The Template integration in Home Assistant can now build media player entities. The pull request was merged on 27 October 2026 and is part of 2026.11.0b0, the first beta of the November release, published on 28 October at 17:06 CET. Until now, anyone who controlled a TV, amplifier or old receiver through an IR blaster, a smart plug or a set of scripts usually ended up with separate buttons and switches, or reached for a custom integration. A template media player turns those pieces into one entity that dashboards, voice assistants and automations understand.

What you can define

  • State: a template that returns off, on, idle, playing, paused or buffering. The deprecated standby state is rejected.
  • Attributes: templates for volume, mute, shuffle, repeat, source and sound mode (with their lists), media position, duration and track, plus metadata such as title, artist, album, content ID and type, and artwork.
  • Actions: 18 of them, covering power, playback, seek, play media, volume, mute, source, sound mode, shuffle and repeat. Each action you configure switches on the matching feature, and it receives the action's data as variables. Volume up and volume down must be configured together.

Without a state template

If you skip the state template, the player runs in optimistic mode: power and playback actions set the state themselves. Volume, mute, source, sound mode, shuffle and repeat are also optimistic when they have no template. That suits one-way IR control, where the device never reports back what it's doing.

A few details show the feature was thought through. The position only advances when the position or the state changes, and pausing keeps the time elapsed since the last sample. Artwork goes through the media player image proxy, with the entity picture as a fallback. After a restart the state, optimistic attributes and metadata are restored, so trigger-based players aren't empty until the next trigger fires.

Where to set it up

Template media players work in YAML, both state-based and trigger-based, and in the UI. In the UI they're created as a template helper, with a preview and an options flow covering state, power, volume, playback and source. The device class can only be chosen when the entity is created.

When to expect it

This is a beta feature, so details can still change before the stable 2026.11 release. If you want to try it now, install the beta on a test system rather than your main one.