Home Assistant Remote Control For My Samsung TV and Sonos – Version 2

In a previous post I described the build of a remote control for my Samsung TV and Sonos sound bar from within Home Assistant. I have received considerable interest in this post and many questions. If you have not read this post, I suggest you read it first. Click on link to view – Home Assistant Remote Control For My Samsung TV and Sonos

Since this last post I had trouble with my Home Assistant server (Raspberry Pi 4). The SD card died, and unfortunately my backup processes were not very good. So I had to rebuild HA from a very old backup and from this blog (turned out to be good user test for the blog).

In rebuilding the remote control page I have made a couple of changes, and discovered a new configuration that was required. I am not sure why it fully worked in the first version. So, I have described these changes in this blog.

The two main changes are to replace the navigation buttons with a touchpad, and described the configuration step to build/define the Samsung TV app list. It seems that this might sometimes be done automatically during the integration installation, but if not you will need to do this manually.

Touchpad Navigation

I found that using the navigation buttons on my original design worked ok, but sometimes I would miss the buttons if I was scrolling horizontally through a list. I decided to replace the buttons with a touchpad, which makes it easy to just swipe sideways and vertically around the TV screens. I just then tap the pad to select. It works really well and is much easier.

I have found a HACS card that enables the creation of a full TV remote from within Home Assistant with a touchpad navigation – ‘TV Remote Card (with touchpad and haptic feedback)‘. Full documentation can be found at https://github.com/usernein/tv-card.

This card provides a configurable remote with a touchpad navigation. It looks like a great remote, but does not quite have some of the formatting I wanted. But if you want a remote that can be simply installed from within HACS, I fully recommend this card.

So, I installed the card, and only turned on the touchpad. This might seem quite an overkill, imbedding a full remote inside another remote – however, it does what I need.

Quote from the TV Remote Card github site:

The TV-Card is a simple HACS install. I have only turned on the touchpad, and I have added some card-mod formatting to fit with the styling of the overall page.

type: custom:tv-card
entity: media_player.home_tv
navigation_row: touchpad
card_mod:
  style: |
    toucharea {
      border-radius: 10px;
      border:1px solid;
      border-color:#575757;
      flex-grow: 1;
      height: 200px;
      background: #2d2d2d;
      touch-action: none;
      text-align: center;
    }
    .row {
      display: flex;
      padding: 8px 8px 8px 8px;
      justify-content: space-evenly;
    }

Samsung TV App List Configuration

I have used the custom component Home Assistant SamsungTV Smart Component to provide integration between Home Assistant and my Samsung TV (see first post). It seems that in certain conditions the installation will automatically build the App List for all the apps that are installed on the TV. This is what seems to have happened the first time I installed the integration, but the second time I had to configure this list manually. I have absolutely no idea why this happened.

You first need to find the Samsung App IDs for each of your required TV apps. Fortunately a substantial list of apps and their IDs are available from the following web site. Go to https://github.com/tavicu/homebridge-samsung-tizen/wiki/Applications – this is a great resource and had all the apps I needed.

You then go to the ‘SamsungTV Smart’ integration in Home Assistant settings and click on the CONFIGURE link. You then click on the ‘Show Advanced Options’ check and submit. You will then be presented with a number of options – click on the ‘Applications list configuration >’. This will present you with the input screen to add the app list codes. My list included:

Netflix: "11101200001"
YouTube: "111299001912"
Plex: "3201512006963"
Prime Video: "3201512006785"
7plus: "3201803015934"
9Now: "3201607010031"
Kayo Sports: "3201910019354"
ABC iview: "3201812017479"
10 play: "3201704012147"
BINGE: "3202010022098"
SBS On Demand: "3201510005981"

Once you submit and save this list, restart Home Assistant and the full list of apps will be available for selection within the Remote Control.

I hope you find this post useful. If you have any questions or comments, please leave details below.