Album Art as base64 (mqtt)

[ThunderBirrddd]

Hey,
is it possible to fetch the album art in base64 encoded format instead of img entity, using mqtt.
I had tried it myself but didn't succeed.

[mikebrady]

Thanks for the question. I’m not familiar enough with MQTT to know what the standard is for encoding images ( is there one?), but the artwork is in Base64 format in the metadata pipe, if that’s of any use.

[aaronk6]

In theory, it should be possible to achieve this with an MQTT camera entity (see https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/camera.mqtt/). It can handle binary data received via MQTT, so no base64 encoding would be necessary. I’ll see if I can get that up and running.

[aaronk6]

It works.

However, it seems to always show the previous artwork, not the current one. This must be something in Home Assistant. The image I get when subscribing manually to the topic is the correct one:

mosquitto_sub -h homeassistant.example.com -t "shairport-sync/bad_dg/cover" -C 1 > cover.jpg

@ThunderBirrddd Can you test this on your end and report back what results you get?

[aaronk6]

Looks like it’s a known issue in Home Assistant: home-assistant/core#75930 I have quickly skimmed through this thread and it seems the suggested solution is sending two snapshots. That’s unfortunate.

[aaronk6]

Actually, scrap that—there is also an MQTT Image entity, which I totally did not have on my radar.

mqtt:
  - image:
      image_topic: shairport-sync/bad_dg/cover

This works perfectly here and updates almost instantly.

@mikebrady I’ll add this to my setup and see if it’s also stable over time. If so, I’ll make a PR to add it to the MQTT auto discovery payload (if publish_cover is enabled).

[mikebrady]

Fantastic, thanks.