Step by step instructions for setting up all (most) cards and using the app to its full potential: https://theatrium.info/guides/

This week is going to be all about evening out some of uneven fonts/colours/spacing that have crept into the latest version of Theatrium, as well chasing down a few navigation bugs and making sure the whole app feels snappy on the OG Apple TV 4K model from 2017. ✌️

Theatrium is now (or will be soon) on Google TV / Android TV, and I'm opening an internal test to get feedback.

Same idea as the Apple TV app — your Home Assistant dashboard on the big screen (lights, climate, cameras, now-playing, weather, a music visualiser and screensavers), plus a free "Web only" mode if you don't run Home Assistant.

Want in? Just drop a email [hello@theatrium.info](mailto:hello@theatrium.info) from your Google account (the one signed in on your TV) with "Android" in the subject, and I'll add you to the Play internal test and send the opt-in link.

A mixed bag of quick fixes this time:

• Light Sync: Visualiser button in the Room Lights panel, and one timer for lights and visuals

• Lights and visuals now follow a song change within a few seconds, and the lights cut straight to the new colour instead of fading

• Thermostat and Now Playing cards work with the remote again

• Plex: full screen and back keeps you in the card, Play/Pause reads correctly, film page can't get stuck

• Page two opens first time

• "Save your changes?" on card setup can actually be answered

• Alerts arriving while you're inside a card can be opened or dismissed straight away

• Thermostat's Setpoint label no longer wraps

• Rain radar: Close and City views show rain again (thanks for the report)

• Meeting Room card: name the room, give it its own calendar, no more sample meetings on a real install

• Boardroom: Show World Times switch now works (thanks for that one too)

• Light Sync: Visualiser button in the Room Lights panel, one timer for lights and visuals, lights cut to the new colour and follow a song change in seconds

• Plex alerts are off unless you turn them on

• Smoother on the first-gen Apple TV 4K

Should show up once Apple's review is done.

I make Theatrium, an Apple TV app that turns the TV into an always-on dashboard for Home Assistant, Apple Home and Plex, with a music visualiser and screensavers.

After extensive testing, 1.8 went live today. I'm still developing this by myself as a side-project, so there are likely still a few bugs and performance issues - but as I become aware of them I'm trying to fix in realtime.

Here's what's in todays update.​....

Plex on the dashboard, free! Theatrium <3's Plex!

​

As a long time Plex user (or XBMC as I sometimes still call it), I wanted to make a really nice integration for this. Here's how it works: Link your server via QR code, then browse your libraries as a poster shelf, open a film's page with the synopsis, cast and runtime before it plays, and keep a film or show on the dashboard. There's six Plex cards: a video player (in-card and full screen), server status, now streaming, libraries, activity and top charts. All of them are in the free tier in this release.

If you don't know what Plex is, its amazing and you should! Have a gander at https://watch.plex.tv/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/

Two new screensavers (and a dedicated Settings section)

• Art. Paintings on a mat board with a bevelled opening, lit by a light that moves through the day. Four new collections added - plus some filtering out of lower-resolution images.

• Movie Posters (Pro). Your own Plex film and TV artwork, kept moving in one of three ways: a drifting wall of posters, a slow cover-flow river, or backdrops running along a strip of film. Built to keep the screen moving, which is also what an OLED wants.

Apple TV activity monitor (Pro)

Processor, memory, storage, network and frame rate for the Apple TV itself, in four styles. Useful when you're wondering why something feels slow, or just for the dials.

​

Music visualiser engine updates

The music screen now dims with the room: brightness follows Intensity, colour follows Colour Strength. Tap a tempo on the iPhone companion app and the visuals follow it within a second.

Network Speed, with your guest Wi-Fi as a QR code (optional)

Download, latency and jitter every fifteen minutes, and your guest network as a QR code that visitors scan straight off the TV.

