Switching light on/off when starting/pausing movie (FireTV)

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1

Hi everyone,

I’d like to share something with you and hear what you have to say, maybe you’ve implemented something similar:

  - alias: Turn on lights when pausing movie
    trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: media_player.amazon_fire_tv
      to: 'playing'
      from: 'standby'
    action:
      service: scene.turn_on
      entity_id: scene.beamer_pause
  - alias: Dim lights when playing movie 
    trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: media_player.amazon_fire_tv
      to: 'standby'
      from: 'playing'
    action:
      service: scene.turn_on
      entity_id: scene.beamer_play

And these are the scenes:

scene:
  - name: Beamer Pause
    entities:
      light.deathstar:
        state: on
        transition: 3
        brightness: 80
        rgb_color: [255, 0, 0]
  - name: Beamer Play
    entities:
      light.deathstar:
        state: on
        transition: 1
        brightness: 1
        rgb_color: [255, 0, 0]

This is working quite well, except that opening an app (e.g. Netflix) on the FireTV makes the FireTV-mediaplayer-component returning the state as “playing” which means that this automation does not work within the Netflix-app (or any other app for that mather).

2

What app are you using to watch your movies and shows on?

3

I just setup my FireTV to work in my HA also and want to do some automations with lights as well based on the state of play/pause/standby but have noticed the same issue. I use Netflix for most of my viewing and a little of Hulu and notice that as soon as you open the Netflix app the state changes to play. Not a huge deal if you are just going to sit there and play a movie or show straight through then then it off, but as stated above if you pause it or anything else while in Netflix it doesn’t change the state. I haven’t tried Hulu yet. It would be nice to have a fix for this to make this feature more useful.

4

I’ve done something very similar on my HTPC using Kodi to watch media. I only want the lights to dim and turn on again with blurays, not other types of media so it has a condition that media content type has to be movies which blurays are categorised as. It also sticks Hyperion into full ambilight mode rather than the constant colour I prefer for everything else.

Great one for impressing the natives as I’m sure you’ve found :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

Yeah I was also going to suggest using Kodi. I have both the Fire TV and Kodi media player components set up and really only use Kodi for my automations like that. They also have Hulu and Netflix addons that you could use as a workaround to your problem. If you need any help at all just let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction. I’ve been using Kodi as a default media player since it came out as xbmc back in the day and am very familiar with it. I can set you up with a really nice build that will have everything you need in it.