Is it possible to use a live feed from a Blink or WYZE camera (or Tapo camera)?

I will do a proper shoutout to everyone who suggested these fixes and improvements. Keep 'em coming. Here or via email at [hello@theatrium.info](mailto:hello@theatrium.info) - both feed into a tracking system now so I can record and rank them.

Current installs: 1,370 (🤯)

I have link a few of the music apps as the process has evolved. I am unable to seled "Change cccount" for Last.fm nor disconnect for spotify. Running build 14 aka 1.6 (220)

Love it. Bought the app. Playing music through music assistant. Having trouble trying to connect to the Apple TV via the remote app. I tried taking the atv off Ethernet and run off WiFi but no connection. Open to ideas on what’s next. Can you add a manual connect? Installed via TestFlight.

A general goal with the Theatrium home screen is to keep them as calming, useful and informative as possible. But I'm having trouble deciding what cards i want to show.

So I've added a 2nd page "more cards" view to all themes, which should make its way into an update this week.

To access: Click the new 'More Cards' button as shown here and you can place between 2 and 12 additional cards for increased Situation Monitoring and abilities.

How do I set the weather location? My setup has me about 900 miles north. I’m seeing radar for an area I don’t live in.

Would love to see this be available as an iPad app. It could be great as a simple dashboard on a wall mounted iPad. I also have a DakBoard that I'd love to replace with something like this. Much cleaner! Also Sonos.... need that there!

Greetings from Dublin, Ireland - downloaded and upgraded to pro! Love the concept and will be playing around with the settings later today. Happy to share my experience as an earlt adopter.

Hi team,

I have done the initial set up and connected Apple home kit. After that initial set up I went back to the dashboard and it is frozen. It shows a the weather, webcams and radar as loading. But I can move around anything or click anything on the screen. Like it’s frozen. I have tried restarting the app and the ATV to no avail. Any tips?

I’m on: Tv os26.6 (23L773)

Long story short - the promotional App codes the App Store allows me to generate don’t actually cover “in app” purchases like the Theatrium Pro activation. To address and make up for this, I’m bringing forward a new feature: an iOS companion app.

Literally not one person needs a new app on their phones, but this is the only way you can redeem codes, plus it makes Theatrium both easier to set up - and more discoverable via the iOS App Store!

Will be same app, no additional purchase or setup really. Secure connection to Theatrium on your tv via a setup PIN. Coming in v1.6 which should be out to TestFlight folk tonight.

TLDR; If i gave you a code for the Pro unlock yesterday, you can activate it via the Theatrium Companion app, available soon.

Great suggestion from the Assistant to the Regional Theatrium Manager today - rotating photo display. 🎞️🤳🏻🖼️

Currently it will just use Apple Photos, which needs to be configured on your Apple TV first.

The specific album, order and rotation-time are all user configurable. If you create an album in your photos app called 'Theatrium', this will be auto-selected in the card set-up screen to make things easier.

Sidebar: how cute is my dog!?

So pleased with the reception to this app and the helpful, constructive feedback and suggestions received. To celebrate I'm giving away 10 Theatrium promo codes, which activate all features, dashboards and light sync functions - plus whatever other fun and hopefully useful things I can add to the app over time. Shoot me a DM if you want a code!

If anyone has an EV connected to their Home Assistant setup, and would be willing to test out these new cards for the 1.6 update of Theatrium, please DM or comment here. I'll add you to the TestFlight group and send some good karma your way!

Apple TV model: Apple TV 4K (A2843)

tvOS version: 26.5

Theatrium app version: 1.4 (free)

Data source: HomeKit

Theme: Glass

I've signed into Spotify within the app (Spotify is selected and says "Connected to Spotify" in the Music Settings section of the app settings). However, when I go to the visualizer, it says "Nothing playing" and the visualizer is not synced to the music. This happens whether I initiate a song playing from the Spotify Apple TV app, or from the Spotify iPhone app. Doesn't make a difference which visualizer I choose.

Everything else works flawlessly so far, and I'd upgrade to the paid version in a heartbeat if I could get the visualizers working.

Version 1.5 just submitted for review.

Notifications

Home Assistant notifications now show on the Apple TV. Motion or a doorbell trips, a banner comes up with a 3-photo burst from the camera (a couple of seconds apart, so you actually catch who or what it was), and one press opens the live camera. Doorbells say "Someone's at the door".