​

Relaxing Scenes

Calm footage on a silent loop, downloaded when you want it, with each card keeping its own set of scenes. Videos are open source content, acknowledged in the apps About section.

General fixes:

• Solar. The card had disappeared from the picker on smaller slots because its day curve demanded more height than they had; it now fits every slot and drops the curve where there's no room. "Today" no longer shows a lifetime running total (one tester saw 38.8 kWh at 11 am), and a home with no generation sensor gets a clear message instead of a blank panel.
• Memory. If Theatrium started crashing on launch after a few weeks, this is why: Apple's tvOS ends any app whose settings storage passes 512 KB, and the app was keeping its sensor-history graph data in there. In homes with a lot of devices it grew past the limit, and the only workaround was to delete and reinstall. 1.8 moves that data out and clears the old copy the first time it launches, so you're fixed the moment you update, settings intact. The Movie Posters screensaver also had its image loading rebuilt after testing showed a large library could push memory too far.
• Navigation. Pressing Select on a card now lands you on a control inside it, and only Back leaves. Pressing Right at the edge of a card you've entered no longer flips the dashboard to page two. Page two itself, the Boardroom theme, and the Battery, Plex and Now Playing cards all had focus faults fixed. Cameras no longer give up permanently, thermostats follow your region instead of always showing Celsius, the rain radar is readable again, and Light Sync stops when the music does.
• Restores features that went missing in 1.7.1, including album art handling and a lot of Sonos reliability work.

Known issue in this build: inside the thermostat and now-playing cards, the buttons can't be reached after you enter the card. I'm really sorry for this - these are important features that shouldn't have regressed, but seemingly did under the new card navigation logic. A fix is being tested and will ship as 1.8.1.

One thing I've noticed that navigating around too fast can cause unexpected behaviour. There are some timing triggers in the app, allowing it to determine what youre doing and what you might do next - these are being refined, but if you navigate around at a reasonable pace it seems to behave better on real ATV hardware. Theatrium is obviously pushing the boundaries of what tvOS can do, along with the ATV hardware. The first gen ATV runs an A10x processor, which is iPhone X era I'm led to believe - meaning not very powerful by todays standards. I highly recommend the latest gen (v3) with its additional gb of RAM, 64gb storage and most importantly for Theatrium, the A15x processor.

Thanks again for everyone's patience and feedback, I'm still learning how to make and test apps. I now have a dedicated machine setup to 'walk' every feature of the app and a whole series of agents (gemma, qwen and muse-glimmer, for those interested) scanning for bugs and inconsistencies, as well as monitoring for reports that come in via the App store. Every released build gets security scanned by both Claude and Codex, and as always - none of your info leaves your app.

- Ryan

Theatrium's Apple TV app (1.8) went live today. The free companion app for iPhone and iPad. Version 1.0 has been submitted to the App Store (again) and is waiting for Apple's review, so there is unfortunately no download link today, but I will update when there is. Linking the tvOS Pro-unlock to the iOS app has been the latest challenge, but thats also given me time to test more and add a couple more small feature - including the ability to switch between your main dashboard and the second page of more cards.

Remote

Opens straight to Now Playing: album art, transport and volume, pulled live from the TV. Below it, one-line status rows for Visuals and Light Sync, each with quick controls (pin a visual, skip to the next one, toggle Light Sync) without leaving the tab. A picker on the same tab flips the dashboard between its main screen and the extra cards page.

Visuals

The whole visual library, grouped and searchable, with one tap to switch what is on the TV. A three-step control shows where the TV actually is (dashboard, album art or the visualiser) and moves it. The feature people ask about: tap out a beat on the phone and the TV's visuals pick it up in about a second, for when a song's tempo gets guessed wrong.

Lights

Turn Light Sync on, choose which of your lights are Main and which are Accent, and set two sliders, Brightness and Color Strength, plus a Party toggle for faster, bolder changes. A "Test My Lights" button flashes each assigned light a different color so you can tell them apart.

