Controlling your Jellyfin media for streaming onto various devices usually involves opening an app, choosing something to play, and enjoying. It's not a terrible setup, but what if you could do all of that and turn down your lighting at the same time? That's where Home Assistant comes into play. This powerful tool can hook into all your smart home equipment and display everything through a single interface. The best part? It's all self-hosted!
What are Jellyfin and Home Assistant?
Jellyfin is a powerful media cataloging and streaming platform. It takes all your purchased media, be it TV shows, movies, or music, and catalogs everything with metadata, album art, and more. Libraries can be configured to keep all your media separate and playlists can be curated for streamlined playback. Think of it as your own Netflix and Spotify service, but hosted from your home. It eases the strain on your Internet connection by streaming everything over the LAN and it's perfect on network-attached storage (NAS) devices or home servers.
When it comes to smart home products, many of them have dedicated ecosystems. Amazon's Fire TV devices, Philips Hue lighting, speakers, and HVAC all have their respective controls and apps. Keeping tabs on everything can be a pain and even when you finally get around to arranging your smartphone home screen into folders, it will still force you to switch between apps. Home Assistant is a smart home management service that attempts to solve this problem by integrating with all supported ecosystems.
You can control lighting and HVAC, view weather reports, manage servers, and more through a single interface. What you likely didn't know is Jellyfin is supported by Home Assistant so you don't even need to fire up one of the apps to manage what's being played.
How to install Jellyfin on a NAS
Jellyfin seems complicated, but it doesn't have to be. This is how to set it up on TrueNAS.
How to connect Jellyfin to Home Assistant
Hooking Jellyfin into your Home Assistant ecosystem is a painless process that take s acouple of minutes. There's no commands to enter nor do you require a degree in computer science. Here's how to do it:
- Go to the Jellyfin Home Assistant page.
- Click the "Add integration to my Home Assistant" button.
- Click Open link.
- Click OK.
- Enter your Jellyfin server credentials.
- Click Submit.
- Configure all the detected devices and click Finish.
- Jellyfin is now integrated into Home Assistant!
You can now use Jellyfin through your home without leaving Home Assistant. Widgets will be added to the dashboard to manipulate playback on various devices, be it a TV, PC, or smartphone. Home Assistant apps can now control what's played through sound systems and media centers, allowing you to control everything within your home from a single source.