Hi! I have been wondering about whether investing into home assistant would be worth it to control my media center as well. Do you happen to have handy links to any resources you found helpful?
Not OP but it makes the whole setup easier to use.
For instance, when I turn on the PS4, HA turns on the receiver and the TV, switches to the correct inout, adjusts the lights in the room.
When I turn off the ps4, it switches off the tv and the avr, unless I switched the receiver to the music or media player input (in which case it turns the tv off or not)
It also lets me use these cheapo ikea zigbee volume buttons to adjust the sound on the receiver, pause and skip songs or video (via libreelec). And the “light switch” aqara button to turn off all lights at bedtime from my bed and keep the music running (if I double tap) or switch it off otherwise.
The above wouldn’t be possible otherwise: ikea’s volume switch only works with these ikea/Sonos lamp things otherwise.
Not OP, but various automations that fire off commands based on whatever your TV, receiver, Apple TV box, etc are doing are how I find it most useful.
Example: I have some cheap Govee LED strip lights behind my TV for ambient lighting. HomeAssistant can detect when my Apple TV (or Samsung smart TV) is on and automatically turn on the lights for me. I don't have to reach around the back of the TV to try and find the little button to turn the lights on (or remember to turn them off).
I can also control both my TV and Apple TV through HomeAssistant. It's not exactly the most polished/straightforward, but you could definitely string together some automations - something like a "movie night" button that dims the lights, turns on the TV, switches to the appropriate input, and cues up a file. For me that's more hassle than it's worth.
> I've got an msi desktop gaming PC, an LG CX OLED TV, and a Yamaha RX-A2A receiver and they never played well together. The kids always had a hard time getting them all on at once and set to the right inputs and launching steam.
> So I created a Home Assistant automation that does all that, bought a Zwave button that sits on the coffee table, and now they just turn it all on with one button like it's a video game console.
I also plan to add "scenes" where I can just tap the button and the lights dim, and the media center gets put into movie mode, as well as a "music" scene for when I have parties, which would join the two zones my receiver supports an then
start playing a playlist from spotify.
Love this. My TV setup is super straightforward these days, but I had a nice home theater setup in my previous house and used a rather disappointing Logitech Harmony remote.
If you want to get creative, you could create a custom dashboard and put an old iPod touch/Android device in kiosk mode and use it as a remote touch panel control for your home theater (or anything else in HomeAssistant).
I have two Lenovo M8 tablets ($100/each) that I'm using as home control panels - super convenient and rock solid. https://imgur.com/a/f0aNTRq
Yeah they're solid - come with a little dock so it looks like a high-end automation system panel. You can configure the power settings to hold the battery charge around 50% to prevent any issues with the battery swelling.
If you go this route, definitely buy the Android app FullyKiosk. It will let you lock the tablet to the HomeAssistant dashboard, automatically recover if something crashes, etc. I have it set up to use the built-in camera & motion sensor to automatically turn on the display if someone walks up to it or touches the tablet, and automatically turns the screen off after a few minutes of no motion.
Slightly off-topic, but I have been interested in setting up Plex (or similar) in my homeserver but never figured out a good workflow or source to add movies/shows to it? Are people generally just torrenting, or are there DRM-free stores that I do not know exist? Or if there is an efficient workflow for ripping blurays?
I personally use private trackers and sonarr/radarr apps to manage the content. You could probably use public trackers if you want.
There is a nice docker image that runs deluge and wireguard. Works great with my VPN. Keeps a port open and everything. Has the firewall set to prevent using anything other than the vpn. It’s also nice I don’t have to play with my servers network settings as it’s all in the container.
I don't believe anywhere is selling DRM free movies. iTunes DRM used to be pretty easy to crack, which may be legally piracy in some jurisdictions but at least for me I felt morally pretty ok with it. Bluray ripping is not too hard these days either, you basically need MakeMKV and a bluray drive with the right firmware (which is actually most "LG" drives).
I don't know of a store that offers DRM free movies for general content, but there are places you can get very specific things DRM free. RiffTrax is DRM free for example.
I find it very similar to how understanding of OS and hardware fundamentals can make one a much better software engineer, how infrastructure in the cloud/servers are setup helps make better design decisions.
At least in my experience, my hobby of maintaining my own home server helped out immensely in my path in the industry due to knowing what tools are available when working on multi-faceted software designs.
Definitely agree with you on that. Making use of layers of abstraction and delegation is absolutely necessary when working on more and more impactful work.
That convenience has to be let go when working on operations-critical services. This feature is an absolute necessity in a lot of cases, and of course employees can complain, but not resolving certain issues urgently can mean that an entire hospital's system stays inaccessible overnight, or worse.
Missed the point. If that operation is so critical, give me a workplace owned device to deal with it. My employer is not getting superuser access to my personal devices.
they do not need super-user permissions. That would imply that the phone has to be rooted. over-coming certain settings that apply to regular apps? sure. but that's a very android/iOS specific feature-set that is exposed to all app developers.
They do not need superuser, they can just request the permission to bypass DND. I believe apps can't tell if you gave them the permission or not, so there is no way to "force" users into this.
