Show your Plex/Emby/Jellyfin "now playing" card on a cheap ESP32 touch panel (ESPHome + a tiny screenshot sidecar)

Share your Projects!
1

TL;DR

There’s a great little project called Marquee (by Jamisonfitz) that turns a Google Nest Hub into a gorgeous “now playing” display for Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin — poster, title, plot, ratings, progress bar, clock, the works.

For those who don’t own a Nest Hub, or are moving away from them, I wanted to expand the project to support ESP32 displays. I bought the first, most popular disoplay on Amazon compatible with ESPhome, a 7" Elecrow CrowPanel (an ESP32-S3 touch screen). So I taught it to show the exact same card, driven by ESPHome. No Nest Hub, no soldering, no custom firmware toolchain — just an ESPHome YAML you flash from the dashboard.

I want to share it so others can build one too. Spark some ideas for your own projects.

20260803161113preview
20260803161113preview1920×1440 670 KB

The idea in one picture

Plex / Emby / Jellyfin
        │
        ▼
   Marquee  ───►  renders a beautiful now-playing web card
        │
        ▼
  marquee-shot   ───►  screenshots that card to a plain image
 (tiny sidecar)
        │  http://your-server:8088/card.jpg
        ▼
   ESP32 panel   ───►  downloads the image, shows it full-screen
   (ESPHome)

The ESP32 is deliberately dumb: it just downloads a JPEG and paints it on the screen. All the pretty layout work happens on your server, where it’s easy. That’s the trick that keeps the ESP side simple and reliable.

Two ways to do it (pick one)

1. Screenshot sidecar — recommended, pixel-perfect

A tiny extra container called marquee-shot opens Marquee’s real card page in headless Chromium, screenshots it, and serves it as /card.jpg. The panel just shows that image. Because it’s a photo of the actual card, it looks identical to what a Nest Hub would show — and you automatically get any future design changes for free.

The sidecar is a decoupled add-on: it only reads Marquee over HTTP and never changes it. That means it works against any Marquee — including the plain upstream image — so you don’t have to run a forked app.

2. On-device render — no sidecar

The ESP32 rebuilds a simpler version of the card itself from Marquee’s JSON + artwork. Lighter (no Chromium container), but it’s a re-creation, not a pixel copy. There are two ready-made examples in the repo (crowpanel-lambda.yaml = simple poster+title; crowpanel-lvgl.yaml = cinematic dimmed backdrop).

Most people will want option 1.

What you need

  • An Elecrow CrowPanel “Basic” HMI 7.0" (ESP32-S3-WROOM-1-N4R8, 800×480 RGB IPS, GT911 touch). Other ESP panels work too — you just adjust the display pins/timings for your board.
  • Marquee running somewhere on your LAN (Docker; also on Unraid Community Apps). Point it at your Plex/Emby/Jellyfin.
  • The marquee-shot sidecar container (published image: ghcr.io/trusselo/marquee-shot).
  • ESPHome (the dashboard/add-on you already use for your other sensors).

Quick start

1. Run the sidecar (host networking, points at your Marquee):

docker run -d --name marquee-shot --network host --restart unless-stopped \
  -e MARQUEE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8084 \
  -e PANEL_WIDTH=800 -e PANEL_HEIGHT=480 -e SERVE_PORT=8088 \
  ghcr.io/trusselo/marquee-shot:latest

Open http://your-server:8088/card.jpg in a browser — you should see the current card. (On Unraid there’s a one-click Community Applications template in the repo.)

2. Flash the panel. In ESPHome, create a device, paste esphome/marquee-crowpanel-shot.yaml from the repo, set the sidecar’s IP at the top, and Install over USB the first time. After that, updates are OTA.

3. Play something. Within a few seconds the card appears and updates on play/pause/seek.

Full step-by-step: esphome/README.md and sidecar/README.md.

Nice touches it already does

  • Tap the screen to wake it and brighten for 10s.
  • Brightens on a new title/episode so you notice the change from across the room.
  • Full brightness when paused (you’re probably looking at it), dimmed during playback (cinema mode), backlight fully off when nothing’s playing so it’s dark at night.
  • Only re-downloads the image when something actually changed (a tiny /state.json version counter), so it’s easy on the network.

The stuff I learned the hard way (so you don’t have to)

This is the part I’d have loved to read before I started. These are all specific to getting an RGB ESP32-S3 panel stable in ESPHome:

  • Put the console on UART0 (logger: hardware_uart: UART0). ESPHome 2026.7 defaults the log console to USB-Serial-JTAG — but on this board those pins (GPIO19/20) are the touch i2c bus. Leaving the default makes touch init kill your logs and destabilize the app. This one cost me a whole evening of “why are there no logs?”.
  • PSRAM is mandatory (psram: mode: octal, N4R8 = 8 MB). The 800×480 framebuffer + JPEG decode buffers do not fit in internal RAM. Miss the CONFIG_SPIRAM_* flags and a fresh USB flash can hang at entry.
  • If you use LVGL, set buffer_size: 5%. The 25% default eats the internal DMA RAM that Wi-Fi needs on an RGB panel, and then Wi-Fi silently won’t associate. This looked like a Wi-Fi bug for ages; it was really an out-of-RAM problem. (The screenshot method sidesteps LVGL entirely — another reason I prefer it.)
  • Pin the ESP-IDF version if Wi-Fi keeps dropping with “Association Expired” — a recent IDF had a Wi-Fi regression; pinning a known-good version: fixed it.
  • GT911 touch: run it polled, no interrupt pin. On this board the touch reset sits behind a GPIO expander, and wiring the interrupt pin crashed boot for me. Polled at address 0x5D just works.
  • Elecrow’s own docs for this board are unreliable (wrong/omitted pins, stale snippets). The reference that actually got me working was this espboards.dev write-up — much of it is literally correcting Elecrow’s page: https://www.espboards.dev/blog/esphome-configuring-elecrow-7-inch-display/

All of these are already handled in the repo’s YAML — I’m listing them because they’re general lessons for any RGB ESP32-S3 panel, not just this one.

Credit where it’s due

The beautiful card and all the Plex/Emby/Jellyfin magic is Marquee by Jamisonfitz — please star that project. My repo just adds the ESP32/ESPHome path as an optional, decoupled add-on on top of it.

Happy to answer questions or help anyone getting a different panel working. If you build one, post a photo. :television: