I am trying to figure out a means to play an MP3 through a bluetooth speaker when an automation is triggered. I thought to use VLC to help accomplish this, but I was thinking what I was doing was installing VLC on home assistant to tell a remote system running VLC to play the mp3 over telnet. So far, I have not been able to get this to work at all. I mean, I have VLC running on a laptop with telnet enabled, tested connecting to VLC, logging in and getting the Hello, Master message, but I cannot get Home Assistant to connect to play the MP3.
If I am completely incorrect with how VLC functions on Home Assistant, or if there is a much easier means to accomplish this I would greatly appreciate hearing it. At this point, I am even of the mind to move my Raspberry Pi from my rack just so I can plug it into my amp with the 3.5mm cable and play it that way.
Forgive my noobishness. I have the base installation on my Raspberry Pi and made no changes, so… yes? But, reading through this some more, I am guessing that since I am running Home Assistant OS, VLC will not work for me.
Correct. That is not a core installation running in a python VE.
Any other ideas on how I can trigger the playing of an MP3 over a bluetooth speaker, or otherwise force the system to output the audio of that mp3 through the headphone jack, and I can connect it to my amp? Not finding anything definitive yet.
HA is not a media player. There is the VLC addon though.
Could you elaborate a bit more on your use case(s), so that people would have better recommendations for you? Are you looking for SW or HW solution? Do you against DIY something?
Is this not what you are looking for?
Play song from media folder on all Google Home Devices - Configuration - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)
I completely forgot that my Pi has bluetooth. I currently have my bluetooth speaker connected to it. It shows in known devices. I am not sure what native abilities the platform has to either play or send commands to play specific audio files. At this point, I am just needing to see how to make sure my speaker is in fact configured on the system and functioning, then how, through automations tell the system to play a specific mp3 that is located in /media/.
My system is a Raspberry Pi 4 with the pi image installed. My card on the overview page shows my speaker is “home”, but I am not getting the normal indication from the speaker that it has connected to anything. I have the simple config entry of:
device_tracker:
- platform: bluetooth_tracker
I then have this in known_devices
ue_boom:
name: UE BOOM
mac: BT_MACADDRESS
icon:
picture:
track: true
Here is the config for the media player:
Media Player
media_player:
- platform: mpd
host: 127.0.0.1
scan_interval: 1
And here is the action from the automation:
action:
- service: media_player.play_media
target:
entity_id: media_player.mpd
data:
media_content_type: music
media_content_id: /media/mpd/media/scare.mp3
mode: single
The media is working as I can access it over the webUI and play it from the media section. I am guessing that the speaker is not actually connected to Home Assistant. I can go to the MPD applet and open the web interface for it and tell it to play that specific MP3. It shows that it is playing, yet still no sound. I am definitely leaning towards an issue with connecting to the bluetooth speaker, but I just do not know what I might be missing.
One change I made was to remote the absolute path for the media file. Just using the file name has the audio going out the headphone jack. Probably going to forego the bluetooth as what I am looking to do, I would not want the speaker to shut off because it was not in use. I know I could just automate random sounds, but I will take this as it is, run the headphone jack to my PA amp, and hide my speakers on the front porch.