Thank you! This is very well explained. My use case is a bit different and I have less flexibility with an older TV (Samsung LN52a750) and Receiver (Onkyo sr505). In my home, everyone "forgets" to turn off the TV. Using Home Assistant, I set up an automation to monitor the state of the Amazon Fire TV Stick. If the state is on "Idle" or "Standby" for a total of 10 mins, HA sends a TurnOff command via Harmony. The previous state must be From: "Playing", "Standby" (screensaver) or "Paused". Your tips on checking the STATES tab in Developer Tools is very useful. When I first wrote my automation, I was monitoring the "state_changed" log under EVENTS, which is very verbose. Now I know more ways to leverage the tools available in HA thanks to your video.
Great Video! Very helpful, thanks a lot! :) Would be awesome if you could show how you can recreate the harmony functions which you mentioned at the end.
Thans so much! What a genius idea! I've been struggling with this issue for quite some time, but never thought about using HA to sync harmony hub state based on HA entity states!. I have 2 hubs and this solution will work perfectly for one with Denon AVR-S750H, which I use for my TV Room. However I predict some issues with my listening room, where I use Marantz Model 30 amplifier along with Marantz SACD30n player. These devices do not integrate with HA using Denon AVR integration (even if this is the same company and integration can sense device on HA start - setup does not finishes). So I can only control Marantz using HEOS integration. This works pretty nice from HA, however HEOS integration does not provide information about power status of device (entity state is either playing something or idle and there is no source attribute). For HA purpose I actually combine HEOS with Harmony integrations via media_player_template custom component to create entity, that have all required state and attributes... but for your solution it would create 'circular reference' :-) Any idea to overcome this?
Great video thanks, I’m just starting out with HA so will check out your basics videos. Do you have any idea if it’s possible to use HA to detect if an AVR is currently playing or paused? I am looking to set up an automation to adjust the lights if something ie blu-ray player starts playing or pauses? Thanks for any help…
and is it possible to create switches (or waht else) to use the activities for alexa, including a seperate power off switch, to switch off, what ever acitvity is active
