Infrared feels like old tech, but that is exactly why it is still useful.
There is a lot of gear around the house that works perfectly fine but never got proper smart home support. TVs, air conditioners, sound bars, and pedestal fans are good examples. They still rely on a handheld remote, which usually means they get left out once you start building around Home Assistant. That has started to change. Home Assistant 2026.4 added a proper infrared layer, with support for infrared emitters through Home Assistant and ESPHome, plus the first brand-specific rollout through LG Infrared.
That does not just matter because it is new. It matters because infrared is now becoming a more practical option for real setups, not just one-off hacks.
If you have older devices you still want to use, Home Assistant infrared is worth a look.
Why infrared is still relevant
I think a lot of people write infrared off too quickly because it feels outdated. The reality is that plenty of useful devices still depend on it. Home Assistant’s own infrared push is aimed at exactly those kinds of products, including TVs, air conditioners, fans, sound bars, and other appliances that still use IR receivers.
That makes it a good fit when you want to keep using hardware you already own instead of replacing it with a newer “smart” version.
Sometimes the best upgrade is not a new device at all. Sometimes it is just a smarter way to control the one you already have.
What Home Assistant infrared does
At its core, Home Assistant infrared lets you send IR commands from your smart home to devices that would normally be controlled by a remote. The infrared integration sits between the IR hardware and the device-specific integration, which means the transmitter and the device logic are no longer tied together in the same clunky way. That is the big structural change behind all of this.
So rather than a device integration needing to directly support a specific IR blaster, Home Assistant can now work through an infrared entity provided by something like ESPHome or Broadlink. Then a device integration, such as LG Infrared, can send commands through that emitter.
For most people, the practical version of that is pretty simple: you put an IR transmitter in the room, point it at the device you want to control, and Home Assistant fires the same sort of commands that your physical remote would.
What you can control with Home Assistant infrared
The obvious use case is TVs, and that is where the first official integration has landed. LG Infrared lets Home Assistant control supported LG TVs using an infrared transmitter that has already been set up in Home Assistant.
But TVs are only part of it.
Infrared can also make sense for air conditioners, fans, sound bars, and other appliances that have no network control or only very basic smart features.
If you are trying to make an older room setup smarter without replacing everything, IR is one of the cheapest ways to do it.
The two ways people will actually use it
Most people will end up taking one of two paths.
The first is using a device-specific integration. That is the cleaner option. Home Assistant already has LG Infrared, and the idea is that more brands and device types can follow the same model. In that kind of setup, Home Assistant knows what commands belong to the device and gives you proper controls instead of just replaying a raw code dump.
The second path is learning and replaying commands from an existing remote. This is still going to be the more flexible option for a lot of people, especially if the thing you want to control does not have a dedicated Home Assistant integration yet. ESPHome’s infrared support works with raw timing sequences, and its remote receiver and remote transmitter components let you capture and send remote signals yourself. Broadlink can also learn IR commands and send them later through Home Assistant.
That second option is less polished, but it is often the most useful in the real world.
The easiest ways to get started
Ready-made ESPHome infrared hardware
If you want a straightforward way in, ESPHome now supports infrared proxies and Home Assistant has been pushing that as the new direction. The idea is similar to Bluetooth proxies: a small ESPHome-based device sits in the room and handles infrared transmission for Home Assistant. The 2026.4 release specifically called out IR proxies as part of the update.
This route gives you a cleaner Home Assistant setup without having to build everything yourself.
A DIY ESPHome build
This is the route I would naturally lean toward because it gives you more flexibility. ESPHome’s infrared component works with raw timing sequences, which means it can handle a very wide range of IR protocols. The remote_receiver component can receive and decode common remote signals, while remote_transmitter can send pre-defined IR sequences.
That makes ESPHome a really good option if you want to:
- learn codes from an existing remote
- build your own IR blaster
- experiment with unsupported devices
- keep the hardware cheap and simple
This route gives you more flexibility and does not lock you into one brand ecosystem.
Broadlink if you already own one
If you already have a Broadlink RM mini, RM4 mini, or similar model, it still makes sense to use it. Home Assistant’s Broadlink integration supports learning IR codes with remote.learn_command, then sending them again later through automations or scripts.
I would not rush out and buy Broadlink just because of the new infrared support, but if you already have one sitting in a drawer, it is still a valid way to get started.
Where infrared makes the most sense in Home Assistant
Infrared is not the best answer for every device, but it is a very good answer for some of them.
I think it makes the most sense when you have hardware that already works well but has no proper smart integration. A TV in a spare room, an older split-system air conditioner, a fan in a bedroom, or a sound bar in a lounge are all good examples. These are the kinds of things that often do not justify replacing, but still benefit from being automated.
It is also useful when the action itself is simple. Power on, volume up, input select, fan mode, temperature setting, and similar commands are all well suited to IR control. The cleaner and more predictable the action, the better IR tends to feel in day-to-day use.
Where it gets less appealing is when you want deep two-way control, status feedback, or guaranteed state accuracy.
The main limitation with infrared
This is the tradeoff you need to understand before you buy anything.
Infrared control is usually one-way. Home Assistant can send the command, but the target device often does not report anything back. The Home Assistant infrared setup reflects that architecture: emitter integrations provide transmission, while consumer integrations send commands through them. It is built around sending commands, not reading rich state back from the device.
That means IR is great for “do this” style control, but not always great for “tell me exactly what state you are in” style control.
So if your goal is to turn a TV on, change inputs, or send a few remote commands from a dashboard or automation, it can work really well. If your goal is perfect feedback and tight state tracking, network-based control is still better when it is available.
That is not really a flaw with Home Assistant. It is just the nature of infrared.
Native infrared support versus the older way of doing things
Before this new setup, infrared in Home Assistant often felt like a workaround. It worked, but it usually meant manually learning codes, stuffing them into scripts, and building everything yourself.
That still has value, and I do not think it is going away any time soon.
What has changed is that Home Assistant now has a proper structure for IR going forward. Emitter integrations such as ESPHome and Broadlink can expose infrared entities, and consumer integrations can use those emitters without hard-wiring themselves to a specific brand of blaster. That makes infrared support more consistent, and it should make future device integrations easier to add.
In practice, it means infrared is becoming easier to set up and easier to build on.
Should you use Home Assistant infrared?
I think the answer is yes, as long as you are using it for the right kind of device.
If the device already supports proper local network control, I would normally choose that first. It is usually cleaner, gives better state feedback, and feels more solid in automations.
But if the device is IR-only and still useful, infrared is suddenly much more worth your time than it used to be. Home Assistant now has a proper infrared layer, ESPHome can handle infrared transmission and reception, and Broadlink remains a practical option for learning and replaying codes.
That opens the door to a lot of older gear that would otherwise never make it into your smart home setup.
Final thoughts
I like this shift because it makes Home Assistant more useful in a very practical way.
Not every smart home upgrade needs to be new hardware. A lot of the time, the better move is to keep the device you already own and add a smarter control layer around it. Infrared fits that nicely. It is cheap, it is familiar, and now it is becoming much easier to use properly inside Home Assistant.
If you have an older TV, air conditioner, or other IR-based device sitting around, this is probably the best time in a while to look at bringing it into Home Assistant.