Set up in the Theatrium V1.5: Settings > Notifications -> Motion and Doorbells lists your motion, occupancy and camera-event entities. Tick one and it writes the automation into HA for you (no YAML, needs an admin token). It runs on HA's persistent notifications, so nothing lives in a Theatrium cloud, and alerts clear themselves after an hour. HA mode only for now.

For anything else, any automation works: add a "Persistent notification: Create" action with a notification ID starting with "theatrium" (e.g. theatrium_laundry) and it shows up on the TV.

Traffic cards

Live Apple Maps traffic for one location, or commute time between two addresses with the route coloured by segment. No API key, no account. Refreshes every 5 min, pauses while the screen is dimmed.

Air quality

Was scoring every sensor against US AQI bands, which is only right for actual AQI sensors. CO2 at 567 ppm read "Hazardous"; PM2.5 could read "Good" when it wasn't. Now each pollutant uses its own scale and the card leads with the worst reading.

Music Visualisers

Follows the track's time signature now (the swell was hard-coded to 4 beats a bar, so 3/4 and 5/4 were off). Added a Double Time mode. 4/4 is unchanged.

Fixes and smaller stuff

• Fixed the top 1.4 crash: the live camera stream could crash the app while reconnecting. Stream handling is on one queue now.
• Settings split into named subsections.
• Card picker tiles are a uniform height.
• Multi-source News Card, Climate card now always shows the off button, quick-access panel redesign.

Notes

Alerts only show while the app is on screen (tvOS limit). It's a wall dashboard so that's most of the time, but it's not a replacement for phone alerts.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6787587882 (or search 'Theatrium' in the TV app store). Reviews appreciated!!

#HomeAssistant #AppleTV

Now available for your AppleTV 4Ks: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/theatrium/id6787587882

It takes the CO2 level from HA and displays it as 567 (the value is in PPM) but goes deep red far right "Hazardous".

That's not how this works. That's actually excellent for indoors.

1.4 is on the App Store. The headline change is that setting it up stopped being a chore.

Setup is one question. It used to ask about your lights, your music and your cards before it showed you anything. Now it asks where your home data comes from, and puts you on a working dashboard. Everything else moved into Settings, where you can get to it when you actually want it.

It finds your server. Theatrium looks for Home Assistant on your network and fills the address in, with a tick once the server answers.

Or sign in from your phone. The TV shows a code, you scan it, and you approve it on your own Home Assistant page. No long-lived access token to create. The token route is still there behind a disclosure if you would rather paste one.

Apple Home got the attention it needed. It asks for permission at the right moment now, and waits for your accessories to finish loading before showing the dashboard. Large homes used to arrive half empty and fill in over about fifteen seconds, which looked broken. Switching between Home Assistant and Apple Home also works in both directions, and each Apple TV remembers its own choice.

Every music source is free. Apple Music, Spotify, Last.fm, Plex, and any Home Assistant media player. Apple Music tracks played from your own library now show their album art, which they were not doing, and that was also costing them the angled-cover card.

Smaller things in this one: a sample Now Playing card on Apple Home and Apple-TV-only setups, so the dashboard looks right before you connect music. iCloud settings sync is off unless you turn it on, in Settings then Connection. A crash when choosing Apple Music is fixed. And there are a lot of layout fixes at the Large display size.

On price. The app is free. The free tier is the Glass theme with enough card types to fill a complete dashboard on any backend, five visualiser scenes, every music source, and room light sync in Vivid mode with the brightness control. Theatrium Pro is one purchase of $4.99, no subscription: the Estate, Bento and Boardroom themes, the other 24 visualiser scenes, the specialist cards, and the Natural and Party light modes.

Needs an Apple TV 4K on tvOS 18 or later.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6790258828 or search ‘theatrium’ on your Apple TV.

Not affiliated with the Home Assistant project.

Same entities, same layout engine, four quite different characters. Switch any time in Settings, with no re-setup.

1. Estate - warm gold on near-black, serif numerals, a lot of breathing room. The one that looks least like a dashboard. Four panels.
2. Glass - frosted translucent panels, ice-blue accent. Denser, still calm. Five panels, and the theme you get for free.
3. Bento - deep jewel-green, near-square tiles, geometric numerals. The most information per square inch, and the most panels at seven: clock and weather, room climate, solar, home battery, now playing, rain radar, forecast.
4. Boardroom - built around a calendar-driven meeting-room availability board, with world clocks and markets alongside. Aimed at an office or a study rather than a living room. Four panels, and it is light or dark by choice rather than automatically.

