It’s almost unbelievable, but after 2 days of searching, I made no progress on this…
Seems like a very simple requirement, though: I want to play online radio station from Home Assistant through a local speaker (connected via jack plug, not a networked smart speaker). And I can’t find a way to do it.
I see lots of posts on how to play a local mp3 file, but what about the online radio?
Right now my config is following:
HASS is running in a VM on proxmox. Audio device is added to the VM.
On the host, speaker-test (from alsa-utils) properly outputs audio to the speaker.
On the proxmox vm console, ha hw audio command list the audio device:
I know I need the Radio Browser integration - already installed.
I have no media player in the Home Assistant, though. And here I’m stuck. Is there really no solution to stream music on a local device?
Replying to myself, as hopefully someone would find this useful.
Short answer to my own question above:
The simplest way to do it is to launch a VNC server on the host, and install the VLC Telnet integration to work with it.
Unfortunately, in case of my system for unknown reason, VLC just didn’t work.
I’ve spent hours trying to debug it, with no success. Long story short: alsa works, aplay, speaker-test both work, pulse audio player works, ffplay works, VNC doesn’t…
I’ve tried to set up a headless kodi server in a docker. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get kodi to detect an audio device.
Finally, I decided to implement a simple python script that mimic the VLC telnet interface, so I could connect to it with VLC Telnet on Home Assistant, and on the host it would use ALSA for volume control and ffplay to stream the audio.
If anyone would like to try it, here’s the code:
To use it, simply start tmux on the host, and run: python3 main.py
Connect to the server with VLC Telnet, provide any password, it’s not checked currently.
If anyone finds this useful, please share feedback here or on github.
