Suitable media player for Android device

Hello folks, need a little advice here. I had set up several Android tabs/phones as wall mounted dashboard for home-assistant. Now I need some of those (specially the one placed in bedroom) would be able to play music/tts via its inbuilt speaker. Now I am in a shortage of a suitable player which can be a good choice. Kodi can be easily installed but that need to be turn on each time I want to play something. And if kodi opens, dashboard is not in display anymore. So I need something like mpd which can run on background and I can control the library from other devices as well as Hass front end. Currently I had setup tasker/auto remote and custom Python script to trigger some static music file from home assistant front end. But this process is too static and I can not play the intended Google say stuffs… so need some expert opinion…

I’d like to know this too, in terms of being able to integrate my Shield AndroidTV.

Consider the Snapcast android client.

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Is this in response to the OP, me or both of us?

OP, but you as well, assuming your Shield can run Android apps. I’m not familiar with that device.

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It’s an Android TV device. Running Nougat.

I can confirm Snapcast runs perfectly on the Shield TV. You’ll just have to launch it via adb the first time (or with a launcher), in order to set it to auto-start at boot (it’s a built-in Snapcast option). I have it running for almost a year, it’s simply awesome :thumbsup:

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Thanks a lot for the suggestion guys. I checked snapcast but did anyone integrate in home-assistant already ?

@rpitera , did you mean Nvidia Shield Android TV? If that is the case, I think you can pretty easily install kodi/tasker/secure settings and autoremote in your box and by creating a custom script in hass, you can create a custom switch for starting kodi in Shield. As it launches, you can play whatever you need to play from hass via kodi. I tested this setup myself in my android phone which is mounted on wall and displaying the hadashboard.

But my problem is, I cant launch kodi in background mode so that my original Dashboard doesn’t go down( For shield, this is not a problem I guess).
And another drawback is, for my poor phone, kodi is too much considering the processing power it needs specially when continuous motion detection and IP camera is running in the background( I believe this is not also an issue for Shield as shield is considered the most powerful box out there as kodi player) .

So I wanted to know a lightweight program that can be turned on/off from hass frontend and it can play some sensor output via the TTS engine.

Thanks & Regards
Tariku

I didn’t integrate TTS via Snapcast (yet), but I did integrate Snapcast to hass, to turn on/off my receiver when needed. Hass is able to monitor different Snapcast inputs/outputs, and select the input on an output device.

I’ll try TTS via Snapcast later, I’ll keep you posted.

How was it? Can this be done?

Sorry, I totally forgot to update here. Sadly, it doesn’t work with Snapcast.

OK thanks for saving me the trouble.