8 ms·

Fix HDMI-CEC weirdness with a Raspberry Pi and a $7 cable

281 points by jlian 10mo ago

paulbgd 10mo ago
Super cool, I'm definitely going to have to grab a pi and set this up. Now if we could also solve the ps5/switch/etc not turning off the TV, my setup would be perfect!
baq 10mo ago
Assuming you’re ok with connecting your receiver to the network, you should be able to wake the receiver if you detect the tv is on without any cables at all - if your tv is also on the network (I’ve got a home assistant automation doing exactly that) or you can use a $10 smart plug with power metering. That said props for actually using HDMI-CEC! And it’s cheaper than most smart plugs (and probably safer, too)
- jlian 9mo ago
  This was actually the first route I considered. Unfortunately the latency was too much. > My first instinct was to lean on traditional automation stacks: HomeKit scenes to chain “TV on” into “receiver on” or wattage triggers via an Eve Energy plug. This kind of worked, but every extra layer added 30 seconds of lag or more.
codepoet80 10mo ago
Yup, my AppleTV is the only device that gets CEC right. Even my LG TV and LG soundbar get confused. And don’t get me started on the PS4 Pro’s garbage implementation. I’m sad that Logitech killed Harmony because CEC was supposed to make universal remotes obsolete — they’re still the only way my full home theater can function without juggling a dozen remotes.
- SchemaLoad 10mo ago
  I've had pretty good luck with the Steam Deck for CEC, at least with the Apple USB-C hub.
- Spoom 10mo ago
  I dread the day that Logitech kills the servers for Harmony. If they don't release the IR code database, they're going to have a lot of people (myself included) pretty annoyed. (To be clear, they still work today if you can get a second hand remote / hub.)
  - tacoman 10mo ago
    As someone who works in this industry and has access to commercial HDMI debugging equipment, I can’t agree more. I will use Harmony for my home setup until it no longer functions. The horrors I have seen related to CEC and ARC are something else.
  - lsaferite 10mo ago
    Having just swapped to a new TV on my Harmony setup I was concerned if it was still going to work. Lucky me, it did. I really REALLY want someone to manufacture the thin harmony RF remote with a simple receiver puck with an open firmware. That's all we'd need because the HA crowd would be all over it and have it doing anything you want.
  - ssl-3 10mo ago
    I also love the Harmony remote in my living room. It's imperfect, but it's plenty good enough. It flows well and works predictably. It's easy to reconfigure. And no matter what bizarro-world co-dependent cacophony of AV gear I manage to pile up together, any person can pick up the remote and watch TV or play a game or whatever. I will be particularly unhappy when Logitech finally pulls the plug on Harmony servers. At that point, I'll definitely need something different. But IR codes are only part of the puzzle. And that is perhaps the easiest part to solve: We've already got lots of databases with IR-stuff available. There's databases focused on RC5, and the sleepy LIRC project, and some other things (all of which tend to be very Old Web in appearance). License-permitting, it's simple enough to use this work as a foundation onto which newer codes can be placed. That just leaves making the Harmony hardware interface work (hah, hahah -- and it's a dead-end anyway), or developing a new open-source remote to rule them all (which actually might not be too terrible of a task). That all covers the first 90% of the problem. The remaining 90% of the problem is just creating software that has a usable UI and actually works.
- zimpenfish 10mo ago
  Amusingly, my AppleTV is currently the one thing that doesn't even though it used to - for some reason, with no changes, it just stopped turning on the TV. Switch 2 can happily turn on the TV though. Most peculiar. (I've tried updating the AppleTV, replugging the HDMI cable, unplugging the HDMI cable for <period of time>, etc. Nothing has worked. TV does not have any network which means it can't have had any nefarious updates.)
  - spacecrafter3d 10mo ago
    This has happened to me several times. I believe what fixes it is power cycling my AV receiver, in case it helps you.
    - jnaina 10mo ago
      this. power cycling my Marantz fixed it. Otherwise Apple TV is rock solid.
    - zimpenfish 10mo ago
      Might if I had an AV receiver. Apple TV is plugged directly into the TV. But the TV does have a weird junction box (consolidates all the connections into a single cable up to the TV, maybe it counts as an AV receiver) and it might be worth unplugging everything from that and that from the TV. Will give it a try.
  - daoistmonk 10mo ago
    try rebooting the remote: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102569 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102569 it always fixes problems with either turning the tv on/off or volume issues for me
    - zimpenfish 10mo ago
      Tried that without success. Also turned off Tailscale just in case that was keeping "alive" and the TV wasn't really getting a "I've turned on" signal - nothing doing. Investigations continue!
- crtasm 10mo ago
  Anyone know how to make a LG TV wake an AppleTV from sleep? Once it's awake buttons presses on the LG remote are passed through to it but I have to keep the Apple remote around for that first step.
  - codepoet80 10mo ago
    I had to go the other way. The Apple TV controls the LG. It wakes it, controls the volume and turns it off when it sleeps.
    - robflynn 10mo ago
      Mine will turn my LG on, control the volume, do all of that, it just won't ever turn it off. The AppleTV will turn itself off, but the TV itself will revert back to its screen saver display complaining about No Input.
      - rblatz 10mo ago
        My Samsung frame does that too, some TVs ignore the off CEC command. It might be a setting you can control on the tv. Last time I checked the frame did not have that option.
      - skunkworker 10mo ago
        I've got a Apple TV -> Denon -> LG C3. CEC on the appleTV remote will turn all 3 on, and long pressing (power button on appletv remote) will turn all 3 off, not just screen saver with input.
  - theshrike79 10mo ago
    I have an LG TV and I haven't seen the remote in months. Sit down, press button on ATV remote or console controller. TV comes on. I only needed it when it started complaining about software updates, but now with the AI version I took the TV offline and won't be updating it ever.
colechristensen 10mo ago
The first time I "discovered" CEC was when the arrow keys on my TV remote inadvertently navigated the PS3 system menu. I thought I was hallucinating because there was no mechanism for this magic to happen.
- neilv 10mo ago
  I was thrilled when I saw a Reddit comment about this, and it actually worked with my Sony dumb TV + PS5 + Sony RM-VZ320 universal remote. (I was sad at having to give up my nice PS4 universal remote, and not finding an equivalent for the PS5.) However, I couldn't find a button on the remote that was the equivalent of pressing a PS5 controller's PS Button, and that's pretty important to the messy PS5 UI. But the TV had menus that could simulate pressing that button. So I upgraded to a Sony RM-VLZ620, which added programmable macro buttons, which I kludged hard to navigate the TV menus. From my notes: ### Programming PS Button 1. SET(Hold 3 seconds, for LED, then keep holding) 2. middle-circle 3. (Release SET) 4. System-Control-1 5. 9, 8, 1 6. Options 7. Up 8. Down, Down, Down, Down 9. middle-circle, middle-circle 10. SET Note: The **Up** is a timing NOP, since otherwise the TV usually only sees only 3 Down rather than 4.
