Here is my problem:

Our TV is connected to a SBC running a GNOME/Wayland desktop, where we watch Jellyfin and sometimes Netflix/Hulu through Firefox.

I’d like to be able to trigger pause/play (space button) from Home Assistant, which is running on my home server.

What I am thinking of would be a server/daemon running on the TV computer that my home server would be able to send keys to via a CLI tool (in this case the space key). I am surprised to find that I cannot locate any program like this.

Can anyone provide any suggestions here?

Other ideas:

  • Jellyfin’s HA integration doesn’t let me pause/play from it, and that still doesn’t handle Hulu/Netflix.
  • I was able to get this working through SSH and there are tools like ydotool/wtype here that work, but I found waiting for SSH to be a bit slow to connect.

Update: I got frustrated and coded up a solution: https://gitlab.com/neilsimp1/kbsrv