-dlp for YouTube’s JavaScript challenges.
  https://docs.deno.com/runtime/getting_started/installation/

Official standalone yt-dlp executables include the EJS scripts. Other installation methods may require additional setup:
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS

Installation

• Stop Emby Server completely.

• Copy the attached MediaBrowser.Plugins.ThemeFetcher.dll directly into Emby’s actual plugins directory. Find the server’s program data path in its startup log.

• If updating, replace the previous DLL. Keep only one installed copy.

• Start Emby Server.

• Open Dashboard → Plugins → Installed Plugins → ThemeFetcher - Farshad → Settings.

This is a manual installation; it will appear under Installed Plugins rather than the plugin catalog.

Configure and run

Replace the prefilled executable paths with the actual paths on your server. Example Windows paths:

yt-dlp: C:\Tools\yt-dlp.exe
Deno:   C:\Tools\deno.exe
FFmpeg: C:\Tools\ffmpeg.exe

The account running Emby must be able to execute these tools and write to your media folders. Docker users need tools and paths accessible inside the container.

Select your providers and click Save. Then open:

Dashboard → Scheduled Tasks → ThemeFetcher - Farshad → Fetch movie and series themes

Start with a small batch, such as 20 attempts, and inspect the results before processing your entire library. The default limit is 100; setting the limit to 0 allows unlimited attempts.

After themes are saved, run an Emby library scan. Theme playback also depends on your client and its playback settings.

Defaults and limitations

The default maximum theme length is 45 seconds. Missing themes normally have a 7-day retry interval, while failed attempts have a 1-hour retry interval. No automatic schedule is installed; you can add a trigger in Scheduled Tasks.

Movies should have a separate folder for each title. Shared folders containing different movies are skipped.

Not every title has an available theme. Deleted YouTube videos, access restrictions and limited provider coverage can prevent downloads. Internet Archive matches should be previewed, especially for titles with remakes or similar names.

Retry and run-summary files are stored centrally in Emby’s data directory, outside the media folders.

Testing and feedback

Built against Emby SDK 4.8.11, targeting .NET Standard 2.0. Earlier builds successfully downloaded and saved themes on my Windows server. Version 1.0.4 passes local checks, but compatibility across all Emby versions and platforms has not been verified.

The current build includes a fix so unavailable individual YouTube videos do not disable ThemerrDB downloads for other titles.

If you encounter an issue, please include your Emby Server version, operating system, enabled providers and relevant [ThemeFetcher] log lines. Remove access tokens and other private information before sharing logs.

Thanks for trying it!

Farshad

MediaBrowser.Plugins.ThemeFetcher.dll

Edited 37 minutes ago by farshadyaghi
just remove some part