- Crespyl 10mo ago
  I've had this happen a handful of times with my Frame TV and Steam Deck, though it's inconsistent for some reason. It's pretty cool when it works. The Deck can pretty consistently turn the TV on from standby(/picture mode) and grab the input, but if the TV is completely off (black screen) CEC doesn't work anymore.
jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
I know it's called a bus, but I'm still surprised that all devices get the HDMI-CEC stream of all other devices. Being able to watch the Apple TV from the Pi was super cool, and I never would have guessed it was possible to see what was going on there (short of building a man in the middle hardware proxy)!
- tylerflick 10mo ago
  CEC is just i2c which is a bus. In fact you can hook regular i2c devices up to an HDMI port and communicate with them. You’ll need a resistor and shouldn’t draw more than 50 mA.
  - amluto 10mo ago
    I always assumed that it was a separate i2c bus per HDMI link and that it was the AVR’s job to handle a request from something and send the right requests to everything else.
    - extraduder_ire 10mo ago
      Much like i2c, any message put on the bus is transmitted to everything on the bus. Version 1.0 and later of the HDMI spec even mandate that you have to connect those pins across all HDMI ports on your device even if you don't do anything with them.
      - amluto 10mo ago
        Okay, now I’m curious. If the pins are just connected across all ports, how does the AVR tell which CEC-speaking device is on which port? Chip select or similar pins?
        extraduder_ire 10mo ago
        Every device has a logical address that is included in messages.
Hackbraten 10mo ago
Nice hack! The cat seems to be happy with the setup, too!
- thebruce87m 10mo ago
  Strange place for a cat to lie - must be a hot water pipe under the floor there or perhaps a sliver of sunshine that’s since gone away.
pyrolistical 10mo ago
Now package that into a tiny device with an hdmi plug. Better hurry befor-, too late it’s cloned in china. Actually it would be funny if somebody integrated this fix into a cable
- lawlessone 10mo ago
  Someone invent the cornucopia machine
- mongol 10mo ago
  I think it will be a while. There is not even a Pulse-Eight clone on Aliexpress
sudobash1 10mo ago
I am using a raspberry pi pico with a modified pico-cec program to control my Jellyfin-client media PC. CEC is actually really fun to hack on, and once you get a custom setup working, it is (at least in my experience) rock solid. Jellyfin even has a TV mode that you can enable in a normal desktop browser. So my media PC runs the browser in kiosk mode, and it has CEC buttons mapped to keyboard presses. Guests have used it, and I don't think anyone could tell that it wasn't a "smart" TV. https://github.com/gkoh/pico-cec https://github.com/gkoh/pico-cec
recursive 10mo ago
Modern AV stuff is insane. I have no interest in taking it up as a hobby. I have an xbox, a TV, and a pair of bookshelf speakers. How am I supposed to get the audio to the speakers without a bulky expensive receiver box? Luckily, I have one of the last remaining TVs with a headphone jack. I don't use a remote for any of it. Side note: Sometimes the TV doesn't come on when you press its power button. After a tremendous amount of experimentation, I determined this was because the "brain" was on, but the backlight was not. Power cycling it blind usually fixes it. That's harder than it sounds though because you have to navigate the menu blind using short and long button presses with the one button. But I'm scared to try a new TV, because then I'm going to have to figure out how to get audio out of the TV. It seems like AV stuff used to be so simple. Now the simplest scenarios seem to require more and more knowledge about arcane connection standard interactions and network topology. Ugh.
- jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
  Thankfully there are fun engaged hackery people. The article here seemed to dive in, look at what was happening, and figure out some altogether decent & not absurd flows. It wasn't "easy", but it also wasn't totally absurd. I get why you'd whinge & argue for a simple cable. But this was also a wonderful study, that showed steps, that I hope can bring joy & not just derision. That said, I also have no receiver box & rely on headphone out... which my not that old LG C4 has. Also, if that goes away: SPDIF decoder boxes are very cheap!
- systemtest 10mo ago
  > How am I supposed to get the audio to the speakers without a bulky expensive receiver box? You can have bookshelf speakers with an integrated amplifier and HDMI-ARC. All you need is an HDMI cable between the TV and the speakers.
  - recursive 10mo ago
    I'm not home at the moment, but I'm pretty sure they don't have an HDMI input. I haven't seen speakers that do, except sound bars. I don't like the general premise of sound bars. You either need a subwoofer, or you're limited to too-many too-small drivers.
jonah-archive 10mo ago
A long time ago I used one of these HDMI-CEC-to-USB/serial bridges: https://web.archive.org/web/20110219131237/http://rainshadowtech.com/default_files/HDMICECUSB.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110219131237/http://rainshadow... (I'd gotten a large LG monitor instead of a flatscreen tv, and it didn't talk HDMI-CEC but it had a serial-over-TRRS control interface, so I listened for messages on the bus and my media PC translated and relayed them to the monitor.)
bsimpson 10mo ago
I saw the Steam Machine bragging about CEC and being able to turn the TV on when it does, which made me wonder why my setup doesn't do that. Turns out that there's a special pin on your APU that has to be wired up, and AMD didn't bother for the Z1 Extreme chips. I wish "wake on signal" was a universal option.
- sedatk 10mo ago
  Huh, is that why my Steam Deck won't wake up my TV?
- extraduder_ire 10mo ago
  For some reason, GPU makers don't usually expose the CEC interface for the HDMI ports on their cards. Even the raspberry pi's ability to support it wasn't standard/default for years. The common workaround if you had a kodi PC or something was to buy one of these things: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter and run a HDMI cable through it. Because CEC is open drain like i2c is, connecting to it anywhere in your network of devices should work. (the HDMI spec mandated that the CEC pin needs to be connected, even if you aren't using it, from the first version) Just connect it to a spare HDMI port anywhere and you're off to the races.
  - bsimpson 10mo ago
    It's cool that that exists, and also feels silly to spend $50 + need to buy/run an extra HDMI cable just to make your TV turn on when your device does. Real shame these gaming-tailored devices don't support it natively. I wonder if the DP vs HDMI licensing battle is involved.
kayson 10mo ago
Would love to know more about the magic Apple bytes and why the Denon is behaving differently with consoles.
pottertheotter 10mo ago
“every console behaves like it missed the last week of CEC school. They wake the TV, switch the input, then leave the Denon asleep so I’m back to toggling audio outputs manually.” My Roku does this! It will turn on the TV but not the soundbar, which is so frustrating. Guess it’s somewhat normal.
- davidmurdoch 10mo ago
  My shield turns my receiver on, sets it to the right input (then the wrong input, then back to the right input), then... disables the decoder so there is no sound. Then sometimes enables the decoder about 20 seconds later.
