Issues with Universal Media Player Play/Pause

I’ve been trying to setup a Universal Media Player for a while now and have everything working except for the Play/Pause functionality. I have tried various different configurations, but just cannot get this to work as expect. I currently have a script that sends the pause function to the required device depending on what I am watching (TiVo, AppleTV, Smart TV, etc). This script is working without issue. The issue is coming from trying to execute this script via the universal media player. The documentation, unfortunately, doesn’t call out the play/pause functionality, but the code seems to indicate it should work. Is there something specific that needs to be done for this?

Can you please paste your correctly formatted configuration for the player?

Here is the current configuration. It has gone through a few iterations, but nothing has worked in the past.

media_player:
- platform: universal
  name: TV
  device_class: tv
  children:
  - media_player.living_room_receiver
  attributes:
    state: remote.living_room_hub
    source_list: remote.living_room_hub|activity_list
    source: remote.living_room_hub|current_activity
    volume_level: media_player.living_room_receiver|volume_level
    is_volume_muted: media_player.living_room_receiver|is_volume_muted
  commands:
    turn_on:
      service: remote.turn_on
      target:
        entity_id: remote.living_room_hub
    turn_off:
      service: remote.turn_off
      target:
        entity_id: remote.living_room_hub
    volume_up:
      service: media_player.volume_up
      data:
        entity_id: media_player.living_room_receiver
    volume_down:
      service: media_player.volume_down
      data:
        entity_id: media_player.living_room_receiver
    volume_set:
      service: media_player.volume_set
      data_template:
        entity_id: media_player.living_room_receiver
        volume_level: '{{ volume_level }}'
    volume_mute:
      service: media_player.volume_mute
      data_template:
        entity_id: media_player.living_room_receiver
        is_volume_muted: '{{ is_volume_muted }}'
    media_play_pause:
      service: script.pause_living_room_tv

That looks ok.

Have you tried specifying separate media_play and media_pause options instead?

I have tried that as well, but still getting nothing. This script does work without issue when ran alone. Does play/pause need an attribute similar to ‘is_volume_muted’? I just thought of that.

1 Like

It’s definitely worth a try. Unfortunately I don’t have access to GitHub at the moment so I can’t check the source.

Looking at the code, there doesn’t appear to be an ‘is_paused’ type of property from what I can tell at least. Been banging my head against a wall on this one for a bit and it doesn’t seem like a lot of people use the universal media player component from searching around.

Hi,
Paused is a state of media player like idle, on, off…

@dragonpark - I had the same issue, and could not figure out why play+pause would not work. After leaving it for a while I found this post and took @tom_l suggestion and viola it worked.

      media_play_pause:
        service: media_player.media_play_pause
        data:
          entity_id: media_player.study_foobar_server

then I changed it to

      media_play:
        service: media_player.media_play_pause
        data:
          entity_id: media_player.study_foobar_server

      media_pause:
        service: media_player.media_play_pause
        data:
          entity_id: media_player.study_foobar_server