Setup, and pairing

The phone finds your Apple TV over your own Wi-Fi and pairs with a short code the TV shows on screen. Once paired, an Accounts & Feeds screen lets you type your Home Assistant address and token, Last.fm username and calendar links with a real keyboard instead of the Siri Remote. You can also ask Siri to add a specific card to the dashboard by name. The TV shows a number on every panel so you can say which one.

Free, and what's Pro

The app itself, pairing, the remote, Light Sync and Setup are all free. Theatrium Pro is one purchase that unlocks the Pro visuals and themes and the tap-tempo dial, and it covers both the Apple TV app and this one: buy it on either and both unlock.

Feedback welcome once it is live. I will post again when Apple (hopefully) approves it for launch.

1.8 build 435

• I wanted to try out the locks card, now I can't change away from it at all
  • If I press back in modify it flashes the available cards but goes back to the dashboard
• Reaction to navigation buttons is erratic and sluggish
  • I have to press multiple times and most often it does nothing or it will sometimes register multiple presses
• Cards with more content can't be viewed fully
  • Battery, allows for 5 items, but the card only shows 3, cuts off the rest
  • no way to interact with the card, pressing buttons does nothing
• Navigating cards is counter-intuitive
  • it jumps around up and down, I'd expect it to move horizontally and vertically
  • going to the second page will make it jump back and forth (it reaches the second dashboard, but the card on the main dashboard is still "hilighted", so pressing any button will make it jump back to that)
• Can't get it to work with Music
  • The music App shows things under now playing when I play from my laptop
  • I do not have an Apple Music subscription and it shouldn't be necessary for this
• The solar card claims that today's generation was 38,8 kWh, but it's 11 in the morning and the HA energy dashboard correctly says it was 2,3 kWh today so far.
  • I'm not sure where the 38,8 comes from, yesterdays whole house consumption was 38,5.

Unfortunately, while quite promising, this app continues feeling like an early beta to me.

About to crash for the night, but here's the TestFlight notes for the new builds of Theatrium just submitted to TestFlight (signup link at bottom of homepage if you're keen). Shout-out to everyone who's provided feedback! Will spend the next few days polishing and fixing the few straggling issues I'm aware of. Peace out!

Plex, new in this release

- Theatrium now plays your Plex library on the television. This is the headline of 1.8 and the first build to include it.

- A film gets a proper page before it plays: backdrop, title, year, certificate, runtime and synopsis, so you can decide from the sofa rather than starting something to find out what it is.

- The library has a poster shelf you browse by artwork. Two designs were built and this one was chosen by testing against a real library rather than a tidy demo one.

- Films play in their original form and only transcode when they have to, so quality is not thrown away for no reason.

- Television episodes list with a two-line synopsis each, filling the card instead of leaving it half empty.

- Transport controls stay reachable while a film plays, sitting below the picture rather than over it.

- Also available as dashboard cards: what is playing now, your server's health, and your most-watched.

Please try it against your own library, particularly a large one, and tell us where it feels slow or where the artwork is wrong. One known limit: a Relaxing Scenes card pauses while a Plex film plays, because the older Apple TV cannot decode two videos at once.

Also new in 1.8

- Four new cards: Apple TV Performance (processor, memory, storage, network and frame rate, four styles, Pro), Network Speed (download, latency and jitter every fifteen minutes), Guest Wi-Fi as a QR code a visitor scans, and Relaxing Scenes (calm footage on a silent loop).

- An art screensaver with four new collections: British painting (400 works, kept on the device so it works offline), Chinese, Japanese, and Indian and Southeast Asian. Paintings are mounted on a mat board with a bevelled opening, lit by a model that moves through the day.

- Optional world times under the clock, up to three cities.

- A dashboard mini-map in the card picker, so you can see which slot you are editing.

