[HN Gopher] Consumer Electronics Control
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Consumer Electronics Control
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-06-03 15:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (computer.rip)
(TXT) w3m dump (computer.rip)
| mmaniac wrote:
| CEC is one of those features that sounds beautiful but never
| seems to work quite as well as you'd like.
|
| I have two TVs with a Roku soundbar connected to each. Sometimes
| when I wake each TV, the soundbar no longer connects so I get no
| audio. One TV is capable of displaying the volume level, but the
| other can't. My Playstation can accept directional and OK button
| presses over CEC, but my Roku can't despite that being much more
| useful. And if CEC is enabled on both, all hell breaks loose.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > My Playstation can accept directional and OK button presses
| over CEC, but my Roku can't despite that being much more
| useful.
|
| To be fair, in this case, the issue not "CEC doesn't work", but
| rather, "Roku broke compatibility".
|
| You can control directional/OK on a Roku STB built into a Roku
| TV via CEC, the hardware supports everything just fine. But in
| software, Roku (intentionally?) implemented unusual (arguably
| proprietary) control codes to do it, instead of the normal ones
| everyone else uses. Roku will, however, happily pass along
| regular codes to a connected Playstation or Google TV stick or
| whatever other 'lesser' device you connect.
|
| (assuming HDMI-CEC) You can work around this by injecting Roku-
| specific codes into your CEC stream. But like, no one should
| have to do that...
| focusedone wrote:
| Through _many_ iterations of home theater setup I have enjoyed a
| single, brief, period of harmony where a TV remote seamlessly
| controlled a PS3 's navigation bar. That was a nice couple of
| years.
|
| Such periods of unity must be savored, knowing the fleeting peace
| will vanish with the next device upgrade.
| throw0101d wrote:
| There are two 'mainstream' display protocols nowdays, DisplayPort
| (mainly used with computers) and HDMI (mainly used with home
| A/V): it seems that the only practical difference between the two
| at this point is that HDMI has CEC and DP does not.
|
| Though, does DP have something like ARC?
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Return_Channel
| barryrandall wrote:
| CEC works so well in consumer electronics that I control my home
| theater with a Raspberry Pi and a bunch of Bluetooth-to-RS-232
| adapters.
| mrrothe wrote:
| I feel like I'm in the minority with a seamless working CEC
| setup, fairly old Onkyo receiver with LG TV, Chromecast and PS2.
|
| I hit cast from my phone and a couple seconds later everything is
| powered on and connected. Then the LG remote (RF not IR) does
| volume. Audio routes correctly between TV and receiver when I
| play back files on a USB SSD connected to the TV
| kstrauser wrote:
| Same here with a Sony receiver, Samsung TV, PS5, and Apple TV.
|
| If I turn on the PS5 or Apple TV, within a couple seconds the
| receiver and TV are powered up and working. If I turn on the
| other device, the receiver switches to its input. When I turn
| the active device off, the TV and receiver turn themselves off.
|
| That is, until one of my kids goes out of their way to find the
| TV remote and turn it off manually. Then everything goes out of
| sync until I cut power to all those devices and turn them on
| again. At least it's an easy fix that doesn't require any
| manual configuration.
| scottlamb wrote:
| I think a major problem with HDMI-CEC from the perspective of
| folks who want to say control everything with Home Assistant is
| that it's not "make all the devices on the bus controllable by my
| home automation setup" but "allow each device on the bus to talk
| to each other". With no particular standardization about what one
| device does in response to another or how that's configured, and
| possibly the vague expectation that the TV drives everything.
|
| As a tiny example, by default when I turn off my AV receiver, my
| TV notices and turns itself off too. (Or maybe it's the reverse,
| or both. Don't remember.) This behavior is controlled by a
| poorly-named item deep in the TV's menu, and by
| enabling/disabling CEC on the receiver. (The latter is what I
| chose because it still passes CEC signals through source<->TV and
| has a better-defined automation protocol of its own.) Who knows
| if some other TV has the same default or has any way to control
| it, much less a way I can describe without getting into the
| specifics of each model.
|
| To make it really useful for a well-controlled HA setup, I think
| at least I'd have to have some sort of device has a bunch of HDMI
| in and out ports and intercepts all the HDMI-CEC signals so the
| devices no longer talk with each other but instead with something
| I control. That takes it from an O(devices^2) interop problem to
| an O(devices) problem. Even then I'm not sure it's really
| tractable. There needs to be more standardization.
| pathartl wrote:
| There needs to be more configuration, which I don't know that
| CEC supports. I think it's fine to have a mode where it fits
| 80% of scenarios where your STB remote can control your TV and
| sound bar, but doing anything other than that is so limited.
| pathartl wrote:
| I am a big proponent of IR over CEC or (shudder) Bluetooth. IR is
| wireless by default, there's almost no input latency, and it's
| open enough where you can get a universal remote like Harmony and
| do anything you want.
