Home Assistant

Emulated Roku

This integration integrates an emulated Roku API into Home Assistant, so remotes such as Harmony and Android apps can connect to it through Wi-Fi as if it were a Roku player. Home Assistant will see key presses and app launches as Events, which you can use as triggers for automations. Multiple Roku servers may be started if you run out of buttons by specifying multiple server entries.

Windows is not supported because Home Assistant uses ProactorEventLoop which does not support UDP sockets.

This integration opens an unauthenticated API on the host, allowing anything on the local network to access your Home Assistant instance through the automations you create with emulated Roku as the trigger. Using a proxy with whitelisted IP addresses is recommended. (set advertise_ip to the proxy’s IP or DNS name)

Configuration

To add the Emulated Roku integration to your Home Assistant instance, use this My button:

Manual configuration

If you wish to configure advanced options, you can add the following entry in configuration.yaml.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
emulated_roku:
  servers:
    - name: Home Assistant
      listen_port: 8060

Configuration Variables

Looking for your configuration file?
name string Required

Name of the Roku that will be displayed as the serial number in Harmony.

listen_port integer Required

The port the Roku API will run on. This can be any free port on your system.

host_ip string (Optional)

The IP address that your Home Assistant installation is running on. If you do not specify this option, the integration will attempt to determine the IP address on its own.

advertise_ip string (Optional)

If you need to override the IP address or DNS name used for UPnP discovery. (For example, using network isolation in Docker or using a proxy)

advertise_port integer (Optional)

If you need to override the advertised UPnP port.

upnp_bind_multicast boolean (Optional, default: true)

Whether or not to bind the UPnP (SSDP) listener to the multicast address (239.255.255.250) or instead to the (unicast) host_ip address specified above (or automatically determined). The default is true, which will work in most situations. In special circumstances, like running in a FreeBSD or FreeNAS jail, you may need to disable this.

After starting up, you can check if the emulated Roku is reachable at the specified ports on your Home Assistant instance (eg.: http://192.168.1.101:8060/).

Events

Event roku_command

All Roku commands are sent as roku_command events.

Field Description
source_name Name of the emulated Roku instance that sent the event. Only required when using multiple instances to filter event sources.
type The type of the event that was called on the API.
key the code of the pressed key when the command type is keypress, keyup or keydown.
app_id the id of the app that was launched when command type is launch.
Available key codes
Home
Rev
Fwd
Play
Select
Left
Right
Down
Up
Back
InstantReplay
Info
BackSpace
Search
Enter

Automations

The following is an example implementation of an automation:

# Example automation
- id: amp_volume_up
  alias: "Increase amplifier volume"
  trigger:
  - platform: event
    event_type: roku_command
    event_data:
      source_name: Home Assistant
      type: keypress
      key: Fwd
  action:
  - service: media_player.volume_up
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.amplifier

Video tutorial

This comprehensive video tutorial explains how events work in Home Assistant and how you can set up Emulated Roku to control a media player using a physical remote control.

Troubleshooting

If you change your advertised IP or ports, you will have to re-add the emulated Roku in your app. When using Harmony, the app should auto-discover any changes via UPnP discovery (if name is unchanged) once it detects that the device is unreachable. Alternatively, you can trigger the ‘Fix’ page by pressing a button on the unreachable device’s remote in the app and wait ~10 seconds, then click ‘Fix it’.

Known limitations:

  • Some Android remotes send key up/down events instead of key presses.
  • Functionality other than key presses and app launches are not implemented yet.
  • App ids are limited between 1-10. (The emulated API reports 10 dummy apps)
  • Harmony uses UPnP discovery (UPnP is not needed after pairing), which might not work in Docker. You can:
    • Change Docker to host networking temporarily, then revert after pairing.
    • Run the advertise.py helper script from the emulated_roku library directly somewhere else and point it to the emulated Roku API.
  • Harmony cannot launch apps as it uses IR instead of the Wi-Fi API and will not display the custom dummy app list.
  • Home control buttons cannot be assigned to emulated Roku on the Harmony Hub Companion remote as they are limited to Hue (and possibly other APIs) within Harmony.
  • Harmony will not set the name of the added emulated Roku device to the specified name.