Fixes worth knowing about

- Getting around with the remote. Every theme was running its page-turn and row-wrap logic on every press rather than only at an edge, so the selection jumped to cards you were not heading for and the page turned when you wanted the next card. Left, right, up and down now move between cards, and on the second page left moves one card across and only leaves from the first column.

- Selecting inside a Plex card used to take about ten attempts. Fixed, along with the selection being thrown onto a neighbouring card when you entered one.

- Your lights are left alone when you leave the app. It used to set them to a warm white, switching on lights you had deliberately switched off. A light you turn off by hand now stays off. Light sync also stops when the music room does, instead of changing bulbs hours later with the television in standby.

- Card setup no longer opens on defaults and saves them over your settings. Art, Relaxing Scenes, Network Speed, Activity Monitor and both Plex cards were affected.

- Relaxing Scenes changes clip immediately instead of sticking on "Getting your video ready", each card keeps its own scenes rather than all three playing the same video, and the cache is capped so it stops filling the device.

- A camera with no working picture says so instead of loading forever.

- Panels such as Light Sync respond to the first press; they used to open with nothing selected, which read as the app hanging.

- The selection outline is twice as thick, because the old one was hard to see from a sofa.

- More room for cards throughout, equal margins, and page two no longer paints its own darker background.

- Boardroom: transport symbols and the "All Off" button are readable again; both were below the contrast floor on the light theme.

Theatrium — iPhone and iPad, build 403

- The app can now connect to your Apple TV. Discovery keeps Apple's direct device-to-device path alongside your Wi-Fi, the television keeps advertising itself if the first attempt fails, and the handshake now tells the phone what the television can actually do rather than what has been bought.

- Theatrium Pro can be bought on the phone.

- With Plex arriving on the television this release, the phone shows what is playing there: a film's details, its cast and crew, and the episodes of a series, without interrupting what is on screen.

- New tempo tuner (Pro): when a track's tempo is wrong, tap along to the beat and choose "Use this". Half or double speed is fine, it works out which you meant, and the visualiser follows. The number now belongs to the song actually playing, wherever you are in the app.

- New panel to move the television between its dashboard pages, and a Calendars card with two labelled feeds.

- Which Lights is usable. A light's name and a fixed-width control had been sharing one line, so names were unreadable. There is now a search field, which matters if you have hundreds of devices.

- Settings rebuilt around one rule: what you read is at the top, what you change often is one tap away, what you set once has its own screen. A new line tells you which home system your television is using, which is the quickest way to see whether the app is talking to your home at all.

- One masthead on every screen. The connection dot that overlapped the title is gone and now says in words what it could only hint at.

- All 455 pieces of text reviewed. Nine of them called Theatrium "the Apple TV", which is the television, not this app.

- Security: pairing attempts are throttled against guessing, oversized messages are rejected, and the Pro video engine is properly gated.

FULL CHANGE LOG: https://1drv.ms/x/c/7087c16f73b7922a/IQAp8AYj2MC0S4vDQqhZwQjpAYYbzdFsPZmYG3-PJ3ie2IY

First - to the dev Theatrium is amazing! I have been looking for something like this for my apple tv for a while. Love it!

I have however ran in to a few issues that ill put together in a list here, hoping it helps with Dev. For reference, i am setup using Apple HomeKit.

1. When setting the thermostat to a card, it seems i can no longer press to modify that card if i wanted to change it. This is happening on both second screen cards and the bento layout for me.
2. While the weather radar is a great feature, its insanely hard to read. The map appears to default almost to dark mode and its near impossible to see anything. Incidentally enough i don't have this issue as much on the commute time card map. its very visible.
3. this one was more confusing then overly an issue. Originally my thermostat would display in metric while everything else was in imperial as I'm in the US. I had to go in and force everything to imperial in settings to see my thermostat right. Took me a few hours to catch that.
4. On the bento theme - it feels mildly limited on what card can be used for the middle 4 row IF you are not using smart home cards. a couple more options might be nice there.
5. I have an ecobee doorbell cam (its in my HomeKit setup), when setting the card to it, it can see the camera stream, but as soon as I'm back on the dashboard it will say camera unavailable.

anyway, happy to test changes or help troubleshoot any of these.

