button-card VS mini-media-player

I use the custom button card but any card that support tap_action should do. This may be more complicated than you need but I also use decluttering templates (which I omitted here). I hope it isn't too complicated.

HI, try to use custom-button available in HACS, needs a little bit of coding but it is worth it! https://github.com/custom-cards/button-card and a good source also here: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/fun-with-cutom-button-card/238450

Custom Button Card

I've got my current layout pretty close using button-card, but I am not sure how to / if I can pull in data from other sensors that aren't the main entity. Here is my code so far:

As for the "Turn on TV", "Turn off TV", "Play Xbox", "Play PS4" stuff, you can create buttons for them, rather than using switches, using something like Button Card or something. Personally, I think pulling out a phone, waiting for some app to load, scrolling around to whatever thing and pressing a button is just stupid and slow, so I have a few physical buttons around my house. The Hank 4 button/8 scene remote is good, I have a few of them. I've also got some much cheaper Sonoff RM433 8 button remotes that I integrate with rtl_433. Each of my Inovelli Red dimmers also has 11 possible "buttons" via 2/3/4/5x tap and the config button single tap. So I've got zero-fuss buttons to hit for things that aren't easily automated, like "play Xbox" or whatever. It's so much faster to just hit a real button than to fumble around with a phone app. Plus, our phones are usually not nearby anyway.

You can use custom-button-card to achieve this, and more.

It's simply just custom button cards with "spin: true" as one of the properties! The icon must be completely centered otherwise it will spin weird

The particular Home Assistant card I use is mini-media-player which allows me to define the extra buttons you see in the bottom row. Left/Right call scripts which fire volume up/down via a Broadlink RM4 Mini IR Blaster to my receiver. Stop sends power off to my receiver through the blaster and stops cast playback on my phone (in Plexamp on your phone, be sure to allow your Plexamp app to be remotely controlled.)

I went through the same thing a year ago when we renovated an old house. I am using two (2) of the Monoprice 6 zone amps and the Monoprice integration in HomeAssistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/monoprice/). I also use the minimedia player card (https://github.com/kalkih/mini-media-player). For sources, I have the AVR in our family room connected to one input on the Monoprice amp and five old Apple Airport Expresses that I got off Ebay connected to the other inputs.

If you were to use Home Assistant, you could use a tablet or old phone running the HA app and having something like the "mini media player" card for each speaker, and then one for all speakers, stacked on top each other. This allows individual or overall volume control when playing content. I did it for the same reason you stated -- I was tired of having to verbally tell Google to adjust individual speaker volumes.

Look for grouped cards option https://github.com/kalkih/mini-media-player