Any way to monitor programs on a desktop?

[Noahma (Noah Mason)]

Alrighty, Is there a way to monitor what programs / web pages are open on a desktop computer?

I use a windows machine as our “media center” for all of our streaming etc. I am trying to figure out a way to easily have Home assistant see that say, netflix is open and playing and adjust the lighting accordingly. Or say a web page like paramount + is open etc. I looked into the new System Bridge integration, but it does not give me enough info to put together the automations I would like to.

Thanks in advance.

[anon63427907]

I am using iotlink to shutdown, volume up&down and execute commands on my windows machine. It is using mqtt in background, so far happy with it.

https://iotlink.gitlab.io/

[Noahma (Noah Mason)]

I don’t think that one will work for what I am trying to do. I am hoping to find something that can report what apps or web pages I have open to Home Assistant.

[Holdestmade]

I use this and it does generate a sensor with the active window:

Hass Workstation Service - Turn your PC or laptop into a bunch of sensors

Hi y’all! I have been working on an application that lets you use your PC or laptop as a bunch of sensors for Home Assistant. This will, for example, let you dim your lights when playing games or trigger something when opening a specific window. [68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f4b584b51714d722e706e67] [68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f315976783245612e706e67] I’m looking for some interested people to beta test. You can find the project here. Edit: Second beta is released!

Otherwise, have a look at Eventghost, I think that can detect open windows and there is an MQTT plugin for it that can send it via MQTT

[nickh66 (Nick Harrison)]

Hi,

Iotlink can for sure handle the task of monitoring applications (processes or .exe). I use it to monitor a vpn client running and vpn connection on a pc & then have automations in HA to take some action if the vpn connection drops etc.

In iotlink you want to look for the documention that relates to ‘process monitor’. With process monitor you can see if chrome.exe is running, for instance, but the limitation might be with knowing what url(s) might be open.

On another tangent, have you thought about using software like Plex on that windows box to manage & stream the media. With a solution like that then you can easily drill down to what content is playing.

Cheers
Nick

[Noahma (Noah Mason)]

Sorry got very busy and the project got put on my back burner. Unfortunately Plex would not work with my current setup. I use a multitude of streaming services. Netflix, Prime, Discovery+, Disney+, Hulu, Curiosity stream etc. And from what I can find, they do not play well with plex.

@Holdestmade As soon as I have time, I will take a peak thanks!

[gmsiegel (umbighouse)]

@nickh66 I’m trying to do the same thing as you- monitor for a VPN connection and report the status in HA. Do you mind sharing your setup?

[nickh66 (Nick Harrison)]

Hi,

Since i wrote that reply i have moved from iotlink to hass.agent. I found iotlink worked well but i think i found that it was not longer being developed & supported. Imho hass.agent is perhaps not as feature rich as iotlink but for my purposes it works pretty well. However, monitoring vpn connections, with iotlink or hass.agent is problematic & does not really result in what i was looking to achieve.

Setting up the monitoring tool to monitor a specific service or executable is simple enough but that’s all you get. I found that when the vpn connection is established on the machine being monitored the monitoring tool loses connection to the mqtt server.

My end end result for monitoring a vpn connection was not reliable.

Cheers