MediaPond Launch note

Bring existing devices into media rooms

Home Assistant and MediaPond: your existing devices, in the media room

If you already run Home Assistant then you have solved the hard part of the house, so MediaPond does not ask you to do it again. It connects to your instance and brings the devices you care about into the rooms where the media lives.

Connecting your instance

You point MediaPond at your Home Assistant instance and authorize it. The connection is to your own server on your own network, so there is no MediaPond account involved and nothing about your house is copied elsewhere.

From there you choose what to bring across, rather than importing hundreds of entities you will never press.

Why a media room is a different room

A general home dashboard has to represent everything equally. A media room does not, because what matters there is the screen, the sound and the light level, in that order, with the film you are choosing at the centre.

MediaPond is that second view, so a lamp brought in from Home Assistant sits beside the television controls and dimming it becomes part of starting a film rather than a separate app and a separate tap.

Both, rather than either

Nothing is moved out of Home Assistant, so your automations, your history and your dashboards stay exactly where they are and MediaPond only borrows the devices it needs to make a room coherent.

For a mixed house that is usually the right answer: Home Assistant for the whole building, MediaPond for the two or three rooms where people actually watch things.

The devices MediaPond talks to directly, meaning the televisions, the streamers and the Matter lights, are still found on your own network rather than routed through your instance, so a Home Assistant restart does not take the remote down with it. What a given entity can do inside MediaPond depends on what your instance exposes and on the integration behind it.

At a glance

What Home Assistant supports

  • Connecting your own Home Assistant instance over your network
  • Bringing selected devices into MediaPond rooms
  • Lighting controls beside the room’s television, streamer and speakers
  • Lights included in room power-on and scenes
  • Nothing removed or migrated out of Home Assistant

What can be brought across depends on your Home Assistant version and configuration, and on the integrations you already run. Home Assistant releases can change how those entities behave.

Questions

Home Assistant questions

The full FAQ covers pricing, privacy and availability.

Does MediaPond replace Home Assistant?

No, it sits beside it. Home Assistant carries on running the house while MediaPond gives the media rooms a control surface built around watching something.

Does my Home Assistant data go anywhere?

No. The connection is between the app and your own instance on your own network.

Do I have to import everything?

No. You pick the devices worth having in a media room and leave the rest where they are.

Also worth reading

Devices and services MediaPond supports · How a room comes up · Questions and answers

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