No Media Player entity picture when casting from a non-MA source?

[yorb]

In HA, it appears that the MA versions of Google Cast media players don't show album artwork if music is played directly to the speakers from another service (e.g., casting from Spotify directly to the speaker itself):

I'm still not totally clear how the HA integrations work, so I may be missing something. When I installed MA, it made duplicates of all my Google Cast media players. I'm not really sure why, but it does have the benefit of showing MA categories in the media browser that pops up when you click Browse Media, so I guess I should use these entities in my dashboards. The problem is they don't get the entity_picture.

Is this a bug? Is it Google Cast players only? Am I just using this totally wrong? :D

[OzGav]

The MA player entities are required for all of the advanced MA actions such as play_announcement.

Interacting with third party applications is not currently supported. If you want to do that then there is no point in using the MA players. You don't need to install the integration if you don't need to MA actions or need access to HA players within MA.