Arbortheus 10mo ago
In my home media setup (LG UQ81 TV, WiiM Amp via ARC, Xbox Series X, Chromecast with Google TV), the CEC setup _almost_ works perfectly. * I can use the LG TV’s remote alone to control everything including the Chromecast and amp’s volume controls. * The amp automatically switches on and off with the TV. * Turning the Xbox on/off via its controller also turns on/off the TV and the amplifier together. Mostly good, except sometimes when I have my Chromecast on and switch the Xbox on via the controller it gets stuck in an endless loop of flicking back and forth between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2, between Chromecast and Xbox. Nothing I can do will stop it except to power cycle the TV. If anyone has experienced anything similar or has any tips on how to debug this that would be much appreciated!
rgovostes 10mo ago
This is the lord’s work. It’s ridiculous that in 2025 my $500 gaming PC GPU cannot tell the receiver to change inputs. Even my Apple TV, which is considered a model citizen here, steals the receiver’s input every few hours if I have another device active.
- avidiax 10mo ago
  Yeah, the Apple TV isn't better so much as it is very aggressive. I usually have to long press the power button on the Apple TV remote to get it to power off and let go of my receiver. Other devices like an nVidia Shield or the XBOX require that you press power/home a couple of times to take control of the receiver and switch inputs.
askvictor 10mo ago
I wrote related kind of thing a while back: https://github.com/askvictor/ChromecastControls https://github.com/askvictor/ChromecastControls . Though I haven't used it since upgrading most of my AV gear.
davidczech 10mo ago
A side note: I am very sad that HDMI-CEC apparently can only support like 3 "console-like" devices. I have an Apple TV, Nintendo Switch 2, Sound Bar (eARC) and PS5 hooked up, but only 3 can really interact with CEC. It took me a long time to diagnose why it seemingly wouldn't work with my Nintendo Switch 2. I ended up disabling it on my PS5 because I never use the darn thing, but it kind of stinks since most TV's have 4 HDMI inputs.
- dwood_dev 10mo ago
  This is my exact setup. Maybe I don't have many issues because I literally only have the NS2/PS5Pro turn on the TV/change input. I still use the AppleTV remote to adjust volume no matter the input.
- hackernudes 10mo ago
  Yes, the three playback limit is so annoying. Just... why?! CEC is so stupid. Way overengineered yet completely undercooked. I'm imagining some day soon TVs/receivers will start proxying the CEC bus instead of sharing it globally.
- Terretta 10mo ago
  AppleTV, Hisense 75" U7, Hisense sound bar, and Xbox Series X, tapping the Xbox logo on controller switches from Apple TV input to console input. Great! But long press on Xbox logo button to e.g. accept a party invite -- switches to Apple TV. Not great. The consoles are indeed awkward, but so are soundbars. And really, it seems like the TVs are the worst. All can be solved with the boxes from HD Fury like VRRoom.
- jlian 9mo ago
  Yes I actually run into the same issue and put it down as a footnote on the post https://johnlian.net/posts/hdmi-cec/#fn:3 https://johnlian.net/posts/hdmi-cec/#fn:3 Where I talk about the craziness that happens when more than 3 playback devices are on in my system: > ...if the one playback device (e.g. PS5) was on, changing input to another playback device (e.g. Xbox) was impossible, I'd get a quick black screen and the input snaps back to PS5. This is wild, but fortunately I only use one console at a time so it’s not a big deal. I remember when I wad losing my mind diagnosing this, I ended up asking ChatGPT for help with deciphering the HDMI-CEC frames when this was happening. It told me about the 3 device limit being the culprit with the line "You’re not crazy, HDMI-CEC is."
ghm2199 10mo ago
An analogous audio binding issue used to happen with my Jabra Bt headphones. It was generally connected to my phone and my computer. After finishing a phone call — if previously the computer was playing some music — the music would turn back on but it would be a very poor quality, I suspect the audio "mode" was stuck at "transmitting" phone call audio quality even though the BT software on the headset detected devices being switched from phone -> computer. Toggling the BT sound output on the mac to and fro between Computer and Headphones, fixed it. I suspect it was probably a vendor — jabra — software issue when sending a signal to apple's BT stack when switching between types of devices? But probably not worth fixing on my own.
theLegionWithin 10mo ago
that was an interesting read. glad I do all of my video watching & games playing on a computer instead of consumer grade hardware!
rcarmo 10mo ago
Genius. I might have a pretty good use for this, since I have constant issues with my consoles fighting for the TV.
neuroelectron 10mo ago
"Media closet tour" Just looks like a Rube Goldberg server to me. This is really illustrative of the nonsense that media copyright has manufactured. I'm not going to solve "HDMI-CEC weirdness with a XYX" I'm going to download the movie from a torrent or run an emulator.
- bijant 10mo ago
  As if the sight of this dystopian thread wasn't depressing enough, there is your one gold nugget of a comment, downvoted into oblivion, grayed out at the bottom of the comment section. A hundred comments of people reverse-engineering vendor handshakes, writing Python daemons, and debating the finer points of CEC frame injection - and not one of them asking why this is necessary. The answer is in three letters: DRM. Your PlayStation is a computer. Your Xbox is a computer. Your Apple TV is a computer. Your "smart TV" is a computer. You already own a computer. The reason you can't just... use it... is that the entertainment industry spent two decades making sure the bits know who owns them at every step of the pipeline. HDCP, HDMI licensing, CEC's vendor-specific "quirks".I see no interoperability failure, it's interoperability prevention. Meanwhile, a $200 mini-PC running VLC, connected via DisplayPort to a monitor and 3.5mm to powered speakers, plays anything in any format at any bitrate with zero handshake failures. One "remote": a wireless keyboard. This solution has existed since before some commenters here were born. What you're all debugging isn't technology. It's compliance.
deepspace 10mo ago
I am not sure why the author specifically mentions a $7 cable when the Raspberry Pi and accessories are going to set you back close to $100. That is by far the most expensive component. The money is possibly better spent buying a programmable remote.
- ihaveone 10mo ago
  I'm assuming he could have used a Pi zero instead
hackernudes 10mo ago
I wrote a program in Golang to control my a/v setup. Included within are small pkgs to control Linux CEC and LIRC devices (ioctl/read/write) as well a pkg for LG TV commands over serial port. Link here: https://github.com/EBADBEEF/tvman https://github.com/EBADBEEF/tvman One really useful thing when getting started was to use `cec-ctl -M` to monitor the CEC traffic live. Like the author, I used the v4l-utils commands to interact with CEC but eventually got frustrated with them and rewrote my program in in Go! I have found CEC to be flaky and hard to work with. I had to turn off CEC on my TV because it breaks everything, almost randomly switching inputs and turning on and off devices.
pier25 10mo ago
