I’ve been using the AndroidTV integration to interact with my nvidia shield and it’s been working okay, although lately with the upgrade to 11 it’s required me to clone someone’s repo with some temporary fixes to get it working again.
I’ve noticed that there’s also a “Google Cast” integration, which looks a bit better in some cases : It knows what I’m playing in Kodi, and updates instantely whereas the AndroidTV Integration only knows the app and updates periodically.
The flip side is the chromecast integration thinks the shield is off when nothing is playing and doesn’t seem to show a picture of what’s playing.
Wondering if there’s a way around those limitations, or if people have clever setups using both integrations to compose a better entity, is there a way to grab bits of each :
Use AndroidTV’s picture, source selection
Use Chromecast intstant updates if something is playing, but AndroidTV’s state if nothing is playing
Use Chromecast volume controls that actually work
…
I know that’s doable for automations, but is that achievable for lovelelace media cards somehow ? I believe the default card and the mini media player card can only take one media player as an input.
Thanks
That looks pretty much exactly like what I was thinking, thanks @nickrout I’ll give that a try.
Never new that integration existed but I had a feeling it should !
@Ulrar where you able to figure it out? If so, would you mind sharing your universal media player combining androidtv and cast for your shield (best of both worlds)?
I did come up with something which seemed to work okay at the time, but to be honest it’s been very wonky lately.
I’ve been meaning to try this again, I’ll post it here when (or if) I come up with something that works reliably. I do hope they fix the AndroidTV integration soon …
Ummm, is it broken ? After lots of frustration I believe that AndroidTV is designed for a human sitting in front of the screen with a remote control. And that it was designed with an Android phone “app” mentality. For these users it works great. Not the fault of AndroidTV that we want it to work differently
I spent a lot of effort investigating and experimenting with HA and my nVidia ShieldTV, and then enhancing my automations when I swapped to node-RED.
The majority of my automation flows is trying to compensate for (a) not being able to see current status of the currently running app (like, where the focus is currently in the menu structure), and (b) not being able to feed commands into an app. Ie there are several loops and delays waiting until app is started, or give time to process keystrokes; and extra "UP’ and “LEFT” keystrokes trying to ensure the TVs cursor is in the home position before starting my desired keypresses.
I am thinking about publishing my flow, but realised I have a lot of extra stuff in there (like turning off my voice assistant while TV is on, and raising/lowering lights when TV is paused). Also there seems to be a lot of variation in what information the different AndroidTV devices expose.
Yes, for AndroidTV 11 it’s still broken. It regularly reports the wrong state (playing vs idle), the source selector drop down does nothing and the reported playing app is often mangled or plain wrong.
My understanding is that the code makes a lot of assumptions and can’t properly adapts to newer versions of the OS, which don’t have the same commands or output.
It’s been fixed enough a few versions ago to be about usable, but it’s still very buggy
Yes, sorry. I saw posts about AndroidTV 11 and so didn’t even try to upgrade my nVidia Shield … and then forgot about the problems.
I guess this just highlights that there’s plenty of difference in the way AndroidTV is implemented on all the different hardware … making the task of a standard integration nigh on impossible.