|
| CEC on the flip side is wired only, only works with certain
| devices, and its success is dependent on manufacturers coming to
| some sort of agreement. CEC is missing some sort of bridge,
| something where other non-CEC devices can control everything on
| the bus. Something that can remap buttons for specific devices.
|
| CEC has also led to a lot of devices outright not adding IR
| remotes to their setup anymore, which makes any sort of external
| control 100x harder and prone to failure. I have an LG OLED TV,
| Pioneer AV receiver, and an Nvidia Shield. My choices for remotes
| are either the Shield's terrible Bluetooth-based remote that eats
| 2xAAA's every week, or the LG's magic wand where anything other
| than the TV doesn't support the pointer and tons of buttons can
| accidentally be pressed resulting in webOS rearing its ugly head
| on my display (with ads as a bonus!).
|
| With IR in the mid 2000's I could get a Harmony that would
| control every single device in my cabinet. If their database
| didn't have a remote's profile, you would have to learn the extra
| buttons and program it, but you could do it. There were certainly
| downsides, like activities were poorly planned and the lack of a
| bidirectional communication meant that the remote was often out
| of sync for what devices were actually on.
|
| Honestly, as much as the post trashes on USB, I would almost want
| CEC's capabilities to be a part of USB. Let me route my USB
| keyboard, mouse, remote, gamepad, whatever to whatever device in
| the chain. Let me remap any of those buttons to talk to a
| specific device in the chain. Basically, let me have a KVM that
| relays inputs based on configuration.
| replygirl wrote:
| tip: there is a service menu setting to disable ads. webos is
| much nicer since i toggled that. the entry point with the
| standard remote varies between models and os versions, but you
| can also get service remotes on amazon for cheap
| ianferrel wrote:
| My experience with the Harmony remote was that it was a very
| brittle solution. It took tons of setup, and would regularly
| strand me in some intermediate state where some components were
| enabled and switched properly and some weren't.
|
| Add to that the fact that 1. Some devices have separate "turn
| on" and "turn off" signals and some only hav a "power toggle"
| 2. My receiver had buttons that did not exist in Logitech's
| database. My attempts to have the remote learn them was only
| partially successful (like, it learned some of them properly
| and others never worked) 3. My screen was a projector that
| refused to turn _on_ again until a 1-2 minute cooldown after it
| had been turned off (I assume to avoid heat stress on the bulb)
|
| It was a right mess. When it worked it was great. The 5% of
| time it failed hard I had to dig out the individual remotes
| because the projector's cooldown made Harmony's attempt to fix
| things not work at all.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| > _I don 't think any conventional PCs have CEC transceivers. The
| solution, if you are mad enough to want one, is a USB CEC
| adapter._
|
| I have no idea what the status is, but there has been work on
| driver support for AMDGPU and Nvidia-supporting Noveau drivers
| dating back to 2018. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-
| Nouveau-CEC-Tunnel . The official kernel docs link forward to a
| pretty helpful https://linuxtv.org/downloads/v4l-dvb-apis-
| new/admin-guide/c...
|
| It's notably CEC over DisplayPort AUX, not HDMI. It'd be super
| interesting to know if this would tend to work with HDMi adapter
| or not?
|
| I did have a battle a couple years back, where my dad said the
| main thing keeping him from using the mini-pc & monitor and
| instead sitting at the desk with an old janky laptop was that
| there were keyboard shortcuts for adjusting the brightness. I
| tried like 6 programs and one (and only one) actually did let me
| adjust the monitor's brightness (via the Intel integrated
| graphics)! (And then wrote some gnome keyboard shortcuts to wire
| that up). I remember it being brutal, a slog, trying all sorts of
| stuff, but it was so rewarding to see (and made me so much
| happier than software dimming).
|
| (Epilogue: dad still doesn't use that nice ass computer or
| screen.)
|
| For many a years, CEV was something seemingly only available on
| raspberry pi & other sbc. It seems like CEC is still sort of an
| afterthought for most desktop environments. A pity! Ideally
| computers should be a nexus of control, but so often we accept
| the limited personas we are handed, don't delve deeper.
|
| Interesting write-up! I'd only known abstractly about CEC, known
| there's some mind of toolbox of options in it & that most PCs
| don't really use that.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| There is also the pulse-8 USB/CEC adapters (which work fine
| with linux):
|
| Universal: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-
| adapter
|
| NUC specific: https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/154/intel-nuc-hdmi-
| cec-adapter
| scottlamb wrote:
| I have the NUC version and can confirm it works as expected
| with my old NUC6i3SYK.
|
| Raspberry Pis (at least the 2 and 4, so I'd guess the 3 and 5
| too) also have CEC support built in. Same libcec/cec-client
| software as the pulse-eight adapter, but no dongle needed.
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