I have an Apple TV and Nvidia Shield connected to a home theater receiver which is connected to the LG TV. Sometimes when turning any of the set top boxes, the other one would turn on and its HDMI would become the active one. I couldn't simply turn off the box I didn't want to use because all the system would turn off. The solution was to disable CEC on the TV. I still get CEC between the boxes and the receiver (for volume and HDMI active input) but I need to manually turn the tv on and off.
nfriedly 10mo ago
My TV and soundbar have the same issue: CEC works for everything except the "turn on" command. I ended up fixing it with an arduino-ish IR blaster that's powered by the TVs USB port - so as soon as the TV powers on, the Arduino boots up and tells the soundbar to turn on too. https://www.nfriedly.com/techblog/2015/01/samsung-tv-turn-on-soundbar-with-arduino/ https://www.nfriedly.com/techblog/2015/01/samsung-tv-turn-on... I also had a NUC that I installed a Pulse Eight CEC module into, but I never ended up using it, so it got passed on to someone else.
nullhole 10mo ago
I used a similar setup to translate CEC user commands (volume/fwd/reverse/etc), that travelled from my TV remote to the TV to the CEC bus to a pi that was plugged into the TV via HDMI. The pi was running jukebox software (moode audio). Similar to the article, the pi had a shell script that reads all the loglines coming from cec-client and acted on them when appropriate, in my case translating a subset of the CEC user commands to moode commands. Worked pretty well, was nice to CEC-ify a pi program and eliminate the need for special-purpose hw/sw to interact with the audio player. The CEC spec has all of the user control codes on the 2nd last page[1], in table 27. [1] https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/xtreamerdev/CEC_Specs.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads...
- sho_hn 10mo ago
  I made myself a little HDMI dongle (about half the size of a classic Fire Stick) with a WiFi modem that I use to remote control my TV from Home Assistant. My remote is the HA app. Why? Because Google Home's TV remote stuff can do a lot, but not turn on the TV. CEC can.
rogerallen 10mo ago
This is the content I come here for.
VerifiedReports 10mo ago
Well, from the article I learned about Homebridge, which integrates non-Homekit products into Homekit. Yay!
retsyx 10mo ago
In a similar vein, I created a project, Amity, that uses HDMI-CEC to control the whole home theater with one remote. Using a simple streamer remote you can select an activity (watch Apple TV, play on the PlayStation) navigate interfaces, control the system's volume, and power it off. One of several fairly common streamer or TV remotes can be used. Amity, too, is based on a Raspberry Pi but also uses a very simple custom PCB to hook into the HDMI-CEC bus between the TV and the receiver. One of the most common problems encountered with HDMI-CEC is that different components will often compete to be displayed by the TV (for example, turning on your Apple TV, turns on the TV, which turns on the PlayStation, which requests to be displayed, which switches the TV to displaying the PlayStation. So you end up viewing the PlayStation when you wanted to stream Netflix on your Apple TV). I found that the only way to fix this problem is to sit between the receiver and the TV to break the cycle. Hence, the PCB. Amity is available here: https://github.com/retsyx/amity https://github.com/retsyx/amity
sandos 10mo ago
I really need this in my life. Once upon a time, things were good and our Chromecast with Google TV knew _exactly_ how to turn on our soundbar, set our TV to output sound to said soundbar, control the volume on that soundbar using IR. Now absolutely nothing of that works. The audio output on the TV is set seemingly semi-randomly depending on content!?. The volume controls just stopped working, and I can not FIND THE SETTINGS in the menus? I suspect it is required to completely redo the remote setup to see those settings, OR as I rather suspect: they broke this shit in purpose to get us to buy a new Google TV Streamer.
InterlooperX 10mo ago
Agreed that CEC is weird. Never thought about adding yet another device like the Pi into the mix to help control everything, though... I have accepted that I am apparently in the minority with my setup. In fact I was actually surprised to read that OP has a Denon as, just by what I have read about the topic of home theater", everyone else seems to be doing just fine with a simple soundbar which has one! hdmi socket. So, here is my setup: -Dumb TV (Panasonic. So old it doesn't have a CI+ module built in, it is "just" a CI module) -Denon AV Receiver -Nintendo Wii -Nintendo Switch Dock -Original Xbox -Blueray Player -HTPC -Satellite Receiver -AppleTV Excessive? Maybe but I still own all that stuff, have room for it in my cabinet so I like to convenience of powering each of these on when I feel like it without having to unearth them from a storage room and then fiddle with cables to connect everything for just a short time of usage. Basically everything is plugged into the Denon. And then a single HDMI cable goes from the Denon to the TV. So the TV stays on one HDMI channel and everything else happens on the Denon. Switch Inputs on there and you get the corresponding Audio/video signal from the chosen device. So far I have been lucky that in order to switch everything on, I could use a Harmony One. I could simply program the power on command for the TV, then switch to HDMI1 and turn on the Satellite receiver. This was the default. Put it on a news station and you got yourself some background noise. If you want to switch, you just had to tell the Harmony to switch its input to any other device listed above. It really irks me that the Harmony line is dead and I don't know what I will do should the remote, one day, stop to function. Now I wonder if I would have to go the Pi route to have that switch things around depending on devices announcing themself when turned on.
kimos 10mo ago
I’ve tried getting CEC working with my pretty average setup: Samsung Frame, Marantz receiver, couple of console games. It has been worse than doing all the remote juggling switching mysel because it is non-deterministic. This article will help me debug it, but it’s a toss up which audio device the screen will pick, if game mode activates or not, and if some device waking in the wrong order will put another one right back to sleep. Even if I follow the same steps every time.
FatherOfCurses 10mo ago
I have what I believe is an acceptable setup at home (Denon AVR-X1700H and Apple TV like the OP, a decent Sony display, 7.1 speaker setup, but the plethora of audio coding options completely mystify me. I know this is a me problem. I'm hoping in the new year to watch more movies with the family and would like to make better use of the surround system for sci-fi and action movies but for whatever reason I have no idea where to start.
star-glider 10mo ago
heh I really enjoyed reading this because I went on a RPI-fueld CEC deep-dive about a year ago when we put a gym in our house. I wanted a simple media center control for the TV/Receiver we had in there. An RPI sits at the center of the thing, and by reading the CEC bus I can respond to various remote commands to launch the media center, bring up security camera feeds, switch the receiver to Bluetooth, start Spotify Connect, etc. It works well, but CEC most definitely is the buggiest part of the setup. It's a reasonably elegant system, but it's just not implemented very well by most electronics. I ended up putting in a lot of retries: stuff like "send active source command; wait five seconds and send it again." Still, if you're willing to dive into the weeds, you can do some nifty stuff.