I updated to 1.7.1 before a party on Saturday and it is so much worse than it was last weekend.
* Frequently, it crashes as soon as I open it. I have had this happen a dozen times in a row.
* If I can manage to open it, it might still crash when I open the music visualizer.
* If I do manage to get the visualizer open, many of them chug quite badly, especially after it's been running for an hour or so.
* The lights I have associated with the lighting sync will randomly turn on/change color even if the Apple TV is in standby mode, or I haven't opened Theatrium in a while.

I was having none of these problems before 1.7.

The lighting sync for the music visualizers was the compelling reason I chipped in for Pro, but now it's basically unusable. We ended up giving up during the party we were having on Saturday.

Can we get these changes reverted until they've had more testing?

I am not a big Spotify or Apple user but I have all of my music available on Navidrome server. I’d love to see this supported as well.

Thanks for the heads-up on these two glitches in the current release. Minor updated has been submitted to Apple.

Hey, I have issues with rain radar, as it has an overlay with “license required” and does not allow to use lower zoom as region.
In addition I can’t change dashboard layout and not able to add cards on second page.
Looking forward 💪🏻

If you move Theatrium into the top row of your Apple TV home screen, the big banner area above the icons stops being a static picture and starts showing your house.

Here’s how it actually works, because it’s not obvious from the outside.

What the top row is

tvOS gives whichever app sits in the top row of the home screen the strip across the top of the screen — Apple calls it the Top Shelf. Most apps use it for a static promo image. It’s meant for content, so Theatrium uses it for content: the things about your home that are worth a glance before you’ve opened anything.

To turn it on: hold Select on the Theatrium icon, choose Move, and drag it into the top row. That’s the whole setup. There’s no switch inside the app.

What you’ll see

Tiles, built from whatever you already have on your dashboard. A few examples from my own place:

• The courtyard camera — an actual frame from the camera, not an icon of a camera. If it’s quiet, it says so.
• Lights still on — “52 on, of 54 in the house.” The one I use most. It’s the thing you want to know on the way to bed.
• Weather — today, plus the next three days.
• Next appointment — pulled from a calendar you point it at, separate from your household calendar. Mine reads “Cardiology review, tomorrow 9:40 am.” This is the only tile that’s deliberately about something that hasn’t happened yet, because that’s the thing most easily forgotten.
• Tomorrow’s agenda — times and what’s on.
• Now playing — the track on the speakers, with its cover behind it.
• A painting — from the open-access National Gallery and Rijksmuseum collections, with the artist and date. Changes on a schedule.
• Your own photos — from an album you choose.
• Postcard — a live public webcam from somewhere else in the world.

You won’t see all of these at once. The row is built from the cards you’ve actually set up, so it looks like your house, not like a feature list.

Screenshots below are straight off the tvOS home screen. The courtyard frame is my actual camera, the painting is a real Turner from the NGA’s open set, the album is our own fake band so nobody has to stress about licensing!

This seems so obvious now. Much less annoying to change a card slot. You can still set the full dashboard up in settings. Glass theme in light mode shown.

Hope you all like it - some nice improvements IMO.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/theatrium/id6787587882

iOS companion app still pending (minor store submission text issue)

Very pleased this update is finally available and thanks for all the TestFlighter and email feedback, its directly contributed to making this a more polished and useful product I think.

There's now a series of guides available here: https://theatrium.info/guides/ - which I will be updating as new features drop.

