Media player
A unified view over speakers, receivers, and TVs you've already connected through their own
integrations - not a device you add directly. Adding a media player just picks an already-
configured device from Sonos/SYMFONISK,
Spotify, Denon AVR, your
LG webOS, Samsung Tizen, or
Android TV, or an ESPHome
device's own media_player: component, and gives it one consistent set of controls.
Why it exists
Each of those eight sources has its own real capabilities and its own entity shape - a TV can't
report volume the way a speaker can, and Denon reports volume in native dB rather than a
percentage. Media player wraps all eight behind the same key names (power,
state, volume, mute, play_pause,
next/previous, source, media_title/
media_artist/media_album) so one Dashboard card type and one Automation
node work the same way regardless of which brand is behind it - but only ever shows the keys a
given source actually supports for real. A TV-backed player shows just a power toggle; a Sonos-
backed one shows the full transport/volume/track widget; an ESPHome-backed one shows state
(read-only) plus controllable volume and mute. Volume is always normalized to 0-100% here, even
for Denon's own native dB range.
An ESPHome device's own media_player: entity also supports play/pause/stop and arbitrary-URL announcement playback directly (used by the AI Assistant's own per-Area announcement target) - just not surfaced as its own unified Media player key here yet, since transport control belongs to whatever content is already playing on the device rather than something a generic card would drive. An ESPHome device can also expose more than one media_player: component, so the "Add media player" picker lists each one separately by name when a device has more than one.
The Dashboard card
A dedicated "Media player" card type picks one media player and renders whichever controls actually resolve for it. A dropdown in the card body lets you switch which configured player the same card drives at any time - one card can stand in for all of them instead of needing one per device. There's no album art, since none of the eight wrapped sources expose an artwork URL.
Tizen and Android TV only ever expose a power toggle here - both platforms are fire-only remote control with no readback for volume/mute/source at all, so nothing else is faked.