Iphone appearing as media player

Configuration
1

I’m new to home assistant, got my pi3 set up over the weekend and I’ve been learning mostly from the example configurations and forum posts.

I haven’t been able to find anything from anyone else about this…
My girlfriend’s iPhone is appearing as a media player in the home group (when I comment out the default_view). No play button but it appears in the Current entities list as media_player.[name]_iphone
sceenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dalMs1H.png

I’m using asuswrt for device tracking, discovery is on (we have 3 chromecasts, can’t get them to appear anywhere when offline and I think they don’t show up at all if discovery is off despite static IPs and they’re in the media_player array)

I know I can just use default_view to include only what I want, but why is it discovering the iphone and why can’t I find anyone else that’s even seen this?

2

I don’t have an iphone, but when I revived my old HP Touchpad with a LP ROM, I was seeing it in there as a media player as well. In my case I was wondering if it was the Chromecast app or using it as a Plex client. Does your gf have anything like that running on her iPhone like a plex or kodi client or AirPlay?

3

We both have plex clients (no plexpass, we just cast it) but her iphone didn’t appear as a media player until after she was asleep. History shows her phone was connected all night. If I’m looking at the right entity in the History window it went from not existing to “idle” just before 6 and I guarantee we were not awake then. I know she used her chromecast before bed but that was 6 hours earlier.

I don’t have an iPhone so I don’t really know how airplay works to know if her phone could be doing something with that.

My phone has not shown up while doing anything related to casting or plex. Plex server hasn’t shown up no matter what I try, but that’s a problem for another thread…

4

Any DLNA will show up.

5

and if your phone runs plex, and you have “Advertise as a player” on it, it will show that.

1 Like
6

Which explains why my Touchpad was showing up; this never occurred to me.

1 Like
7

I turned off the “advertise as a player” option and that doesn’t change anything. Currently casting hbo go from her phone and it’s back on the media player list…

8

I believe HA is seeing you casting from it and so it’s correctly id’ing it as a media player. If you stop casting, then turn off discovery, and reboot HA, does it still show up? And what about when you start casting again? That would be the next test I would try.

9

The iPhone isn’t home right now so I’ll try later if I get the chance.

Other than not being able to grab my friends and family members’ phone info when they come over and connect to my wifi, what impact will turning off discovery have? I switched it off, turned on a TV with a chromecast and it appeared (after a normal delay) which was my main worry.

Also, since that still works and I want to be able to device track that phone (it’s in known_devices.yaml) I suspect it won’t do anything to hide the media player. I still haven’t found a pattern to when it even shows up as a media player…

10

I take it back, was watching hulu on a different chromecast (also in known_devices) and it didn’t show up until I turned discovery back on.