I have a Nabu Casa / HA set-up in my home. Works perfectly. I have an automation that plays media on my Nest Mini speakers at home. Awesome.
My mother in law would like a similar set-up (it would literally be a copy paste of my automation) but I don’t feel like setting up an entire HA setup just for a single automation.
My question is this:
Is there a speaker I can purchase and install in my mother-in-law’s house which will allow me to send media to it from my Home Assistant.
A cloud connected speaker with the right API’s should do the job but I’m not too familiar in the speaker space and what their capabilities are like these days.
It could be a VPN between the two places and everything is on the same network. Many routers have this already. Yours could have the server and hers the client.
It could be a VPN but it would definitely require extra hardware (ISP grade routers typically don’t have such features, at least not in the UK) and the VPN would be on a separate subnet which I don’t think will work with Google Cast / mDNS. At that point, it would be easier to set up HA on a Pi for her.
There’s gotta be a speaker which I can instruct to play some sound media over the internet from my HA
There probably is, but you probably shouldn’t. There are 2 possibilities as to how this would work.
a media player that you have to port forward at the router to allow you AND anyone else who happens across it - to connect.
a media player connected to some cloud. Which has it’s own security issues.
Personally I would install Wireguard on a Pi, and connect it back to you your network. Then you can just control whatever media player you want on it, as if it was part of your own network. See
I am the author of this optional integration (currently being reviewed for inclusion in HA) and I can happily endorse its use over a VPN like Wireguard. But your speaker will have to run Linux and use a media player compatible with MPRIS (most media players available on Linux are).
