I am looking to find a way to best go about automating playback of content for my child’s playroom.
Today I have a multiple 4 button zigbee remotes attached to the playroom wall at a children’s height and each button has a stick representing the TV show. She can click the one she wants and this is where I am stuck and need working feedback.
In the playroom I have the TV attached to an AppleTV and all of my content is on Plex in a Kids Library for consumption.
I am not MARRIED to the AppleTV solution but what I do want is to use Plex, if possible, to “serve” the content to the device.
I’ve got automations setup where I can wake the AppleTV and it will turn on the TV via HDMI-CEC and that is all working fine and dandy but the problem I have is interacting with the Plex tvOS application and the fact in the Home Assistant integration it shows the player unavailable until content starts to play which kind of defeats the purpose if I am trying to tell Plex media player to “Start playing Bluey on Shuffle” using the native Home Assistant integration. I know there could be creative ways around this by doing remote sequences and getting the play to start playing something then I can control it via the integration but this seems like a bad way about it.
Is there anyone today doing anything media player related in this scope, even if using different hardware, so I can get this all automated for the sake of my child?
Thanks!