281 points by jlian 10mo ago

Super cool, I'm definitely going to have to grab a pi and set this up. Now if we could also solve the ps5/switch/etc not turning off the TV, my setup would be perfect!

baq 10mo ago

Assuming you’re ok with connecting your receiver to the network, you should be able to wake the receiver if you detect the tv is on without any cables at all - if your tv is also on the network (I’ve got a home assistant automation doing exactly that) or you can use a $10 smart plug with power metering. That said props for actually using HDMI-CEC! And it’s cheaper than most smart plugs (and probably safer, too)

jlian 9mo ago
This was actually the first route I considered. Unfortunately the latency was too much. > My first instinct was to lean on traditional automation stacks: HomeKit scenes to chain “TV on” into “receiver on” or wattage triggers via an Eve Energy plug. This kind of worked, but every extra layer added 30 seconds of lag or more.

codepoet80 10mo ago

Yup, my AppleTV is the only device that gets CEC right. Even my LG TV and LG soundbar get confused. And don’t get me started on the PS4 Pro’s garbage implementation. I’m sad that Logitech killed Harmony because CEC was supposed to make universal remotes obsolete — they’re still the only way my full home theater can function without juggling a dozen remotes.

SchemaLoad 10mo ago
I've had pretty good luck with the Steam Deck for CEC, at least with the Apple USB-C hub.
Spoom 10mo ago
I dread the day that Logitech kills the servers for Harmony. If they don't release the IR code database, they're going to have a lot of people (myself included) pretty annoyed. (To be clear, they still work today if you can get a second hand remote / hub.)
- tacoman 10mo ago
  As someone who works in this industry and has access to commercial HDMI debugging equipment, I can’t agree more. I will use Harmony for my home setup until it no longer functions. The horrors I have seen related to CEC and ARC are something else.
- lsaferite 10mo ago
  Having just swapped to a new TV on my Harmony setup I was concerned if it was still going to work. Lucky me, it did. I really REALLY want someone to manufacture the thin harmony RF remote with a simple receiver puck with an open firmware. That's all we'd need because the HA crowd would be all over it and have it doing anything you want.
- ssl-3 10mo ago
  I also love the Harmony remote in my living room. It's imperfect, but it's plenty good enough. It flows well and works predictably. It's easy to reconfigure. And no matter what bizarro-world co-dependent cacophony of AV gear I manage to pile up together, any person can pick up the remote and watch TV or play a game or whatever. I will be particularly unhappy when Logitech finally pulls the plug on Harmony servers. At that point, I'll definitely need something different. But IR codes are only part of the puzzle. And that is perhaps the easiest part to solve: We've already got lots of databases with IR-stuff available. There's databases focused on RC5, and the sleepy LIRC project, and some other things (all of which tend to be very Old Web in appearance). License-permitting, it's simple enough to use this work as a foundation onto which newer codes can be placed. That just leaves making the Harmony hardware interface work (hah, hahah -- and it's a dead-end anyway), or developing a new open-source remote to rule them all (which actually might not be too terrible of a task). That all covers the first 90% of the problem. The remaining 90% of the problem is just creating software that has a usable UI and actually works.
zimpenfish 10mo ago
Amusingly, my AppleTV is currently the one thing that doesn't even though it used to - for some reason, with no changes, it just stopped turning on the TV. Switch 2 can happily turn on the TV though. Most peculiar. (I've tried updating the AppleTV, replugging the HDMI cable, unplugging the HDMI cable for <period of time>, etc. Nothing has worked. TV does not have any network which means it can't have had any nefarious updates.)
- spacecrafter3d 10mo ago
  This has happened to me several times. I believe what fixes it is power cycling my AV receiver, in case it helps you.
  - jnaina 10mo ago
    this. power cycling my Marantz fixed it. Otherwise Apple TV is rock solid.
  - zimpenfish 10mo ago
    Might if I had an AV receiver. Apple TV is plugged directly into the TV. But the TV does have a weird junction box (consolidates all the connections into a single cable up to the TV, maybe it counts as an AV receiver) and it might be worth unplugging everything from that and that from the TV. Will give it a try.
- daoistmonk 10mo ago
  try rebooting the remote: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102569 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102569 it always fixes problems with either turning the tv on/off or volume issues for me
  - zimpenfish 10mo ago
    Tried that without success. Also turned off Tailscale just in case that was keeping "alive" and the TV wasn't really getting a "I've turned on" signal - nothing doing. Investigations continue!
crtasm 10mo ago
Anyone know how to make a LG TV wake an AppleTV from sleep? Once it's awake buttons presses on the LG remote are passed through to it but I have to keep the Apple remote around for that first step.
- codepoet80 10mo ago
  I had to go the other way. The Apple TV controls the LG. It wakes it, controls the volume and turns it off when it sleeps.
  - robflynn 10mo ago
    Mine will turn my LG on, control the volume, do all of that, it just won't ever turn it off. The AppleTV will turn itself off, but the TV itself will revert back to its screen saver display complaining about No Input.
    - rblatz 10mo ago
      My Samsung frame does that too, some TVs ignore the off CEC command. It might be a setting you can control on the tv. Last time I checked the frame did not have that option.
    - skunkworker 10mo ago
      I've got a Apple TV -> Denon -> LG C3. CEC on the appleTV remote will turn all 3 on, and long pressing (power button on appletv remote) will turn all 3 off, not just screen saver with input.
- theshrike79 10mo ago
  I have an LG TV and I haven't seen the remote in months. Sit down, press button on ATV remote or console controller. TV comes on. I only needed it when it started complaining about software updates, but now with the AI version I took the TV offline and won't be updating it ever.

colechristensen 10mo ago

The first time I "discovered" CEC was when the arrow keys on my TV remote inadvertently navigated the PS3 system menu. I thought I was hallucinating because there was no mechanism for this magic to happen.

neilv 10mo ago
I was thrilled when I saw a Reddit comment about this, and it actually worked with my Sony dumb TV + PS5 + Sony RM-VZ320 universal remote. (I was sad at having to give up my nice PS4 universal remote, and not finding an equivalent for the PS5.) However, I couldn't find a button on the remote that was the equivalent of pressing a PS5 controller's PS Button, and that's pretty important to the messy PS5 UI. But the TV had menus that could simulate pressing that button. So I upgraded to a Sony RM-VLZ620, which added programmable macro buttons, which I kludged hard to navigate the TV menus. From my notes: ### Programming PS Button 1. SET(Hold 3 seconds, for LED, then keep holding) 2. middle-circle 3. (Release SET) 4. System-Control-1 5. 9, 8, 1 6. Options 7. Up 8. Down, Down, Down, Down 9. middle-circle, middle-circle 10. SET Note: The **Up** is a timing NOP, since otherwise the TV usually only sees only 3 Down rather than 4.
Crespyl 10mo ago
I've had this happen a handful of times with my Frame TV and Steam Deck, though it's inconsistent for some reason. It's pretty cool when it works. The Deck can pretty consistently turn the TV on from standby(/picture mode) and grab the input, but if the TV is completely off (black screen) CEC doesn't work anymore.

