More > JRiver Media Center 32 for Windows
Make MC compatible with Home Assistant
mattkhan:
This is a longstanding issue as originally reported in https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,115440.msg798510.html#msg798510 and subsequently requested in https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=130305.0
Home Assistant is increasingly popular and not being able to drive MC from HA due to some proprietary extension is not great.
One alternative is for someone to contribute a custom integration to HA to enable it to work with it directly, most other popular software equivalent to MC has been given this treatment so this could be an even better path
example -> https://github.com/home-assistant/core/tree/dev/homeassistant/components/roon
eve:
--- Quote from: mattkhan on December 28, 2023, 10:41:04 am ---This is a longstanding issue as originally reported in https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,115440.msg798510.html#msg798510 and subsequently requested in https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=130305.0
Home Assistant is increasingly popular and not being able to drive MC from HA due to some proprietary extension is not great.
One alternative is for someone to contribute a custom integration to HA to enable it to work with it directly, most other popular software equivalent to MC has been given this treatment so this could be an even better path
example -> https://github.com/home-assistant/core/tree/dev/homeassistant/components/roon
--- End quote ---
My solution is running a service that 'intelligently' polls MC to deal with state / file metadata. This way I get a nice REST interface (with some massaging to deal with things like 'tracks' in video) providing JSON responses. The playback position gets spat out via websocket too since that's sometimes more useful than polling in applications.
I then have some wrappers around MCWS functions / playback controls and a bunch of queue management shenanigans. Besides that, it handles dealing with multiple systems running MC, through a single point of entry for me (so I can control / access a device and zone by names or ids, which are tied to the rest of my control system)
+1 though.
I love HA. Been using it a long time. I outgrew it for media and the actual UI. My media stuff is too complex to rely on HA however. I ended up building my own frontend for some of the smart home stuff but like, as a 'get all your devices talking' platform it's fantastic. I used to take advantage of NodeRED for a bunch of the device stuff to talk to HA but I've gradually replaced those things with actual code. Still awesome for mocking things up.
mattkhan:
yes I have similar apps (polls and broadcasts via ws, custom UI) but the 1st one is just covering a gap in MC itself, having to write an app just to avoid clients having to poll for updates is a pretty unfriendly, and the latter predates panel and does some other stuff so I kept with it.
to be clear, compatible doesn't mean "replace panel" or build some really complex integration, it's just a simple media control like play/pause/next/prev and so on that one can drop in amongst other stuff on a page as a simple control to interact with MC. At present, as far as I can see, the only thing that actually works is changing volume and mute (but unmute doesn't work). Browsing = fail, any playback control = fail.
Striker:
--- Quote from: mattkhan on December 29, 2023, 03:28:20 am ---yes I have similar apps (polls and broadcasts via ws, custom UI) but the 1st one is just covering a gap in MC itself, having to write an app just to avoid clients having to poll for updates is a pretty unfriendly, and the latter predates panel and does some other stuff so I kept with it.
to be clear, compatible doesn't mean "replace panel" or build some really complex integration, it's just a simple media control like play/pause/next/prev and so on that one can drop in amongst other stuff on a page as a simple control to interact with MC. At present, as far as I can see, the only thing that actually works is changing volume and mute (but unmute doesn't work). Browsing = fail, any playback control = fail.
--- End quote ---
I get full playback control using MC30.exe (or whatever version you use).
I use the old unsupported PlayingNow plugin to notify me when the track changes and the current and next track info.
Unfortunately... I believe JRiver now owns the rights to PlayingNow but has never updated or re-released it. For that reason, I can't use the 64bit version of MediaCenter.
I've asked many times for JRiver to update the PlayingNow plugin. There may be a very good reason JRiver has not done this, but they have never explained why.
mattkhan:
--- Quote from: Striker on December 29, 2023, 10:39:18 am ---I get full playback control using MC30.exe (or whatever version you use).
--- End quote ---
you get full control in HA?
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