EE TV Media Player

Third party integrations
1

Having most of my media player devices working, but not my EETV box was a bit annoying, especially as I’d managed to get some form of control via PHP…

So a wet weekend playing with python3, pyCharm, setup.py sdist bdist_wheel, twine, and pypi and I’ve wrote my first python bindings (well based off @pschmitt 's bindings for the LiveBoxPlay TV - took a punt that Orange in France and EE (which is part owned by France Telcom) might have a similar box - nah turns out the APIs aren’t at all similar, but it got me in the right ball park from the python/Hass side and those got me controlling EETV from the command Line, Cloning the same devices Hass Components and amending them to use the same bindings got it working in Home Assistant!

Component code at :- https://github.com/kevjs1982/python-eetv

And as it appears in Home Assistant:-

So far I can

  • Turn it on / off
  • Channel + / Channel -
  • Directly jump to a chosen channel by name
  • Change the volume

The biggest issue I have found is that you can easily tell when :-

  • The set top box is in low power standby (Total Disk Space is 0 Bytes)
  • Watching a TV Channel
  • Watching a recorded programme

However when you are doing the following the API returns no useful information, all you can really tell is that it’s not in low power standby (as the disk reports it’s actual capacity)

  • Is display an on screen menu (e.g. the Apps List, Recordings List, EPG)
  • Is displaying a streamed TV channel (e.g. TV Player channels, Box Plus Channels, TNT World)
  • Is using an app (e.g. YouTube, Demand 5)
  • Is tuned to a radio station (e.g. Kisstory)
  • Is in high power standby (e.g. you’ve recently turned, it’s recording, it’s checking for updates)

So during all those states you’ve get the image every EE TV viewer has seen many times before…

(You can however use this component to “tune” to the TVPlayer / Box+ Channels)

Alas even EE’s own app (which hasn’t worked or been updated since Android Nougart was launched in 2016) can’t display any information in those modes either.

Just in case EE ever update their app you may need to change the APPKEY to stop it putting up OSDs telling you to update the app - this is (currently) the SHA-1 has of the appKey buried in the Android APK (handily exposed as part of the user agent).

I should also be able to list and play all the recordings on the device, but I can’t figure out how I would display that in Haas (are there any Media Player components which do this already?) I’ve also had it playing MP4’s from the network before now, so need to work out how to integrate that into Haas too. e.g. streaming a recording from my TVH PVR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohs_O1coNDQ

2

This looks like what i am looking for to control/see what my EE TV box is doing, can you help me get this working iside my Home Assistant installation ? I have HACS and are using the UI-Lovelace.yaml.

3

No idea what HACS is, and I no longer have the EE TV Box, so I can’t help with debugging / any changes made since I left EE TV in March. (Which may prevent this from working)

In the directory which contains ui-lovelace.yaml you need a directory called “custom_components”, inside this create a directory called “eetv”, then save https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kevjs1982/hass-components/master/custom_components/media_control/eetv.py as “media_player.py”

Then add a new media_player

media_player:
  platform: eetv
  host: 192.168.1.100
  name: "Lounge EETV"

Change your IP Address to match your EE TV boxes IP Address

Check your Home Assistant config and restart.

Then in Lovelace you can add the card you need.

Think that should work, but I can’t test right now.

4

I appreciate this is dragging up a very old post, and that you no longer have EE TV but I was wondering if you could just point me in the right direction.

I’ve just installed EE TV but can only get basic attributes in HA via the router integration. This doesn’t include channel data etc.

Following your advice above I did the following only:
Set up the directory eetv directory
Created the .py file with the text from the git
Added the the below in configuration.yaml:

media_player:
  platform: eetv
  host: 192.168.1.206
  name: "Lounge EETV"

but this returns a “Platform error 'media_player' from integration 'eetv' - Integration 'eetv' not found.” error when checking in Dev Tools.

I understand the API could have changed or been removed altogether since you posted your code but, just so I can be sure, have I done anything wrong or missed a step?

I’m desperate to get this integrated.

5

This was for the old Netgem based EETV Platform which announced it’s closure in 2019 and which ceased in 2021.

The current EE TV platform used to be known as BT TV and this addon was never compatible with that.

1 Like
6

OK, thanks for confirming.