jauntywundrkind 10mo ago

I know it's called a bus, but I'm still surprised that all devices get the HDMI-CEC stream of all other devices. Being able to watch the Apple TV from the Pi was super cool, and I never would have guessed it was possible to see what was going on there (short of building a man in the middle hardware proxy)!

tylerflick 10mo ago
CEC is just i2c which is a bus. In fact you can hook regular i2c devices up to an HDMI port and communicate with them. You’ll need a resistor and shouldn’t draw more than 50 mA.
- amluto 10mo ago
  I always assumed that it was a separate i2c bus per HDMI link and that it was the AVR’s job to handle a request from something and send the right requests to everything else.
  - extraduder_ire 10mo ago
    Much like i2c, any message put on the bus is transmitted to everything on the bus. Version 1.0 and later of the HDMI spec even mandate that you have to connect those pins across all HDMI ports on your device even if you don't do anything with them.
    - amluto 10mo ago
      Okay, now I’m curious. If the pins are just connected across all ports, how does the AVR tell which CEC-speaking device is on which port? Chip select or similar pins?
      - extraduder_ire 10mo ago
        Every device has a logical address that is included in messages.

Hackbraten 10mo ago

Nice hack! The cat seems to be happy with the setup, too!

thebruce87m 10mo ago
Strange place for a cat to lie - must be a hot water pipe under the floor there or perhaps a sliver of sunshine that’s since gone away.

pyrolistical 10mo ago

Now package that into a tiny device with an hdmi plug. Better hurry befor-, too late it’s cloned in china. Actually it would be funny if somebody integrated this fix into a cable

lawlessone 10mo ago
Someone invent the cornucopia machine
mongol 10mo ago
I think it will be a while. There is not even a Pulse-Eight clone on Aliexpress

sudobash1 10mo ago

I am using a raspberry pi pico with a modified pico-cec program to control my Jellyfin-client media PC. CEC is actually really fun to hack on, and once you get a custom setup working, it is (at least in my experience) rock solid. Jellyfin even has a TV mode that you can enable in a normal desktop browser. So my media PC runs the browser in kiosk mode, and it has CEC buttons mapped to keyboard presses. Guests have used it, and I don't think anyone could tell that it wasn't a "smart" TV. https://github.com/gkoh/pico-cec https://github.com/gkoh/pico-cec

recursive 10mo ago

Modern AV stuff is insane. I have no interest in taking it up as a hobby. I have an xbox, a TV, and a pair of bookshelf speakers. How am I supposed to get the audio to the speakers without a bulky expensive receiver box? Luckily, I have one of the last remaining TVs with a headphone jack. I don't use a remote for any of it. Side note: Sometimes the TV doesn't come on when you press its power button. After a tremendous amount of experimentation, I determined this was because the "brain" was on, but the backlight was not. Power cycling it blind usually fixes it. That's harder than it sounds though because you have to navigate the menu blind using short and long button presses with the one button. But I'm scared to try a new TV, because then I'm going to have to figure out how to get audio out of the TV. It seems like AV stuff used to be so simple. Now the simplest scenarios seem to require more and more knowledge about arcane connection standard interactions and network topology. Ugh.

jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
Thankfully there are fun engaged hackery people. The article here seemed to dive in, look at what was happening, and figure out some altogether decent & not absurd flows. It wasn't "easy", but it also wasn't totally absurd. I get why you'd whinge & argue for a simple cable. But this was also a wonderful study, that showed steps, that I hope can bring joy & not just derision. That said, I also have no receiver box & rely on headphone out... which my not that old LG C4 has. Also, if that goes away: SPDIF decoder boxes are very cheap!
systemtest 10mo ago
> How am I supposed to get the audio to the speakers without a bulky expensive receiver box? You can have bookshelf speakers with an integrated amplifier and HDMI-ARC. All you need is an HDMI cable between the TV and the speakers.
- recursive 10mo ago
  I'm not home at the moment, but I'm pretty sure they don't have an HDMI input. I haven't seen speakers that do, except sound bars. I don't like the general premise of sound bars. You either need a subwoofer, or you're limited to too-many too-small drivers.

jonah-archive 10mo ago

A long time ago I used one of these HDMI-CEC-to-USB/serial bridges: https://web.archive.org/web/20110219131237/http://rainshadowtech.com/default_files/HDMICECUSB.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110219131237/http://rainshadow... (I'd gotten a large LG monitor instead of a flatscreen tv, and it didn't talk HDMI-CEC but it had a serial-over-TRRS control interface, so I listened for messages on the bus and my media PC translated and relayed them to the monitor.)

bsimpson 10mo ago

I saw the Steam Machine bragging about CEC and being able to turn the TV on when it does, which made me wonder why my setup doesn't do that. Turns out that there's a special pin on your APU that has to be wired up, and AMD didn't bother for the Z1 Extreme chips. I wish "wake on signal" was a universal option.

sedatk 10mo ago
Huh, is that why my Steam Deck won't wake up my TV?
extraduder_ire 10mo ago
For some reason, GPU makers don't usually expose the CEC interface for the HDMI ports on their cards. Even the raspberry pi's ability to support it wasn't standard/default for years. The common workaround if you had a kodi PC or something was to buy one of these things: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter and run a HDMI cable through it. Because CEC is open drain like i2c is, connecting to it anywhere in your network of devices should work. (the HDMI spec mandated that the CEC pin needs to be connected, even if you aren't using it, from the first version) Just connect it to a spare HDMI port anywhere and you're off to the races.
- bsimpson 10mo ago
  It's cool that that exists, and also feels silly to spend $50 + need to buy/run an extra HDMI cable just to make your TV turn on when your device does. Real shame these gaming-tailored devices don't support it natively. I wonder if the DP vs HDMI licensing battle is involved.

kayson 10mo ago

Would love to know more about the magic Apple bytes and why the Denon is behaving differently with consoles.

pottertheotter 10mo ago

“every console behaves like it missed the last week of CEC school. They wake the TV, switch the input, then leave the Denon asleep so I’m back to toggling audio outputs manually.” My Roku does this! It will turn on the TV but not the soundbar, which is so frustrating. Guess it’s somewhat normal.

davidmurdoch 10mo ago
My shield turns my receiver on, sets it to the right input (then the wrong input, then back to the right input), then... disables the decoder so there is no sound. Then sometimes enables the decoder about 20 seconds later.

