hue-entertainment

Async Python client for the Philips Hue Entertainment streaming API.

It pairs with a Hue bridge, discovers entertainment areas, and streams colour frames to the lights over DTLS 1.2 PSK using the HueStream protocol with minimal latency. It works with both the Hue V2 ("square") bridge and the Hue Pro bridge.

The DTLS 1.2 PSK handshake, record layer and HueStream encoder are pure Python on top of cryptography — no openssl subprocess, no C bindings, no other DTLS dependency. Blocking socket I/O is confined to a dedicated sender thread, so it never blocks your asyncio event loop.

It powers the Hue Entertainment plugin (the Sendspin bridge) in Music Assistant and the ambilight-hue-pro-bridge.

What it provides

• Bridge discovery — find Hue bridges on the LAN via mDNS (discover_bridges).
• Pairing — create an application key and the DTLS client key (HueEntertainmentAPI.pair).
• Areas — list a bridge's entertainment configurations with their channels and positions.
• Streaming — start/stop an entertainment stream and push per-channel colours at up to ~50 Hz.
• EntertainmentSession — a high-level async facade that opens the stream on demand, runs the blocking DTLS work in an executor, enforces the bridge's single-active-stream constraint, and tears the stream down after inactivity.
• Works with the V2 and Pro bridges; dependencies are aiohttp, cryptography and zeroconf.

What you can build with it

Anything that drives Hue lights from a fast colour source — screen / Ambilight sync, music visualisers, games, rich notifications, or your own virtual bridge — without the Hue Sync hardware.

Planned extensions

• HueStream v1 framing and the CIE xy colour space (currently HueStream v2 / RGB).

Install

pip install hue-entertainment

Requires Python 3.11+. Runtime dependencies: aiohttp, cryptography, zeroconf.

Usage

import asyncio

from hue_entertainment import EntertainmentSession, HueEntertainmentAPI, LightColorCommand


async def main() -> None:
    host = "192.168.1.50"

    # One-time pairing (press the bridge link button first):
    api = HueEntertainmentAPI(host)
    creds = await api.pair()  # {"username": ..., "clientkey": ...}
    await api.close()

    # Stream to an entertainment area:
    session = EntertainmentSession(host, creds["username"], creds["clientkey"])
    areas = await session.get_entertainment_areas()
    area = areas[0]

    await session.start(area.id)  # activates the area + opens the DTLS stream
    try:
        # Drive frames at your own rate (~25-50 Hz). One command per channel.
        for _ in range(250):
            session.send(
                [LightColorCommand(channel_id=ch.channel_id, red=65535) for ch in area.channels]
            )
            await asyncio.sleep(1 / 50)
    finally:
        await session.aclose()


asyncio.run(main())

API

• HueEntertainmentAPI(host, app_key=None) — low-level CLIP v2 wrapper: pair(), get_entertainment_areas(), start_entertainment(area_id), stop_entertainment(area_id), get_bridge_id(), close().
• HueDtlsStreamer() — low-level DTLS/HueStream streamer: connect(host, username, clientkey, area_id) (blocking — run in an executor), send_colors([...]), disconnect(), is_connected.
• EntertainmentSession(host, app_key, client_key, *, idle_timeout=10.0) — the recommended high-level facade: on-demand start(area_id), non-blocking send(...), stop() / aclose(), automatic idle teardown, and enforcement of the bridge's single-active-stream constraint. The blocking DTLS work runs in an executor for you.
• Models — EntertainmentArea, LightChannel, LightColorCommand.

LightColorCommand carries 16-bit RGB; the encoder emits the duplicated-byte HueStream v2 format and lets the bridge gamut-map per light.

Development

scripts/setup.sh
pre-commit run --all-files
pytest

License

Apache 2.0