Hello everyone! I have a Vizio SmartCast TV The integration works well for what it is, but I do find it lacking (unless I’m just not seeing it) a pretty basic feature. Before I got this new TV, I was just using a Chromecast dongle, and it would show if media was “playing.” I had an automation set to dim the lights way down when the Chromecast was playing. If I paused or stopped the media, the lights would turn back up to full brightness. I have small children, so movies regularly get interrupted. It’s nice to just pause the movie and the lights come on.
With the Vizio SmartCast TV, there is no indication in the integration that media is playing. I can see and change which app (youtube, netflix, plex, etc…) is being used, see and change the current volume, etc… but I can’t actually tell if the TV is playing anything. On top of having HA detect the “play” status for automations, it would be nice to also have standard play, pause, stop media buttons in HA. I’ve looked all over the device/entity pages for the TV and haven’t found anywhere where I can pause the media.
Now, if I’m purely using the cast feature of the TV (which has its own entity in HA as a Chromecast), everything is fine. I can control play, pause, and automations work. But since we got this TV, we haven’t really used the cast feature. Since the TV has the apps integrated and a remote control, I’d rather use that than the Chromecast feature.
Is this a limitation of the SmartCast API? Maybe it is, and there isn’t much to be done to add these features.