Arbortheus 10mo ago

In my home media setup (LG UQ81 TV, WiiM Amp via ARC, Xbox Series X, Chromecast with Google TV), the CEC setup _almost_ works perfectly. * I can use the LG TV’s remote alone to control everything including the Chromecast and amp’s volume controls. * The amp automatically switches on and off with the TV. * Turning the Xbox on/off via its controller also turns on/off the TV and the amplifier together. Mostly good, except sometimes when I have my Chromecast on and switch the Xbox on via the controller it gets stuck in an endless loop of flicking back and forth between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2, between Chromecast and Xbox. Nothing I can do will stop it except to power cycle the TV. If anyone has experienced anything similar or has any tips on how to debug this that would be much appreciated!

rgovostes 10mo ago

This is the lord’s work. It’s ridiculous that in 2025 my $500 gaming PC GPU cannot tell the receiver to change inputs. Even my Apple TV, which is considered a model citizen here, steals the receiver’s input every few hours if I have another device active.

avidiax 10mo ago
Yeah, the Apple TV isn't better so much as it is very aggressive. I usually have to long press the power button on the Apple TV remote to get it to power off and let go of my receiver. Other devices like an nVidia Shield or the XBOX require that you press power/home a couple of times to take control of the receiver and switch inputs.

askvictor 10mo ago

I wrote related kind of thing a while back: https://github.com/askvictor/ChromecastControls https://github.com/askvictor/ChromecastControls . Though I haven't used it since upgrading most of my AV gear.

davidczech 10mo ago

A side note: I am very sad that HDMI-CEC apparently can only support like 3 "console-like" devices. I have an Apple TV, Nintendo Switch 2, Sound Bar (eARC) and PS5 hooked up, but only 3 can really interact with CEC. It took me a long time to diagnose why it seemingly wouldn't work with my Nintendo Switch 2. I ended up disabling it on my PS5 because I never use the darn thing, but it kind of stinks since most TV's have 4 HDMI inputs.

dwood_dev 10mo ago
This is my exact setup. Maybe I don't have many issues because I literally only have the NS2/PS5Pro turn on the TV/change input. I still use the AppleTV remote to adjust volume no matter the input.
hackernudes 10mo ago
Yes, the three playback limit is so annoying. Just... why?! CEC is so stupid. Way overengineered yet completely undercooked. I'm imagining some day soon TVs/receivers will start proxying the CEC bus instead of sharing it globally.
Terretta 10mo ago
AppleTV, Hisense 75" U7, Hisense sound bar, and Xbox Series X, tapping the Xbox logo on controller switches from Apple TV input to console input. Great! But long press on Xbox logo button to e.g. accept a party invite -- switches to Apple TV. Not great. The consoles are indeed awkward, but so are soundbars. And really, it seems like the TVs are the worst. All can be solved with the boxes from HD Fury like VRRoom.
jlian 9mo ago
Yes I actually run into the same issue and put it down as a footnote on the post https://johnlian.net/posts/hdmi-cec/#fn:3 https://johnlian.net/posts/hdmi-cec/#fn:3 Where I talk about the craziness that happens when more than 3 playback devices are on in my system: > ...if the one playback device (e.g. PS5) was on, changing input to another playback device (e.g. Xbox) was impossible, I'd get a quick black screen and the input snaps back to PS5. This is wild, but fortunately I only use one console at a time so it’s not a big deal. I remember when I wad losing my mind diagnosing this, I ended up asking ChatGPT for help with deciphering the HDMI-CEC frames when this was happening. It told me about the 3 device limit being the culprit with the line "You’re not crazy, HDMI-CEC is."

ghm2199 10mo ago

An analogous audio binding issue used to happen with my Jabra Bt headphones. It was generally connected to my phone and my computer. After finishing a phone call — if previously the computer was playing some music — the music would turn back on but it would be a very poor quality, I suspect the audio "mode" was stuck at "transmitting" phone call audio quality even though the BT software on the headset detected devices being switched from phone -> computer. Toggling the BT sound output on the mac to and fro between Computer and Headphones, fixed it. I suspect it was probably a vendor — jabra — software issue when sending a signal to apple's BT stack when switching between types of devices? But probably not worth fixing on my own.

theLegionWithin 10mo ago

that was an interesting read. glad I do all of my video watching & games playing on a computer instead of consumer grade hardware!

rcarmo 10mo ago

Genius. I might have a pretty good use for this, since I have constant issues with my consoles fighting for the TV.

neuroelectron 10mo ago

"Media closet tour" Just looks like a Rube Goldberg server to me. This is really illustrative of the nonsense that media copyright has manufactured. I'm not going to solve "HDMI-CEC weirdness with a XYX" I'm going to download the movie from a torrent or run an emulator.

bijant 10mo ago
As if the sight of this dystopian thread wasn't depressing enough, there is your one gold nugget of a comment, downvoted into oblivion, grayed out at the bottom of the comment section. A hundred comments of people reverse-engineering vendor handshakes, writing Python daemons, and debating the finer points of CEC frame injection - and not one of them asking why this is necessary. The answer is in three letters: DRM. Your PlayStation is a computer. Your Xbox is a computer. Your Apple TV is a computer. Your "smart TV" is a computer. You already own a computer. The reason you can't just... use it... is that the entertainment industry spent two decades making sure the bits know who owns them at every step of the pipeline. HDCP, HDMI licensing, CEC's vendor-specific "quirks".I see no interoperability failure, it's interoperability prevention. Meanwhile, a $200 mini-PC running VLC, connected via DisplayPort to a monitor and 3.5mm to powered speakers, plays anything in any format at any bitrate with zero handshake failures. One "remote": a wireless keyboard. This solution has existed since before some commenters here were born. What you're all debugging isn't technology. It's compliance.

deepspace 10mo ago

I am not sure why the author specifically mentions a $7 cable when the Raspberry Pi and accessories are going to set you back close to $100. That is by far the most expensive component. The money is possibly better spent buying a programmable remote.

ihaveone 10mo ago
I'm assuming he could have used a Pi zero instead

hackernudes 10mo ago

I wrote a program in Golang to control my a/v setup. Included within are small pkgs to control Linux CEC and LIRC devices (ioctl/read/write) as well a pkg for LG TV commands over serial port. Link here: https://github.com/EBADBEEF/tvman https://github.com/EBADBEEF/tvman One really useful thing when getting started was to use `cec-ctl -M` to monitor the CEC traffic live. Like the author, I used the v4l-utils commands to interact with CEC but eventually got frustrated with them and rewrote my program in in Go! I have found CEC to be flaky and hard to work with. I had to turn off CEC on my TV because it breaks everything, almost randomly switching inputs and turning on and off devices.

