i figured it out. set it up as a call service to play_media and then for content id i put http://HAlocalIPadress:8123/local/Police1.mp3 and then put “music” for the content type.
I also tried it with the https://mydomain.duckdns.org/local/Police1.mp3 and it worked that way as well.
hope this helps someone
I’m still not getting this to work. I’m using the automation editor and no errors in the trace.
Success.
I used this to get an auth URL
I then added that to my HTTPS Nabu Casa link.
It needed the Content Type (set to audio/mp3) and it worked.
[Edit] seems to have stopped working. Not sure if the Auth Key has expired.
Updated my solution in the linked post.
@antimage I am not seeing the linked post.
The information I was missing was what /local was.
I have suggested this gets added to the Google Cast documentation;
To cast media stored in your Home Assistant instance, it needs to be added to the /config/www folder which translates to the /local folder. e.g. a cast location of /local/media/audio/test.mp3 is actually stored in /config/www/local/media/audio/test.mp3 . There is no need to define the host, as Home Assistant works that out for itself.
I am not certain of the last part, but it is true for me.
Yes, but I think the auth key expires. Using the /local/ folder seems to work all the time.
The NodeRed flow requests a new authkey every time it fires a media_player.play_media requests.
I have my media on a NAS which is mounted to the Home Assistant Media location. The /local/ doesn’t work in my instance. If you are okay with hosting the media in your home assistant instance your solution seems to be fine.
For anyone else having trouble with this:
To play a wave file in Node Red, used the Call Service node to an automation created like above in the screenshot @baz123 showed, but the folders are backwards for me. I could not get the file to play using a variety of other methods native to node red.
I found that via the network console suggestion by @antimage
/media/local
No need for the authentication key on the end of the url.
I edited my post to include the info that the Authkey expires and the link you got from the network console no longer works.
What works is the node red flow . where I get a new Authkey everytime I want to play something.
Hope this helps.
Big @baz123, this is an interesting solution. I’ll test this one right away. So you’ve never had a problem with the auth even after restarting the Home Assistant?
Just to check… I have to create the whole automation there? Because I wanted to use this in an automation triggered by an input boolean. Instead of Home Assistant UI I should build everything on Node Red, right? Thanks
yeah, its better to do everything in nodered. you can do half in HA and half in nodered but it just adds to frustration when debugging.
thanks a lot, total noob here, let’s try to do it then! thanks!
well, i’m missing something… everything works, except it doesn’t play. i’m trying to play it on my tv, and a 9 sec audio appears on screen but it doesn’t play. I’m missing the Make Payload, it that the reason? As I said I’m a total noob on Node Red, don’t know how to properly set Make Payload using the UI
I’ve been trying for ages to get a local media mp3 file to play when triggered. The only way I have been able to get this to work is using a short lived token that I have to generate manually every 5 hours or so. So I am thrilled that a new media player feature was added in recent updates except it does not work on my RPi 3 setup. The new “Play media” action allows me to select a Google speaker and the local media file, but it doesn’t even make the connect ding on the speaker when triggered like before when it attempts but the media itself fails to play. It’s like nothing happened. I also can never get the text to speech to work which throws an error of “Failed to call service media_player/play_media.” I don’t see this error with the new action, but I’m not sure where to look for it. I have a second action after the “Play media” to change the speaker volume which fails to execute per the log trace “This node was not executed and so no further trace information is available.” I would really like to not have to manually set this every day. It kind of seems contrary to the idea of automation.
So I recalled reading this thread some time ago, and specifically I was interested in the node red approach. I am a total noob with node red, but I tried to copy the approach shown in this thread best of my understanding. I am able to build a https URL with a short lived auth token on it, but the node red flow connects and dings but no media plays. So, I thought I would just copy/paste this URL from a Debug node into my manual automation to test it. And nothing happens when it’s triggered. It’s like the auth key is no good. Does anyone have a working node red flow that uses a local mp3 audio? If I get the URL from the media tab using the browser network tools the URL works as I would expect. Or failing this, how does one use a long lived token to do something like this? I would really like to get this to work and am so disappointed that the new play media action does not work in this case (and apparently for many other cases as well). TIA!
