Spotcast - custom component to start playback on an idle chromecast device

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142

Hello,

This is a great component! thanks!

One thing, i can connect it to individual google cast devices but not to google speaker groups. When i try to do it they all beep but nothing happens and they keep switched off…

Any suggestion?

Thanks

143

2 things

  1. You must run home assiatant >= 0.95 (as stated in the readme)
  2. You must use the latest spotcast version. Simply follow the installation instructions or use hacs (add the repo ). Or better yet see a couple of posts up and help me test the beta of version 2.0
144

i’m doing all of that :slight_smile:

145

by the way, for some reason, commenting out the sensor breaks the component.

146

Can you add debug logging to spotcast using the logging component in hass and send the log lines for spotcast in a paste service like https://paste.ubuntu.com/. Also attach the version of HA you are running as well as the init.py file.

The same for the commenting out the sensors because it is very hard to help with just a short description of the problem and no data…

147

The latest version i suggested you to use does not have that line anymore which indicates you are running an older version

148

Hello again,

When i call:

{
    "entity_id": "media_player.home_group",
    "uri": "spotify:playlist:6wJLsSYUMqlNSCBfdqn5iH"
}

Log:

2019-07-27 18:28:37 ERROR (SyncWorker_1) [custom_components.spotcast] No device with id "f9c425ec9a37460bafbffff6c4c8a41a" known by Spotify
2019-07-27 18:28:37 ERROR (SyncWorker_1) [custom_components.spotcast] Known devices: [{'id': '590c0ab6a83c0e09096f49cfc43a5d9ba57be128', 'is_active': True, 'is_private_session': False, 'is_restricted': False, 'name': 'Web Player (Chrome)', 'type': 'Computer', 'volume_percent': 100}]

What i noticed is sometimes it works, sometimes doesn’t. Now it doesn’t even work if i send to a specific speaker. Same error.

HA - 96.5
Spotcast - 2.0.0.b1

Hope it helps.

150

so… sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. when it doesn’t work, i get same error, but different device_id

151

Weird… sometimes it seems the spotify apis are not in sync with reality. Like the app is launched and the get devices call returns the new device but the play api hasn’t gotten the device yet.

Can you cast using the chrome browser and using the open.spotify.com web player?

152

that also only works sometimes… yeah i feel your component is working well. it’s just spotify being spotify…

153

@fondberg The initial play starts a lot quicker with the new 2.0.0.b1 version, great!
The sensor ‘sensor.chromecast_devices’ seems to be gone, is that correct?

154

Yes. The sensor is not enabled by default. You can still add it though manually in the conf.

155

I am not sure how to do this. Just saw this, but by default it is not commented out https://github.com/fondberg/spotcast#known-issues

I guess I am missing a quite obvious thing here :slight_smile:

156

As you use the beta version you need to chat k the branch which it is released from. Master branch is still using the sensor as default.

If you want to add the sensor you just add

sensor:
    - platform: spotcast

edited, thanks @JBS for pointing out the typo

157

Thanks, that was the trick. For others: Be sure to use it like below :smile:

sensor:
  - platform: spotcast
158

Just found an issue that I wanted to share.
Home assistant is using spotipy_homeassistant-2.4.4.dev1 which is a fork of the spotipy python package, reason is that the author of spotipy has vanished from the face of the earth and don’t merge any pull requests since 2 years. I also use a forked package which is called fondberg_spotipy-2.4.5.dev2. My one contains some bugfixes and works with playback but is backwards compatible.
The problem is that it used to be that the custom components python requirements were installed after hass standard packages.
This seems to not be the case anymore. What this means is that if the hass spotipy is used then it is not possible to play anything with my component.

Does anyone know if a clever trick to fix this? If not I think I perhaps can change the scope of my spotipy and call it something else and avoid the conflict. It would be a pity though.

I will release version 2.0 now because this issue would be the same regardless of version.

Edit: version 2 is released

Edit 2: added random playlist support also but it is not documented yet. Just wanted it for myself. Try it with adding “random” as the uri. Works with random_song also…

1 Like
159

As of today spotcast can easily be installed using HACS

3 Likes
160

Did you see the latest release has random song as well as random playlist?

161

Have a look at my post about the spotipy version issue posted a couple of days ago. If you still experience this issue please open an issue on github so I can get a chance to debug this with your help (if you are willing to help out)

162

Yes! It worked wonderfully. Thank you.