AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode' – double bytes conversion before _aes_encrypt()

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Description

Playback via media_player.play_media (and TTS) fails immediately with:

AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode'. Did you mean: 'decode'?

The error occurs regardless of the audio source — it happens with TTS (tts.speak) as well as with a local MP3 via media-source://. So it is not audio-related, it happens during the Baichuan talk handshake.

Environment

Home Assistant	2026.x (Python 3.14)
reolink_aio	version bundled with current HA core
Integration	installed via HACS from this repo
Camera	Reolink, TrackMix & E1 Pro

Full traceback

File "/config/custom_components/reolink_talk/media_player.py", line 168, in async_play_media
    await self._play_bytes(media_bytes)
File "/config/custom_components/reolink_talk/media_player.py", line 288, in _play_bytes
    await talk_playback(bc, self._target.channel, adpcm_bytes, ability, block_align=full_block_size)
File "/config/custom_components/reolink_talk/talk.py", line 791, in talk_playback
    await send_talk_binary(bc, channel, payload, enc_type=enc_used)
File "/config/custom_components/reolink_talk/talk.py", line 609, in send_talk_binary
    enc_ext = bc._aes_encrypt(ensure_bytes(ext, name="extension XML"))
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.14/site-packages/reolink_aio/baichuan/baichuan.py", line 445, in _aes_encrypt
    return cipher.encrypt(body.encode("utf8"))
AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode'

Root cause

talk.py line 609 passes the extension XML through ensure_bytes() before handing it to reolink_aio's _aes_encrypt():

enc_ext = bc._aes_encrypt(ensure_bytes(ext, name="extension XML"))

However, _aes_encrypt() in reolink_aio/baichuan/baichuan.py (line 445) expects a str and calls .encode("utf8") internally:

return cipher.encrypt(body.encode("utf8"))

So the value is converted to bytes twice. Since _aes_encrypt() lives in the official upstream library, it cannot be patched locally — the conversion has to be removed on this side.

Fix that works for me

Changing line 609 in talk.py to pass a str instead resolves the issue:

enc_ext = bc._aes_encrypt(ext.decode("utf-8") if isinstance(ext, bytes) else ext)

After a restart, both TTS and local MP3 playback work correctly.

Note

There may be other call sites of _aes_encrypt() with the same pattern that I haven't triggered yet — might be worth grepping for _aes_encrypt and ensure_bytes across the codebase.

Happy to test a patch. Thanks for building and maintaining this integration!