Here is a log entry:
Logger: homeassistant.core
Source: components/cast/media_player.py:658
First occurred: 10:19:41 PM (9 occurrences)
Last logged: 10:39:50 PM
Error executing service: <ServiceCall media_player.play_media (c:33080fedff4293e11e6e3ce5f5f047f8): device_id=['a5d0a56a34474fa4d3ad1b911caa1e50'], entity_id=['media_player.living_room_speaker'], extra=, media_type=music, media_id=https://fakeplaceholder.duckdns.org/media/local/white_noise.mp3?authSig=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpc3MiOiI4ZTkzMzc1MjMzYzE0NzE0YWViOGE3OTAxMDVjZGE1MCIsInBhdGgiOiJodHRwczovL215Y3JvZnRob2xtZXMuZHVja2Rucy5vcmcvbWVkaWEvbG9jYWwvd2hpdGVfbm9pc2UubXAzIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQ3MTQ5MzU2LCJleHAiOjE2NDcxNDk2NTZ9.mhQW2T6sQiJ8PZrDTyZXmeEo5HesSfpPyWNjXuv-GMc>
Error executing service: <ServiceCall media_player.play_media (c:ea52a6863e4f731ee31843e3bb69b07d): device_id=['a5d0a56a34474fa4d3ad1b911caa1e50'], extra=, media_type=music, media_id=https://fakeplaceholder.duckdns.org/media/local/white_noise.mp3?authSig=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpc3MiOiI4ZTkzMzc1MjMzYzE0NzE0YWViOGE3OTAxMDVjZGE1MCIsInBhdGgiOiJodHRwczovL215Y3JvZnRob2xtZXMuZHVja2Rucy5vcmcvbWVkaWEvbG9jYWwvd2hpdGVfbm9pc2UubXAzIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQ3MTQ5MzU2LCJleHAiOjE2NDcxNDk2NTZ9.mhQW2T6sQiJ8PZrDTyZXmeEo5HesSfpPyWNjXuv-GMc>
Error executing service: <ServiceCall media_player.play_media (c:a181f15bb32291c8f5b1864defeff6f2): device_id=['a5d0a56a34474fa4d3ad1b911caa1e50'], extra=, media_type=music, media_id=https://fakeplaceholder.duckdns.org/media/local/white_noise.mp3?authSig=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpc3MiOiI4ZTkzMzc1MjMzYzE0NzE0YWViOGE3OTAxMDVjZGE1MCIsInBhdGgiOiJodHRwczovL215Y3JvZnRob2xtZXMuZHVja2Rucy5vcmcvbWVkaWEvbG9jYWwvd2hpdGVfbm9pc2UubXAzIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQ3MTQ5MzU2LCJleHAiOjE2NDcxNDk2NTZ9.mhQW2T6sQiJ8PZrDTyZXmeEo5HesSfpPyWNjXuv-GMc>
Error executing service: <ServiceCall media_player.play_media (c:74d81e3403eaec85808c7a95c29d9d14): device_id=['a5d0a56a34474fa4d3ad1b911caa1e50'], entity_id=['media_player.living_room_speaker'], extra=, media_type=music, media_id=https://fakeplaceholder.duckdns.org/media/local/white_noise.mp3?authSig=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpc3MiOiI4ZTkzMzc1MjMzYzE0NzE0YWViOGE3OTAxMDVjZGE1MCIsInBhdGgiOiJodHRwczovL215Y3JvZnRob2xtZXMuZHVja2Rucy5vcmcvbWVkaWEvbG9jYWwvd2hpdGVfbm9pc2UubXAzIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQ3MTQ5NTg0LCJleHAiOjE2NDcxNDk4ODR9.qxruLTZ8MCJCwtzE_mWB7WW-KJc3tyWeTNYZRbMrUj4>
Error executing service: <ServiceCall media_player.play_media (c:f98e8e585606ef3add19da81c4515544): device_id=['a5d0a56a34474fa4d3ad1b911caa1e50'], extra=, media_type=music, media_id=https://fakeplaceholder.duckdns.org/media/local/white_noise.mp3?authSig=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpc3MiOiI4ZTkzMzc1MjMzYzE0NzE0YWViOGE3OTAxMDVjZGE1MCIsInBhdGgiOiJodHRwczovL215Y3JvZnRob2xtZXMuZHVja2Rucy5vcmcvbWVkaWEvbG9jYWwvd2hpdGVfbm9pc2UubXAzIiwiaWF0IjoxNjQ3MTQ5ODc1LCJleHAiOjE2NDcxNTAxNzV9.FbDbJw24es9cVWGzwP6B9ZJKwAGcIdEQ8FO_vjwZz2I>
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/core.py", line 1654, in catch_exceptions
await coro_or_task
File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/core.py", line 1673, in _execute_service
await cast(Callable[[ServiceCall], Awaitable[None]], handler.job.target)(
File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/helpers/entity_component.py", line 204, in handle_service
await self.hass.helpers.service.entity_service_call(
File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/helpers/service.py", line 668, in entity_service_call
future.result() # pop exception if have
File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/helpers/entity.py", line 949, in async_request_call
await coro
File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/helpers/service.py", line 705, in _handle_entity_call
await result
File "/usr/src/homeassistant/homeassistant/components/cast/media_player.py", line 658, in async_play_media
await self.hass.async_add_executor_job(
