Home Assistant

Media extractor

The media_extractor integration gets a stream URL and sends it to a media player entity. This integration can extract entity specific streams if configured accordingly.

Media extractor doesn't transcode streams, it just tries to find a stream that matches the requested query.

To use the media extractor service in your installation, add the following to your configuration.yaml file:

# Example configuration.yaml entry
media_extractor:

Configuration Variables

Looking for your configuration file?
default_query string (Optional, default: best)

Set default stream query for all devices.

customize list (Optional)

Set entity specific values.

# Example configuration.yaml entry
media_extractor:
  default_query: worst
  customize:
    media_player.my_sonos:
      video: bestvideo
      music: bestaudio[ext=mp3]

This configuration sets query for all service calls like to ‘bestaudio’ with the mp3 extension:

entity_id: media_player.my_sonos
media_content_id: https://soundcloud.com/bruttoband/brutto-11
media_content_type: music

Query examples with explanations:

  • bestvideo: Best video only stream
  • best: Best video + audio stream
  • bestaudio[ext=m4a]: Best audio stream with m4a extension
  • worst: Worst video + audio stream
  • bestaudio[ext=m4a]/bestaudio[ext=ogg]/bestaudio: Best m4a audio, otherwise best ogg audio and only then any best audio

More info about queries can be found here.

Use the service

Navigate to the Services tab inside Developer Tools. From the “Service” dropdown menu select media_extractor.play_media and then press the “Fill Example Data” button at the bottom of the page. Use the “Entity ID” dropdown to select your media player and then press the Call Service button.

This will download the file from the given URL.

Service data attribute Optional Description
entity_id yes Name(s) of entities to seek media on, e.g., media_player.living_room_chromecast. Defaults to all.
media_content_id no The ID of the content to play. Platform dependent.
media_content_type no The type of the content to play. Must be one of MUSIC, TVSHOW, VIDEO, EPISODE, CHANNEL or PLAYLIST MUSIC.

Cookies

Some supported video services provide a better experience when you are logged in. For example, if you use Twitch Turbo or are subscribed to a Twitch streamer, logging in prevents the video stream from showing an “An ad is currently playing. Come back after the break.” message until the ad is over. Other examples are private or purchased YouTube videos which you can only watch while logged in. You can add a Netscape format cookie file in the Home Assistant configuration directory. The cookie file will be loaded each time a stream is loaded:

config/media_extractor/cookies.txt

To generate the cookie file, you can use a browser extension (like Get Cookies.txt LOCALLY). If you want to create one manually, follow this specification: https://curl.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html.