Emulated Roku
The Emulated Roku integrationIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] 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 integrationIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] 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 steps
If the above My button doesn’t work, you can also perform the following steps manually:
-
Browse to your Home Assistant instance.
-
In the bottom right corner, select the
Add Integration button. -
From the list, select Emulated Roku.
-
Follow the instructions on screen to complete the setup.
Manual configuration
If you wish to configure advanced options, you can add the following entry in your configuration.yaml
The configuration.yaml file is the main configuration file for Home Assistant. It lists the integrations to be loaded and their specific configurations. In some cases, the configuration needs to be edited manually directly in the configuration.yaml file. Most integrations can be configured in the UI. [Learn more] file.
After changing the configuration.yaml
The configuration.yaml file is the main configuration file for Home Assistant. It lists the integrations to be loaded and their specific configurations. In some cases, the configuration needs to be edited manually directly in the configuration.yaml file. Most integrations can be configured in the UI. [Learn more] file, restart Home Assistant to apply the changes.
# Example configuration.yaml entry
emulated_roku:
servers:
- name: Home Assistant
listen_port: 8060
Configuration Variables
The port the Roku API will run on. This can be any free port on your system.
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.
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)
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 |
PowerOff |
Automations
The following is an example implementation of an automation:
# Example automation
- id: amp_volume_up
alias: "Increase amplifier volume"
triggers:
- trigger: event
event_type: roku_command
event_data:
source_name: Home Assistant
type: keypress
key: Fwd
actions:
- action: 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
.