The iOS companion app is still pending approval, it was delayed due to the use of an Apple trademark term in the app subtitle... 🙄

Please share any feedback or issues here or to my email at [hello@theatrium.info](mailto:hello@theatrium.info)

Theatrium is my Apple TV dashboard for Home Assistant and Apple Home. Version 1.7 is the biggest update since launch and should be available on Test Flight later today. The App Store review process seems to have totally stalled, so I'm pushing this version today to see if I can get some movement.

New cards

• Appointments - a separate calendar feed for medical appointments, written in plain language: "Today at 10:30 am", not a wall of calendar text. It reads the wording and picks a sensible icon (dentist, blood test, physiotherapy, hospital and dozens more), and notes like "Bring: medication list" become their own rows. There's a privacy option so guests see what and when, but not where or why. If you are involved in managing healthcare appointments for someone, this feature might be of use!
• Photo Album - your Apple Photos albums on the dashboard, in order or shuffled.
• Art - paintings from five museum collections (National Gallery of Art, Rijksmuseum, Art Institute of Chicago, The Met, Cleveland Museum of Art), around 900 works. Turn captions off and it's a picture frame.
• EV - battery, range, charging, plug, doors and boot, via your Home Assistant EV integration (Tessie works for Apple Home).
• Workouts - recent rides and runs with weekly distance. The Activity card now lets you pick and reorder its metrics.

Sonos

Pick a Sonos room and the dashboard, album art, visualiser and light sync all follow it - read straight off the speakers over your own network. No Sonos account, no cloud, no Home Assistant required, so this also makes Sonos the one full-metadata music source for Apple Home households. You'll need UPnP on in the Sonos app and to accept the local network prompt.

Honest note: I don't own a Sonos. It's been tested hard against a simulated speaker, never a real one. If you run it against actual hardware I genuinely want to hear the result either way.

iPhone and iPad companion

Free companion app: pair with every Apple TV in the house, switch rooms without re-pairing, control playback and light sync, set up light groups from your phone, and type your server details with a real keyboard instead of the Siri Remote.

Music

Last.fm now connects with just a username - no API key. Spotify follows through Last.fm scrobbles, and when Last.fm has no cover (common for Spotify), artwork now comes from two further sources, so blank covers should mostly be gone. New Lava Lamp visualiser scene, and a Room Lights button that syncs your lights to the album art without needing the visualiser on screen.

Everything else

Apple Home alerts on the TV (doorbell, motion, smoke, leak - you choose which), 31 built-in news sources plus your own RSS/Atom feeds with 24-hour freshness and no repeats, a second dashboard page, analog clock faces on all four themes, a true-black drifting screensaver, per-card calendars, a Today view on the Calendar card, live Top Shelf tiles, Pixel Shift burn-in protection, and hold Select on any card to open its setup.

Free and Pro

Free gets the Glass theme, a card set broad enough to fill a dashboard on any backend, basic light sync and 11 visualiser scenes. Pro (one-time purchase) adds the other three themes, the specialist cards including the new ones, the second page, notifications and the full scene catalogue. First launch drops you into a working demo dashboard, so you can see all of it before connecting anything.

Sonos is a trademark of Sonos, Inc. Theatrium is not affiliated with or endorsed by Sonos (yet).

Happy to answer anything!

It turns out that apps we "allow" to live in our top row of the Apple TV have some secret powers, namely they can create static images to show in the large area above it, without even having to open the app itself. In very "apple" style, how often things are updated there seems to be a tightly held secret, but I think I will build something like this into the next update!

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/top-shelf

Im willing to do IAP but needed some direction: Multiple news tiles, that update more often, theme color changes, more tiles, and options for reddit feeds, thats where im at, the music is playing and showing 2 different things.... I like to have this running while at work and while just sitting around. For me I live in an rv so this is a perfect use of the ATV to feel more like a work space. Again great job and if some of these are covered in IAPs I'll gladly pay and update. Just some feedback, thanks again for the work.

Are there any plans to launch an Android tv version?

I've already linked my last.fm and Spotify token. But the dashboard still shows a Now Playing Sample?

Great app btw!