To give everyone a clearer understanding of our product pace and to help us prioritize key features, I plan to officially release our 2026 Q2 Product Roadmap next week，I will communicate with the product manager and colleagues in R&D
So I’ve done a lot more work and now have a new custom media entity in HA that updates faster and passes through media controls, fixes a lot of issues with the previous method but the restrictions of ROScard are still a barrier to better integration.
the card on the remote can show Artist and Album, but it cant show an app name or a movie title as far as I can tell, I am using some node-red funny business to translate these into Artist and Album fields as well as replacing NULL values with “ “ empty strings so that when switching the media_entity data source on the fly it doesn’t get stuck displaying the previous data if the new entity didnt have those fields for example. that is all a massive hack but with the current way the remote works it is my best option.
The card is rendered in an awkward layout, the play queue button is overlayed on the artwork but the input select (using the radio icon) is drawn next to the previous track button but offset awkwardly like its position is an error.
this layout could be greatly improved, especially if it were configurable from ROScard, even it it a choice of a few set layouts, or some ability to send a media type flag on the Media_entity to display the data in a different layout or with different data fields.
Another minor unrelated thing I have noticed, If I map one of the colour shortcut buttons to a script it displays a popup on the screen to confirm the action, that is fine, however when that popup is on screen the button cant be pushed again so rapid button presses are not possible without clearing the popup first. very minor issue, but the colour buttons should be able to be mapped directly in a TV card too, if there is no mapping in the TV card for that button it should revert to the default behaviour.
Some TV devices do still use the colour buttons regularly, such as my Satellite TV tuners which use them for recording, subtitles and other functions.
I’m pulling that data into a function node in Nodered and translating/sanitising the values to make a custom master media entity for the Astrion, it’s taken a bit of faffing about and I had to resort to asking gemini which I’m not proud of, but it grabs the current media player device config, replaces missing values with empty strings so you dont get ghost data stuck on screen (astrion ignores NULL data and keeps showing the old text) it also does things like moves the “app_name:” into the “artist” field and puts my current source in the track field for example.
Its a mess of superfluous and dangerously bad code that I need to go through and re-write now that I know what works but it works as is and solved my issue where I want one master media entity that is always referencing the current source, since I have one master TV card, I wanted one master media entity I can map to the music button to bring it up. I can still go to the page with all the individual entities but the master card is great when using the main system.
still has some issues due to astrions current software limitations, like media progress bars resetting if you reload the card, despite pushing updated data to it regularly by force from HA.
I would love to see this published as a flow on the NodeRED forum once you have it ready to go.
Just what I need, I have looked at trying to combine the two shield entities using Universal media player - Home Assistant but I do not think that will do what I want.
if you dont need to dynamically swap out the media entity with source switching you can use the universal media entity and have two sources, but you really need to manually define every attribute and the source for it if you want it to work properly, same goes for the commands and their targets.
if you open a media entity and go to the settings dots, then details, then toggle ymal mode you can get the attribute names in use, then in the universal entity you declare what you want for each one
Looking at the different Apps on the Shield, it will only give me media title, artist and position for Youtube. Disney, prime etc. do not show media title or position. Not really worth the effort for a card I do not use anyway.
It is probably an option Sanytron could give us for the ROS Media Player Card. Mapping different entities to the attributes available.
