Can we expose AV-Receiver through the Homekit Integration to Homkit with the native homekit design?
I’m guessing not without Apple opening up that functionality in their API.
I managed to expose it through homebridge but to do it with Home Assistant would be much better.
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Homebridge has a few AVR plugins, including for Denon/Marantz that work reasonably well and give you power control, inputs and volume, among other things (custom buttons, and more)
Adding an AVR with Home Assistant (media player entity) gives you a SWITCH device, period. With two two toggles in the case of Denon/Marantz. Power and Mute. That’s about 99% useless.
However, adding a Samsung TV (which is in HA using the HACS Samsung TV Smart integration) using media player entity, adds a TV device with power and inputs.
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So I used the HomeAssistant “Customize” ability in config.yaml to override the device_class of the AVR entity and set it as TV. That gets you a Power control and input source list, but no volume control. The TV device type is the only media player class that works in HA’s Homekit integration.
I’m pretty sure the Homebridge plugins that offer all three (power, input and volume) are doing it in a hack-about way. For example, the Denon plugin can expose the volume as a Fan or Dimmer slider combined with Power and Input. I’m pretty sure they’re using a TV device type and then doing something to change the icon in Home to a Receiver type (TV devices can appear with any of about 3 or 4 different icons).
Home Assistant’s HomeKit integration doesn’t offer this ability unfortunately. The Speaker and Receiver device classes will show up in Home the same way, as two switches, which isn’t useful.
This leads me to a possible workaround:
1 - Use the Customize as mentioned above to set the AVR as device class TV
2 - Create a virtual fan in Home Assistant and map it to the volume of the AVR (trust me you want a fan and not a dimmer).
3 - Add both to Homekit. * Unfortunately there’s no way in the Home app to combine a Light or Fan accessory with a TV accessory. As previously mentioned, the Homebridge plugins are obviously doing something special to achieve this.
Note on 2: The reason to use a fan is because using a dimmer, the volume (light device) in Homekit will be affected by any Siri command that it interprets as affecting all lights in a room, like “turn off the lights”
Home Assistant docs include how to template a light to control AV volume here: Template Light - Home Assistant
Until such time as Home Assistant’s Homekit integration is updated to allow more control over accessory categories, or full-on Matter support enables such devices to show up in Homekit natively, my suggestion is to run Homebridge in a docker to expose AV equipment to Homekit along side Home Assistant. Keep Home Assistant’s own Homekit integration restricted to simple items like Lights, switches and sensors.
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Audio Receiver is homekit accessory category 34. TV is 31.
Node Red’s homekit github:
A little bit offtopic for HA, but I’ll post it anyway since we’re talking about it and HA doesn’t offer this capability out of the box.
I can’t get this to work. It looks like I setup everything correctly, was able to connect the bridge to Homekit but I keep getting this:
Failed to get system config from … Please verify the AVR is connected and accessible
which isn’t true as I can connect to it from the Homebridge server. Any idea here?
That means it is not possible to integrate an Av Receiver properly into HomeKit?
Find this post after trying to add my receiver and my sonos speaker to homekit, it would be a very nice feature.
Not with Home Assistant, no.
So, 2023.10 supposedly addressed this according to bullet #2 under Other noteworthy changes.
But, now neither of my AV receivers are available in the Home app and for simple on/off commands via Siri on the Apple TV remote. I think I read/heard something about having to re-add them in accessory mode or something, but cannot find any instructions. So far, I’ve just tried to exclude/re-include them, but that didn’t work.
Anyone know how I can get my AV receivers back into HomeKit…hopefully with proper AV functionality to boot?!
Would this now allow the Harmony Hub to act as media player with proper volume control over the iPhone hardware buttons in the remote app? Maybe even custom buttons?
The implementation seems problematic and I believe you’ll need to do it via YAML if you want to manipulate the various parameters you’ll need to make it non-useless.
At the moment, I’d recommend sticking with the much better support for these devices from Homebridge plugins. Homekit on Home Assistant is still just somewhat below “meh”
This is still the best advice I can give:
Keep Home Assistant’s Homekit integration restricted to simple items like Lights, switches and sensors
For AV or other complex devices, use Homebridge with the appropriate plugin. For cameras use Scrypted.