[Support] emby-watchparty - Watch party for Emby (synchronized playback)

Support thread for emby-watchparty

Synchronized watch parties for Emby media servers — watch videos together with friends in real time, no guest Emby accounts needed.

What is emby-watchparty?

A self-hosted web app that sits in front of your Emby server and proxies HLS video streams to a group of viewers while keeping them synchronized. One person picks a video, everyone else joins with a 5-character party code in their browser, and play/pause/seek events propagate to every viewer in real time.

Key features

• Secure proxy architecture: your Emby server stays on your internal network — only the watch party app needs to be reachable by guests

• Real-time sync: play, pause, and seek events broadcast to every viewer instantly via WebSocket

• No guest accounts: party members don't need Emby logins — they just need the party code and a browser

• Skip Intro overlay: uses Emby's chapter/intro data to show a skip button during intro segments

• Autoplay / binge mode: auto-queues the next episode when the current one ends, with a countdown and cancel option

• Quality presets: 360p up to 1080p-high (10 Mbps)

• Native HLS subtitles: text subtitles served via the HLS manifest, image subtitles (PGS/VobSub) burned in automatically

• Live chat: built-in chat alongside the video

• Static session mode: optional single-party-always-open mode for small groups
  

Why this exists

Emby has a no built-in SyncPlay feature. Emby-Watchparty is for the case where you want to watch a movie with friends who don't have accounts on your server, they just open a URL and join. One Emby account (yours) proxies everything.

Installation on Unraid

Install from Community Applications. The template has all the common config exposed:

Required:

• Emby Server URL — e.g. http://192.168.1.100:8096

• Emby API Key — generate in Emby Dashboard > Advanced > API Keys

• Emby Username and Password — a dedicated Emby user for the app is recommended

Optional (advanced view):

• App Prefix (for reverse proxy deployments)

• Static Session Enabled / Static Session ID

• Log level, log file, log rotation

• HLS token validation, rate limiting, max users per party

Note: both the API key and the username/password are required. The API key is used for library browsing and admin calls, and the username/password obtain the session token Emby requires to serve HLS streams.

Hardware requirements

The watch party app itself is lightweight (Python + Flask + SocketIO) — what matters is your Emby server's transcoding hardware, since every user in the party triggers HLS transcoding.

emby-watchparty forces Emby to re-encode every stream (not stream-copy) because HLS.js needs uniform segment durations to seek reliably. This means hardware encoding (QSV, NVENC, VAAPI) makes a big difference:

• Intel QuickSync (UHD 630 or newer iGPU): 4-6+ concurrent 1080p streams at ~10 W power draw

• NVIDIA NVENC (GTX 1660+): 3+ streams stock, 8-12+ with the community NVENC patch

• Software x264 (no hardware accel): 2-6 users depending on CPU — a 9900K handled 6 concurrent pathological 70 Mbit/s streams in testing, stable at 70C

Full capacity numbers and deployment guides are in the project wiki.

Requirements

• An Emby server reachable from this container (local network is fine, preferred actually)

• Emby Premiere for hardware-accelerated transcoding (Emby's own licensing requirement, not ours)

• The app port (default 5000) reachable by your guests — use Tailscale, ZeroTier, or a VPN if you can't port-forward
  

Links

• Project: https://github.com/Oratorian/emby-watchparty

• Container image: ghcr.io/oratorian/emby-watchparty:latest

• Unraid template: https://github.com/Oratorian/unraid-templates/blob/main/emby-watchparty/emby-watchparty.xml

• Wiki (deployment guides, hardware planning, troubleshooting): https://github.com/Oratorian/emby-watchparty/wiki

• Technical deep-dive on Emby's HLS quirks: Emby quirks we learned the hard way

• Bug reports: https://github.com/Oratorian/emby-watchparty/issues

• Discord (for community support): https://discord.gg/RWUpxq9xsA
  

Support development

If the app has been useful, a small tip helps fund hardware and late-night reverse-engineering sessions:

ko-fi.com/jedziah

Current version

v1.6.4

A 2.0 rewrite is in progress, moving to FastAPI + Vue 3 with per-user transcodes, but is not yet stable or released.

Feedback welcome

If you run into issues on Unraid specifically — template config, GPU passthrough quirks, networking — please post here. Wiki edits are open too (the wiki has an Unraid deployment page that I'd love to keep current with real user experience).

Thanks for checking it out!