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/concurrent/futures/thread.py", line 58, in run
result = self.fn(*self.args, **self.kwargs)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pychromecast/quick_play.py", line 77, in quick_play
controller.quick_play(**data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pychromecast/controllers/media.py", line 665, in quick_play
self.play_media(media_id, media_type, **kwargs)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pychromecast/controllers/media.py", line 566, in play_media
raise PyChromecastError()
pychromecast.error.PyChromecastError
Exact same thing here. And I can’t get it to play. It’s so frustrating!
I use this method for play media
Hope this help
This works for Yamaha’s MusicCast devices, I just wish the media player and media browser would function like this. I searched for bugs on this topic but did not find anything, perhaps its time to open one.
Edit: I got it working, I had to go into Server Control > General > and set the following to automatic:
I guess now would be a good to time to get my music library in order.
Thanks. That works great for me.
File at:
/config/www/media/bark.mp3
Test Script:
alias: Play Sound File
sequence:
- service: media_player.play_media
data:
media_content_type: audio/mp3
media_content_id: /local/media/bark.mp3
target:
entity_id: media_player.nesthub
I was able to get this working, however my approach differs slightly from the previous solutions.
Backstory: Similar to the original poster, I was trying to play media to a Google Home speaker. Initially I was simply using the “Play Media” action. Text-to-speech was working, so I tried playing a .mp3 file that I could find in “Local Media” of the “Cast” dialog. However, this failed to play out of the Google Home, and stopped the Automation from continuing.
More information about my setup: I use Home Assistant running in a Docker container inside my QNAP NAS via Container Station. To make mp3’s available in the “Local Media”, I created a docker bind from a folder in my NAS (/Container/volumes/home-assistant/qnap/), to /media/qnap/ in the docker container. Now anything I add to the NAS folder appears in HA’s “Local Media”. After reading the posts above, I tried messing with different solutions, but none worked for me.
Solution: Ultimately what I did was looked at the YAML for the non-working “Play Media” action. It exposes the required media_content_id and media_content_type based on the file I selected from the dialog browser.
YAML from non-working “Play Media” action
service: media_player.play_media
target:
entity_id: media_player.office_speaker
data:
media_content_id: media-source://media_source/local/qnap/alerts/alert1.mp3
media_content_type: audio/mpeg
metadata:
title: alert1.mp3
thumbnail: null
media_class: music
children_media_class: null
navigateIds:
- {}
- media_content_type: app
media_content_id: media-source://media_source
- media_content_type: ""
media_content_id: media-source://media_source/local/qnap
- media_content_type: ""
media_content_id: media-source://media_source/local/qnap/alerts
One major difference from the posts above is that this use a media-source:// protocol prefix, and uses audio/mpeg instead of audio/mp3 as the protocol, however, I switched this to audio/mp3 for testing purposes and it still worked 
Now I just plopped those values into a “Call Service” action and it worked on the first try!
Working Call Service YAML:
service: media_player.play_media
data:
media_content_id: media-source://media_source/local/qnap/alerts/alert1.mp3
media_content_type: audio/mpeg
target:
entity_id: media_player.office_speaker
Edit:
I have since learned more about how authentication to the file is working. When linking to a media file using media-source url path, it automatically adds the auth signature to the URL as this is a signed path.
More info is is available in the Authentication API documentation:
From what I understand, if you don’t want authentication, use the ‘www’ folder. I believe placing files in /config/www will give you access to them via the URL /local/. So /config/www/myFile.mp3 should be available at YOUR_HOST:8123/local/myFile.mp3 without authentication.