mpv integration for Home Assistant

An Home Assistant Media Player integration for the mpv media player, using mpv's JSON IPC API.

Setup

Installation

The integration can be installed by adding it as a custom repository to HACS. In Home Assistant, navigate to HACS > Integrations > Custom repositories (in the top-right menu). Under Repository enter oxan/home-assistant-mpv, and under Category select Integration. The integration should now appear in HACS.

Configuration

Start mpv with the input-ipc-server option set to the socket location:

mpv --input-ipc-server=/path/to/mpv-socket

Configure the integration in the Home Assistant configuration.yaml file:

media_player:
  - platform: mpv
    name: "MPV Player"
    server:
      path: /path/to/mpv-socket

Restart Home Assistant and enjoy!

Remote mpv

It is also possible to connect to a remove mpv instance over the network. First, ensure that socat is installed, and create a script that runs socat to expose the mpv socket on a network port (2352 in the following example). It is important that this script has the extension .run, and is executable (run chmod +x socat.run):

#!/bin/sh
exec socat TCP-LISTEN:2352,fork UNIX-CONNECT:/path/to/mpv-socket

Start mpv with using the --script option to have it run the script on startup:

mpv --input-ipc-server=/path/to/mpv-socket --script=/path/to/socat.run

Finaly, configure the integration to connect over the network:

media_player:
  - platform: mpv
    name: "MPV Player"
    server:
      host: 192.168.1.100
      port: 2352

Other useful mpv options

You can additionally use the --idle mpv option to have it remain alive if no media is playing.

Playback using local paths

When starting playback through Home Assistant, by default it will stream all media through its own HTTP server. If mpv and Home Assistant can access the media files using the same filesystem path, you can disable this and play media directly from the filesystem. This reduces resource usage and allows mpv to find external subtitle files.

media_player:
  - platform: mpv
    server:
      path: /path/to/mpv-socket
    proxy_media: false