How can I use home assistant to control my Halloween projection

Configuration
1

I have a few videos on my pc I want to project for Halloween. I usually just play them in a loop but now I want to be able to control it from home assistant. I have looked around on how to do this but I haven’t found a good way yet. Does anyone know of a good way to do this.

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What do you already have setup?

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What I do at the moment is just play all the videos on my pc in a loop on something like vlc

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4

Are you looking for advice on specific projectors, lighting, etc or just the control of the videos. Do you want them on that PC or to display somewhere else? Do you want certain triggers based on events

(kind of need to know what you want the end result to be before randomly suggesting products and services)

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I want advice on how to control the videos on my pc from home assistant I will plug the projector into my pc from there

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In that case maybe the VLC Telnet integration may work?
VLC media player via Telnet - Home Assistant (home-assistant.io)

The VLC integration is intended to control a VLC instance on the same box as your homeassistant install - but to control VLC somewhere on the network you’d use this…

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In case you have a RPi available…

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Tried this but cant seem to get it to connect

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I unfortunately don’t have one

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Managed to get it to connect but doesn’t seem to do what I need it to it can only make it play an mp3 or basic functions such as skip or pause cant make it play a specific mp4

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so did you ever get it to work? I wanted to setup something similar.
i have a laptop with videos that get projected as digital decoration and I’d like to hook up home assistant to trigger videos to play in reaction to sensor input. but I don’t know how.

the telnet interface in vlc appears to be deprecated. the MQTT extension is “in active development” as per 2013 :frowning:

I’d be fine with using another player too…

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I managed to enable telnet:

Settings: show all: interfaces: main: under secondary check telnet, then under Lua: set port and password

grab the ip of the device you have vlc run on and enter it, the port and pw from the previous step in the vlc settings wen you configure:
Telnet - Home Assistant

now I just need to figure out how to select a specific playlist element with this integration

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managed to get it to work using the HTTP api and documentation at VLC HTTP requests - VideoLAN Wiki

  1. Turn on http interface in VLC on your halloween projection display’s computer

  2. set password of that http interface

  3. grab the IP of that computer.

  4. setup a playlist in vlc and get the IDs of videos from http://localhost:8080/requests/playlist.xml you’ll need these ids later to play specific videos (eg id=“16” )

  5. setup a RESTful Command - Home Assistant like:

    rest_command:
  halloween_startlescare:
    url: http://<IP from step 3>:8080/requests/status.xml?command=pl_play&id=<id from step 4>
    password: boo
    username: ""

  6. restart homassistant (reloading config won’t work :frowning: )

  7. call via

    service: rest_command.halloween_startlescare
data: {}

you can propably make it dynamic and send required stuff via data. but this does all I need at the moment.