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.

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.

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

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.

(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.)

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.

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.

That said props for actually using HDMI-CEC! And it’s cheaper than most smart plugs (and probably safer, too)

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...

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.

My Roku does this! It will turn on the TV but not the soundbar, which is so frustrating. Guess it’s somewhat normal.

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.

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.

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.

* 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!

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.

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

Yay!

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.

Better hurry befor-, too late it’s cloned in china.

Actually it would be funny if somebody integrated this fix into a cable

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.