I’m interested to connect several media streamers which can be controlled by Home assistant automation.
all streamers devices will be under the same network and each streamer device will have it’s own files to play. The HA automation will control which file to play.
I tried to use PLEX server on raspberry pi, and although i can get the sensor information from the played file, but i didn’t find any way that it can be controlled by the HA and start paying media on the remote raspberry on fullscreen(HDMI).
Is there any other setup that allow HA to auto play (HDMI fullscreen) selected media on a selected raspberry pi?
If you go the Plex route, you’ll need a Plex client in addition to the server if you want to play the media on a given device. The Plex server can serve the media to multiple Plex clients directly so the media does not have to be distributed to each device ahead of time.
Will the plex client can be fully controlled by the HA, meaning: will i be able to run automation to play specific files in full screen over client’s HDMI?
Yes, with a few stipulations. Will this Pi be used to show other things on the display at other times or will you need to switch to the Plex app? Do you have an uncommon network setup with multiple subnets or firewalls? Both of these would need a bit of planning to ensure it would work smoothly.
thanks.
I’m using same network, no subnets. i tried to work with PLEX, although i did manage to stream media remotely to the plex client from the HA, but unfortunately i wasn’t unable to play local files which are stored on remote plex client using HA.
since i want to play media locally and use the network only for control, for now i manged to make several Raspberry pi with stand alone script that will play selected media according to the GPIOs, and a ESP module(MQTT controlled by HA) that connected to the raspberry GPOIs.
no very elegant solution and the downside i’m limited to number of IOs and need to use the “middleman” ESP module for each raspberry as gateway.
hopefully there is more elegant way to control local media storage clients. maybe Home Assistant extension…