[Deprecated] Native support for Fire TV

teprrr · January 25, 2019, 2:44pm

I probably should have written up my previous investigation on this already, but this is indeed the proper way to handle the states (I was thinking about having a simple app to track the states and do push updates to homeassistant). The problem at that point was (it may have been a year since I looked at it last time) that many of the apps do not use the media session (my experiences on Kindle FireTV stick) for controlling even when the API has been there since Android 4.0.

The description and the integers for states can be found from https://developer.android.com/reference/android/support/v4/media/session/PlaybackStateCompat#getState() and more documentati on media session here https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media-apps/working-with-a-media-session .

JeffLIrion · January 25, 2019, 3:37pm

Thanks for the info! I recall reading something similar, perhaps for the Android TV component: there is an API for determining playback state, but many apps don’t adhere to it.

I believe the Android TV component tries to accomplish this task of state detection by using info about the audio output. If you’re interested, you could look at the component that I’ve previously linked to or the thread in this forum.

My opinion is that it’s not reasonable to expect the component to always detect the correct state. (But if someone wants to try to achieve that, their efforts are certainly welcome!) I also don’t think that differentiating between playing, paused, and idle states is a big deal, at least not for my use cases. The component can detect whether it’s on/off, send basic commands (most importantly power on/off and play/pause), and launch apps. That’s good enough for me

teprrr · January 25, 2019, 5:49pm

Basic support is fine, I’m not arguing on that, however, having the ability to, e.g., control the lights based on the play state is somewhat popular application I just wanted to leave the note behind in case someone is digging already on the topic or wants to improve it, unfortunately I have personally no time to further it at this point.

marvinjj · January 31, 2019, 9:58pm

Is it possible to add HDMI switching? Running it with the adb shell command wont work.

monaco · January 31, 2019, 10:30pm

I have latest version of Fire TV stick and did not get pop-up “always allow connections from this device.”

And I also do not have it as Media control entity in my HA

forums2012 · February 3, 2019, 1:32pm

Is it possible to integrate this with the new official adb hassio addon by @frenck

I am using the androidtv custom_component with official adb addon by Frenck (Community Hass.io Add-on: ADB - Android Debug Bridge)
Stability of connection is amazing.

The official FireTV component didn’t work for me. Always showed Unavailable (with one or two state changes in b/w)

AndroidTV custom_component doesn’t seem to be recognizing play/pause/idle or the current track playing on FireTV cube.

Would be amazing if stability of adb addon can be combined with firetv specific code?

Thanks

Zoker · February 3, 2019, 1:38pm

@JeffLIrion Is there any functional difference between the firetv and the androidtv custom component?

github.com

JeffLIrion/homeassistant_native_firetv/blob/pure-python-adb/media_player/firetv.py

"""
Support for functionality to interact with FireTV devices.

For more details about this platform, please refer to the documentation at
https://home-assistant.io/components/media_player.firetv/
"""
import functools
import logging
import threading
import voluptuous as vol

from homeassistant.components.media_player import (
    DOMAIN, MediaPlayerDevice, PLATFORM_SCHEMA, SUPPORT_NEXT_TRACK,
    SUPPORT_PAUSE, SUPPORT_PLAY, SUPPORT_PREVIOUS_TRACK, SUPPORT_SELECT_SOURCE,
    SUPPORT_STOP, SUPPORT_TURN_OFF, SUPPORT_TURN_ON)
from homeassistant.const import (
    ATTR_ENTITY_ID, CONF_HOST, CONF_NAME, CONF_PORT, STATE_IDLE, STATE_OFF,
    STATE_PAUSED, STATE_PLAYING, STATE_STANDBY)
import homeassistant.helpers.config_validation as cv

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github.com

a1ex4/home-assistant/blob/androidtv/homeassistant/components/media_player/androidtv.py

"""
Provide functionality to interact with AndroidTv devices on the network.

