AppleTV integration : HomePods stay in 'off' state

Hello,

I am relatively new to HA, however, have been successful in implementing a Lutron QSX system through the Lutron Caseta integration and have now my Palladiom keypad buttons available in HA and Home app. So far so good.

Also I have set up the AppleTV integration and I can see my 2x HomePod mini and my 2x HomePod (Gen.1) that are paired as a stereo pair to my LG OLED.
What I would love to do is to be able to pause whatever is played on any HomePod by pressing my physical ‘Away’ button on my entrance keypad.
However, whenever I ask Siri ‘Siri, play xyz’ then the HomePod stays in the ‘off’ state in HA. Is this simply because the media is played in Apple Home app only (where the HomePod is shown as playing media) and does not ‘sync’ this state back to HA? Do I just have a wrong/lack of understanding or any missing configuration somewhere?

Would love to have some feedback how/if the aforementioned scenario can be implemented.

Thanks!

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I just had the same problem. I’m playing a radio on my Homepod Mini and the state stays “off”.
I have the feeling this was working before but not sure.
Can anyone confirm this is a bug or missing feature?

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I am a little new to Home Assistant, but did come across the fact the pyatv solution under the hood does not yet support pairing of HomePods. That did have bad things happen like the device moving to the off state for a pair of minis.

The discussion is here.

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I experience the same, not sure it is always like this or just randomly.
Today homepod state was off, then I played spotify through my iphone airplay to homepod, the state in HA not changed
But when I reloaded it, the state is changed to playing a song same as spotify.

At this time I assume I need to reload it whenever the homepod is off. I created automation to call service reload when off