VLC

The vlc platform allows you to control VLC media player.

To add a VLC media player to your installation, add the following to your configuration.yaml file:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
media_player:
  - platform: vlc

Configuration variables:

• name (Optional): The name to use in the frontend.
• arguments (Optional): Additional arguments to be passed to VLC.

Only the “music” media type is supported for now.

This service will control a background VLC instance, therefore you cannot use this to control a VLC instance launched on your desktop, unlike the Kodi media player for example.

Full configuration

A full configuration for VLC could look like the one below:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
media_player:
  - platform: vlc
    name: speaker_1
    arguments: '--alsa-audio-device=hw:1,0'

Additional configuration on macOS

On macOS python-vlc won’t find the VLC plugin directory unless you add this to the user’s .bash_profile that is running Home Assistant:

export VLC_PLUGIN_PATH=$VLC_PLUGIN_PATH:/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins

Additional configuration for Rasperry Pi

You need to add the homeassistant user to the audio group:

sudo usermod -a -G audio homeassistant