Example config using an external ADB server:
media_player:
  - platform: androidtv
    host: 192.168.1.37
    name: MIBOX3
    adb_server_ip: 127.0.0.1
    adb_server_port: 5037
    apps:
      "amazon": "Amazon Premium Video"

Example config using purely Python:
media_player:
  - platform: androidtv
    host: 192.168.1.37
    name: MIBOX3
    adbkey: /config/adbkey
    apps:

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JeffLIrion · February 3, 2019, 3:38pm

I just posted this in two other threads, but here it is again.

Regarding the Fire TV component, this is already implemented in my custom component. I’m working on getting it integrated into the official component.

Configuration example:

media_player:
  - platform: firetv
    name: Fire TV
    host: 192.168.0.111
    adb_server_ip: 127.0.0.1

Comparing the Fire TV and Android TV components, I haven’t tried the Android TV component, but there are some device-specific tweaks and so I expect that each component will work better for its intended devices.

forums2012 · February 3, 2019, 4:53pm

Reposting here for others. Original comment: Home Assistant Community Add-on: ADB - Android Debug Bridge

Awesome. Working well with new addon.

Will keep testing and report back.

recognizes Home as Standby so that’s good. On opening Netflix recognized app as Netflix, and showed Paused. However on playing, state remained Paused.

Will try out with other apps as well. Thanks a lot for the amazing work.

CBRHerms · February 4, 2019, 8:53am

@JeffLIrion
I’m getting the same as @forums2012 above.
Remains in paused state when app is open and playing, though it doesn’t seem to recognise Plex, nor does it pull a list of apps.

JeffLIrion · February 4, 2019, 11:27am

State detection has its limitations. It can’t always determine playback status accurately.

As for the list of running apps, please delete any firetv and firetv* folders in the deps folder in your configuration directory and then restart Home Assistant. This will cause it to install the latest version of the package from GitHub. Please let me know if that fixes the running apps!

CBRHerms · February 4, 2019, 9:07pm

Ahhh cheers.
Well, after doing that it picked up the Plex app, so that’s progress.
Can select Plex, play, pause, forward, back.
Can’t power on though. Ah well. May require a little more figuring out on my end.

JeffLIrion · February 4, 2019, 9:24pm

I just updated my firetv fork, so if you repeat the same steps from earlier the turn_on function should work.

CBRHerms · February 4, 2019, 9:50pm

I may be looking at the wrong repo but this one is showing last push was 2 months ago?

JeffLIrion · February 4, 2019, 10:54pm

You’re looking at the wrong branch. This is more current: firetv.py
I didn’t update the component, I updated my forked firetv repo.

CBRHerms · February 4, 2019, 11:40pm

Gotcha. That worked. Can now turn on via the component.

Looks like it’s just picking up whatever app it first detects.
Eg
if the firetv is off when I restart hass, when it turns it on it detects the home.
If the firetv is on with an app open when I restart hass, it just detects that app in sources.

Deps were cleared after updating the component

Edit: sorry for using the forum for issues

JeffLIrion · February 5, 2019, 12:21am

It should get a list of whatever apps are running, which it will show as sources. Does it not do that?

CBRHerms · February 5, 2019, 12:26am

Afraid not.
tested with no apps running, restarted hass, and it just saw the launcher.
Tried with multiple apples running, restarted hass, and it only had plex in the list (though multiple were running but i was at the launcher)

I am running using an adb server rather than built in if that helps

JeffLIrion · February 5, 2019, 2:42pm

I think I fixed it. Please remove those folders again, restart HA, and let me know if it works.

CBRHerms · February 7, 2019, 12:11am

Yep that worked.
Showed running apps in source though if app hasn’t been started then didn’t appear until it had been started on the fire.

Would it not make more sense for source to list installed apps instead? Allowing HA to open apps that aren’t already running in background?

"pm list packages -3"|cut -f 2 -d ":"

^ would list user installed apps, then adding known pkgs such as com.amazon.tv.launcher and other preinstalled apps would be a more useful sources list would it not?

I guess pushing aapt to a temporary directory on the device to be able to get an array of these app id’s and their friendly names would be a step too far though…