Mediaplayer no cover

Thanks for the clear report, your guess was right. The screens always got picture links on port 8098, even when the app's port was changed to another number in its network settings, so your screen asked SwitchBot MQTT for the album covers. Version 0.4.24 fixes this: the app now asks Home Assistant which port you chose and uses that one. Update ESP Screen Manager, keep 8099, and the covers and station logos should show up. No firmware update is needed on the screen.

If they still stay empty after the update, let me know and we will look further.

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Yes! Works now with 0.4.24 Thanks.

A happy follow-up @knuti1960, since covers were the start of this: 0.4.42 (firmware 0.24.0) is out and takes the media card a lot further.

• The card sits on the colours of the cover that plays, with shuffle, repeat and a bar you drag through the track.
• The speaker it plays on is at the top of the card; tap it to choose another one, where the player offers speakers (Spotify does).
• The library key opens what Home Assistant can browse on the player, down to a page of covers. A tap plays one.
• Display → Favourite makes a tile that plays one playlist, album or artist with one tap.

_{Rendered from the firmware's own code, with made-up records.}

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Thanks for your tips—I’d already seen that and was happy to give it a try. I’m now running version 0.4.47 (firmware 0.28.0). It works perfectly with Music Assistant. For example, when I tap the player on the screen and use the button that appears to access the Music Assistant music selection, if I tap “Radio stations” and select one of the saved stations, it plays right away. And when I return to the media player tile, the station and the currently playing track are displayed there as well—great. However, I also have a few scripts that are supposed to play a station (from the radio browser) on the same media player. Each of these scripts has its own small tile on Guition. Tapping the tile causes the station to start playing immediately, as intended. However, this does not cause any change to the media player’s tile, which still displays the station that was playing previously. I hope I explained it clearly. I just like using the scripts to quickly access a few of my favorite channels without having to spend a long time searching for the channel I want in the player's submenus.

Good to hear it works well with Music Assistant, @knuti1960, and thanks for describing the scripts so clearly.

The screen takes everything one to one from Home Assistant: whatever Home Assistant updates on the player's entity, the tile updates too. So to see where this goes wrong we would like to know a bit more:

1. Which entity is the media tile set to, and which entity does the script play the station on? With Music Assistant a speaker often has two entities, its own one and the Music Assistant one, and they do not always show the same thing.
2. Right after you tap a script tile: open Developer tools → States in Home Assistant, look up the entity of the media tile, and tell us what media_title (and media_artist, if it is there) says. Is it the new station, or still the previous one?
3. Does Home Assistant's own media card for that entity show the new station?
4. If you can, paste the script (the play_media part is enough).

If Home Assistant itself still shows the old station on that entity, the tile is following it faithfully and the fix is pointing the tile or the script at the other entity. If Home Assistant shows the new station and the tile does not, that is a bug on our side and we will fix it.

Got a screen running? Tell others which board you have and what works on the Tessera website. It helps everyone pick a screen that works.

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As I expected, neither the media player tabs in HA nor the developer tools show the newly selected station. However, the new station is playing; the media player tab in HA shows "playing," and so does the Guiton display. Control functions work as well—I can pause and resume playback. The only issue is that the wrong station is still being displayed—namely, the one that was playing previously. So this is definitely not a problem with Tessera.

It's a constant headache for me here—this whole thing with the different media players and sources. It's been a problem ever since I started using Music Assistant. There are exactly two entities for the device (a VoicePE), no more. These are media_player.voicepe_buro_media_player and media_player.home_assistant_voice_09c929_media_player. The first one is used in the script, and it is also the one displayed in the Home Assistant. I'm not even sure if I still need the other entity; I'm deliberately not using it anywhere. I’ve modified the script (or rather, all the scripts) regarding source selection: I’m now doing it exactly as in the MA: MA → Radio

sequence:
  - action: media_player.play_media
    metadata: {}
    data:
      media:
        media_content_id: library://radio/1
        media_content_type: music
        metadata:
          title: WDR 4 Rheinland
          thumbnail: >-
            https://api.ardmediathek.de/image-service/images/urn:ard:image:d175125f33f1924c?w=1400
          media_class: music
          children_media_class: null
          navigateIds:
            - {}
            - media_content_type: music_assistant
              media_content_id: radio
          browse_entity_id: media_player.voicepe_buro_media_player
      enqueue: replace
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.voicepe_buro_media_player
alias: Musik - WDR 4 Rheinland auf Voice PE Büro MA
description: ''

So far, it's been working. Finally, a light at the end of the tunnel. It doesn't explain why it doesn't work with the older scripts, but whatever—the main thing is that it works as intended now. Before, it was:

sequence:
  - action: media_player.play_media
    target:
      entity_id: media_player.voicepe_buro_media_player
    data:
      media:
        media_content_id: media-source://radio_browser/905f3c23-60fc-4636-9e82-9d33078b8793
        media_content_type: audio/mpeg
        metadata:
          title: WDR 4
          thumbnail: >-
            https://www1.wdr.de/resources-v5.132.3/img/favicon/apple-touch-icon.png
          media_class: music
          children_media_class: null
          navigateIds:
            - {}
            - media_content_type: app
              media_content_id: media-source://radio_browser
            - media_content_type: music
              media_content_id: media-source://radio_browser/language
            - media_content_type: music
              media_content_id: media-source://radio_browser/language/de
          browse_entity_id: media_player.home_assistant_voice_09c929_media_player
alias: Musik WDR4 Live Radio im Büro via VoicePE
description: ''

That's where I ran into problems. Ultimately, I'll just have to wait and see if it keeps working this way. I've thought that many times before when dealing with similar problems, and then things always turned out differently. :-)