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Media Proxy

The Media Proxy is a Home Assistant add-on that takes almost any media URL, resizes and decodes it for your panel, and streams the result to the M-1 over the network. It's how the M-1 ESPHome firmware plays animated GIFs, YouTube videos, still images, and album art on a 64x64 panel without you having to convert anything by hand.

Need to install it first?

Head to the Media Proxy section of the M-1 ESPHome Getting Started page to install the add-on, then come back here.

What you can do

  • Play animated GIFs from any URL (Tenor, Giphy, raw .gif links, etc.).
  • Stream YouTube videos by pasting in the regular youtube.com/watch?v=... URL. Media Proxy automatically picks an appropriate resolution and codec for the panel, so you don't have to hunt for a 144p version.
  • Display still images in PNG, JPEG, WebP, or APNG format.
  • Show album art with track info during music playback by pairing Media Proxy with Music Assistant and the SendSpin page.
  • Use hardware-accelerated decode (Intel Quick Sync, NVIDIA, VAAPI, VideoToolbox) when your Home Assistant host supports it, so streaming stays smooth without bogging down your HA host.
  • Get smart resizing for tiny panels with high-quality Lanczos scaling and optional automatic letterbox cropping for cinematic content.

How to use it

Once Media Proxy is installed and running, all of these things are driven from a single text entity on your M-1.

1. Open the ESPHome integration page in Home Assistant and click your M-1 device.

2. Find the entity named Media Source and paste any supported URL into it.

3. The M-1 jumps to the Media Stream page automatically and starts playing.

Don't want the panel to auto-switch?

Under the M-1's Configuration entities you'll find a switch called Auto-switch to Media Stream on source change. Turn it off if you'd rather change the source quietly and navigate to the Media Stream page yourself when you're ready.

Things to try

Animated GIF

Paste a Tenor or Giphy URL straight into Media Source. Animated GIFs loop automatically.

Try it: https://media1.tenor.com/m/cOxR1hF63Y0AAAAd/matrix-film.gif

YouTube video

Paste any normal YouTube URL into Media Source. Media Proxy picks the resolution and codec that fits the M-1 best, so a single 4K music video URL works the same as a 360p clip without any manual conversion.

Try it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Album art with Music Assistant

Pair Media Proxy with Music Assistant and the SendSpin page on hub75-studio to show album art and track info while music plays. The full setup is covered on the SendSpin example page.

Going further

  • The Media Proxy README covers fit modes, autocrop tuning, hardware acceleration setup, and the YAML config file if you want to tweak how content gets resized or decoded.
  • The homeassistant-addons repo is the home of the Media Proxy add-on itself, including release notes and install troubleshooting.
  • If you need to (re)install Media Proxy, the steps live on the M-1 ESPHome Getting Started page.