Deeplink to jellyfin's androidtv app

[pheffner]

I'm using the Android TV Remote extension for Home Assistant to build a nice UI for controlling my Sony TVs with ATV. In order to launch apps on the TV, the platform uses deeplinks to start specific ones. An explanation of the deeplink scheme is found at:
The HA ATV Deeplink Guide
In that doc there is a list of apps which can be launched with their respective link strings. Most allow a URL format or sometimes a string of the form :// e.g. hulu:// or plex://

I tried using the HA developer tool to call the ATV service with parameter strings like jellyfin:// or JellyfinApplication:// which fails. (Using the same call method does launch YouTube, etc. successfuly.)

I retrieved the jellyfin-androidtv sources and looked for the android:host string in all of the AndroidManifest.xml files and found the section which would usually implement the deeplink is configured like this:

   <intent>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
        <data
            android:host="youtube.com"
            android:scheme="https" />
    </intent>

...which uses a URL to YouTube. If this were changed to something like:

       <intent-filter>
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"/>
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/>
            <data android:scheme="jellyfin"/>
        </intent-filter>

and pushed out in the next update it would probably implement a proper deeplink to the Jellyfin app. (I believe....)

[nielsvanvelzen]

The intent you found is part of a query definition to let the system know we're interested in finding out which apps can play YouTube videos, this is used for trailer playback.

At this time we do not have deeplink support in our Android apps. We do implement the Android search action and the view action (data = item id).

[pheffner]

Okay, thanks for your fast response.

[pandaboy6621]

What activity can I use to launch jellyfin's android tv version from Home Assistant?

[ebinf]

It depends on what you want to achieve. If you just want to open the app on your android tv, you could use the following adb command:

monkey -p org.jellyfin.androidtv 1

The resulting Home Assistant step would be:

service: androidtv.adb_command
metadata: {}
data:
  command: monkey -p org.jellyfin.androidtv 1
target:
  entity_id: <YOUR ANDROID TV>

But if you, like me, would like to open a specific title in the app, you could use the following adb command:

 adb shell am start -c android.intent.category.LEANBACK_LAUNCHER -a android.intent.action.VIEW -d <ID OF THE TITLE YOU WANT TO OPEN> -e source 30 org.jellyfin.androidtv/.ui.startup.StartupActivity

Here the resulting Home Assistant step would be:

service: androidtv.adb_command
data:
  command: >-
    adb shell am start -c android.intent.category.LEANBACK_LAUNCHER -a
    android.intent.action.VIEW -d <ID OF THE TITLE YOU WANT TO OPEN> -e source 30
    org.jellyfin.androidtv/.ui.startup.StartupActivity
target:
  entity_id: <YOUR ANDROID TV>

[pheffner]

Have a look at the Android TV Remote doc.
They show you how to call applications by their application ID. If you add a media card for the media player entity for your tv anywhere in your setup, it shows the application ID for the current app running on your TV. If you use your remote to start an app, you can find the appID that way.

The appID for the Jellyfin application is org.jellyfin.androidtv, so you can call it with yaml like this:

# Launch the Jellyfin app
action: media_player.play_media
data:
  media_content_type: app
  media_content_id: org.jellyfin.androidtv
target:
  entity_id: media_player.<your androidtv>

Works great for me, I hope this helps.