Support for new Yamaha Receivers and Musiccast devices

Feature Requests
41

Is it possible with the current Yamaha MusicCast integration to achieve the following in a setup with a MusicCast enabled AV Receiver and an number of MusicCast enabled speakers:

-select HDMI input at the AVR as source and play this input on any of the MusicCast speakers in any room

-the same for a GROUP of MusicCast enabled speakers

Why am I asking this? I do not have such a setup and I want to buy a setup that can do this. From the documentation of the Yamaha MusicCast integration it seems that you can control each device separately, but to me it is not clear:

  • when controlling a MC-enabled speaker: what INPUT SOURCES can be selected? Is it possible to select a physical input source at the remote MC-enabled AV Receiver to play it on the MC-enabled speaker?

  • when controlling a MC-enabled AV receiver: how can an MC-enabled speakers be selected as an OUTPUT to play any physical input of the AVR to any of the remote MC-enabled speakers?

Maybe someone can give more details.

Thank youuu!

42

I have two WXA-50 on my desk for testing. This component is only able to do basic things with it.

If you configure a ā€œLinkā€ in Yamahaā€™a app so that the second Musiccast device would play channels from the first one, youā€™ll get in Home Assistant an input named mc_link (MusicCast Link), thatā€™s the input containing signal from the other device.

43

What do you mean by getting an input mc_link in HA? what kind of entity is that? is it represented as a musicplayer?

AFAIK WXA-30 just has optical input, no HDMI input, correct?

44

Using this component you get a media player entity in HA, in lovelace a dropdown box appears with lots of inputs (AUX, Optical, spotify, etc and among these therā€™s mc_link).
WXA-50 has no HDMI input.

45

Iā€™m looking to replace my Symfonisk speaker with something similar in size/quality, but with aux/bluetooth input and Chromecast compatbility instead of being locked into Sonos nonsense. Aside from the regular media player features, Iā€™m especially interested in something that can remember/reconnect to specific devices, and give some functionality to select those devices as a source (along with aux) in Home Assistant.

MusicCast speakers start at the top end of my budget, but they seem like the strongest contender so far. I canā€™t seem to find any specific information about how either the Yamaha app or the HA integration work regarding BT devices. Could anyone help elaborate?

46

In Home Assistant you can only select Bluetooth as source. There is no option to connect to a specific Bluetooth device or control Bluetooth output device. There are some more features in recent update for the HA integration to play media content, but I have not tried that yet. All of it is possible via the MusicCast mobile app, also the official MusicCast API exposes much more than is currently possible in HA (for example controlling the multi-room connections) so there is a space for expanding it in HA.

47

ā€¦ recently i get this in my log:

2021-07-25 10:32:58 WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.yamaha_musiccast.media_player] Configuration in configuration.yaml is deprecated. Use the config flow instead

i configured

  platform: yamaha_musiccast
  host: 192.168.2.71

and i like the way setting this in a yml besides a flow!
Will it be no longer possible in the future to use this?

48

No, the direction for all integrations is to move to config flow. You can remove this entry from configuration.yaml

49

Oh, okay!
So the plan is to have more autodiscovery i assume. How can i map auto discovered entities in the future - to be used in the scripts?

Loved the way just configure my setup via one huuuuge yaml :zipper_mouth_face: