Home Assistant

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
VLC currently not supported with Hass.io

According to the forum topic “How to add VLC into my Hassio”, it is not possible to install packages like VLC on Hass.io.