pier25 10mo ago

I have an Apple TV and Nvidia Shield connected to a home theater receiver which is connected to the LG TV. Sometimes when turning any of the set top boxes, the other one would turn on and its HDMI would become the active one. I couldn't simply turn off the box I didn't want to use because all the system would turn off. The solution was to disable CEC on the TV. I still get CEC between the boxes and the receiver (for volume and HDMI active input) but I need to manually turn the tv on and off.

nfriedly 10mo ago

My TV and soundbar have the same issue: CEC works for everything except the "turn on" command. I ended up fixing it with an arduino-ish IR blaster that's powered by the TVs USB port - so as soon as the TV powers on, the Arduino boots up and tells the soundbar to turn on too. https://www.nfriedly.com/techblog/2015/01/samsung-tv-turn-on-soundbar-with-arduino/ https://www.nfriedly.com/techblog/2015/01/samsung-tv-turn-on... I also had a NUC that I installed a Pulse Eight CEC module into, but I never ended up using it, so it got passed on to someone else.

nullhole 10mo ago

I used a similar setup to translate CEC user commands (volume/fwd/reverse/etc), that travelled from my TV remote to the TV to the CEC bus to a pi that was plugged into the TV via HDMI. The pi was running jukebox software (moode audio). Similar to the article, the pi had a shell script that reads all the loglines coming from cec-client and acted on them when appropriate, in my case translating a subset of the CEC user commands to moode commands. Worked pretty well, was nice to CEC-ify a pi program and eliminate the need for special-purpose hw/sw to interact with the audio player. The CEC spec has all of the user control codes on the 2nd last page[1], in table 27. [1] https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads/v2/code.google.com/xtreamerdev/CEC_Specs.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads...

sho_hn 10mo ago
I made myself a little HDMI dongle (about half the size of a classic Fire Stick) with a WiFi modem that I use to remote control my TV from Home Assistant. My remote is the HA app. Why? Because Google Home's TV remote stuff can do a lot, but not turn on the TV. CEC can.

rogerallen 10mo ago

This is the content I come here for.

VerifiedReports 10mo ago

Well, from the article I learned about Homebridge, which integrates non-Homekit products into Homekit. Yay!

retsyx 10mo ago

In a similar vein, I created a project, Amity, that uses HDMI-CEC to control the whole home theater with one remote. Using a simple streamer remote you can select an activity (watch Apple TV, play on the PlayStation) navigate interfaces, control the system's volume, and power it off. One of several fairly common streamer or TV remotes can be used. Amity, too, is based on a Raspberry Pi but also uses a very simple custom PCB to hook into the HDMI-CEC bus between the TV and the receiver. One of the most common problems encountered with HDMI-CEC is that different components will often compete to be displayed by the TV (for example, turning on your Apple TV, turns on the TV, which turns on the PlayStation, which requests to be displayed, which switches the TV to displaying the PlayStation. So you end up viewing the PlayStation when you wanted to stream Netflix on your Apple TV). I found that the only way to fix this problem is to sit between the receiver and the TV to break the cycle. Hence, the PCB. Amity is available here: https://github.com/retsyx/amity https://github.com/retsyx/amity

sandos 10mo ago

I really need this in my life. Once upon a time, things were good and our Chromecast with Google TV knew _exactly_ how to turn on our soundbar, set our TV to output sound to said soundbar, control the volume on that soundbar using IR. Now absolutely nothing of that works. The audio output on the TV is set seemingly semi-randomly depending on content!?. The volume controls just stopped working, and I can not FIND THE SETTINGS in the menus? I suspect it is required to completely redo the remote setup to see those settings, OR as I rather suspect: they broke this shit in purpose to get us to buy a new Google TV Streamer.

InterlooperX 10mo ago

Agreed that CEC is weird. Never thought about adding yet another device like the Pi into the mix to help control everything, though... I have accepted that I am apparently in the minority with my setup. In fact I was actually surprised to read that OP has a Denon as, just by what I have read about the topic of home theater", everyone else seems to be doing just fine with a simple soundbar which has one! hdmi socket. So, here is my setup: -Dumb TV (Panasonic. So old it doesn't have a CI+ module built in, it is "just" a CI module) -Denon AV Receiver -Nintendo Wii -Nintendo Switch Dock -Original Xbox -Blueray Player -HTPC -Satellite Receiver -AppleTV Excessive? Maybe but I still own all that stuff, have room for it in my cabinet so I like to convenience of powering each of these on when I feel like it without having to unearth them from a storage room and then fiddle with cables to connect everything for just a short time of usage. Basically everything is plugged into the Denon. And then a single HDMI cable goes from the Denon to the TV. So the TV stays on one HDMI channel and everything else happens on the Denon. Switch Inputs on there and you get the corresponding Audio/video signal from the chosen device. So far I have been lucky that in order to switch everything on, I could use a Harmony One. I could simply program the power on command for the TV, then switch to HDMI1 and turn on the Satellite receiver. This was the default. Put it on a news station and you got yourself some background noise. If you want to switch, you just had to tell the Harmony to switch its input to any other device listed above. It really irks me that the Harmony line is dead and I don't know what I will do should the remote, one day, stop to function. Now I wonder if I would have to go the Pi route to have that switch things around depending on devices announcing themself when turned on.

kimos 10mo ago

I’ve tried getting CEC working with my pretty average setup: Samsung Frame, Marantz receiver, couple of console games. It has been worse than doing all the remote juggling switching mysel because it is non-deterministic. This article will help me debug it, but it’s a toss up which audio device the screen will pick, if game mode activates or not, and if some device waking in the wrong order will put another one right back to sleep. Even if I follow the same steps every time.

FatherOfCurses 10mo ago

I have what I believe is an acceptable setup at home (Denon AVR-X1700H and Apple TV like the OP, a decent Sony display, 7.1 speaker setup, but the plethora of audio coding options completely mystify me. I know this is a me problem. I'm hoping in the new year to watch more movies with the family and would like to make better use of the surround system for sci-fi and action movies but for whatever reason I have no idea where to start.

star-glider 10mo ago

heh I really enjoyed reading this because I went on a RPI-fueld CEC deep-dive about a year ago when we put a gym in our house. I wanted a simple media center control for the TV/Receiver we had in there. An RPI sits at the center of the thing, and by reading the CEC bus I can respond to various remote commands to launch the media center, bring up security camera feeds, switch the receiver to Bluetooth, start Spotify Connect, etc. It works well, but CEC most definitely is the buggiest part of the setup. It's a reasonably elegant system, but it's just not implemented very well by most electronics. I ended up putting in a lot of retries: stuff like "send active source command; wait five seconds and send it again." Still, if you're willing to dive into the weeds, you can do some nifty stuff.