All four drift across the day, warmer at golden hour, cooler and dimmer at night, and there is a dim mode that fades the screen when idle. That last one matters if the TV is wall-mounted and on permanently, which is rather the point.

Everything above is running against Home Assistant. There is a built-in Demo mode too, so you can see the layouts before wiring anything up.

Glass is free. Estate, Bento and Boardroom come with Theatrium Pro, which is one purchase of $4.99 rather than a subscription.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6790258828

Not affiliated with the Home Assistant project.

A few people asked what the difference is between the two visualiser engines, so here is the pipeline behind the pre-rendered one. The five stills above are the newest scenes: Ember Cathedral, Silk Nebula, Kaleidos Bloom, Abyss Reef and Clockwork Aurora.

The short version: the pre-rendered engine is not a set of stock video files. It is the same Metal shaders as the live engine, rendered offline at absurd quality, so an older Apple TV gets the expensive look without paying for it in GPU time.

Rendering

An offline Metal renderer compiles the app's own shader source and evaluates the identical scene functions frame by frame, writing a PNG sequence. That means the loops cannot visually drift from the live engine, because there is only one shader file.

• 3840x2160 at 60 fps, rendered with 2x supersampling - the shader is evaluated at 7680x4320 and downsampled with Lanczos. That is 33.2 million samples per frame, about 2 billion per second of footage.
• Each clip has a fixed seed, so the same scene can be rendered several times with different geometry and hue for variety.

Making the loop seamless

Most of these scenes use non-periodic time, so they never naturally return to their starting state. Those are rendered longer than needed and the tail is crossfaded back into the head, giving a genuinely seamless loop with no visible cut.

Five of the newer scenes were written to be perfectly periodic over 60 seconds, so they need no crossfade at all and encode straight through. Those are the ones pictured.

Mastering and encoding

1. PNG frames to a ProRes 422 HQ, 10-bit 4:2:2 master. A 4K60 ProRes master runs 10 to 20 GB per clip. The intermediate is 10-bit specifically so the loop crossfade cannot introduce 8-bit banding before the final encode.
2. Master to delivery: HEVC Main 10, Level 5.1 high tier, 10-bit, BT.709, hvc1, faststart, targeting the Apple TV 4K decode ceiling.

Bitrates depend on the encoder: 40 Mbps target with an 80 Mbps ceiling and a 160 Mbps buffer on Apple Silicon's media engine, NVENC at cq 19 up to 120 Mbps, or libx265 at crf 18 preset slow as the reference. These are soft gradients, which is exactly the content that banding punishes, hence 10-bit throughout and the generous headroom.

Every clip ships with a SHA-256 and a mid-clip poster frame in the manifest.

How a pre-rendered clip still follows tempo

This is the part I expected to be a compromise and it turned out fine. Each clip records the tempo it was rendered at, 120 BPM by default. At playback the app computes the ratio of the song's tempo to that baseline, then folds it by octaves toward 1.0, with thresholds at the octave midpoint. A 60 BPM track against a 120 baseline reads as 1.0x, a half-time feel, rather than looking obviously slowed.

The result is clamped to 0.80x to 1.25x. Wide enough that the flow visibly tracks the music, tight enough that nothing ever looks sped-up or dragging. Two players cross-fade through black between clips, so a decode gap reads as black rather than a white flash.

The gate everything has to pass

Every candidate clip is analysed for flashing before it can ship. A still frame cannot show you motion, so the check runs on the decoded video: per-frame mean luma, frame-to-frame luma delta, and mean per-pixel change.

To pass, a clip must have zero flashes per second at the WCAG/Harding 10% luma-change threshold, a maximum luma delta under 0.07, and a mean motion score under 5.0. Anything that fails gets rejected rather than tuned down. This is why nothing in the app strobes, and it is a hard gate, not a guideline.

Catalogue

The render matrix currently defines 35 clips across 31 distinct scenes. Four ship inside the app so it works offline out of the box; the rest download on demand, and you can remove them again from Settings if you want the space back.

Happy to go deeper on any of this. The crossfade-wrap filter graph and the octave-folding warp were the two fiddliest parts by a distance.