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.
That little headphone jack is seriously driving bookshelf speakers to a reasonable volume? If it works it works but that doesn't sound right, unless these are actually self-powered speakers with their own amplifiers inside. I'd really like to know the details because this sounds crazy.
Also, I collect a lot of old receivers and speakers. It's really not that complicated and the basics have been the same since the 70s and 80s. Any flatscreen TV made in the past 20 years typically has a TOSLINK output which will be compatible with receivers stretching back to the 80s - I have my LG C1 connected to some 90s Marantz receiver this way. Any old receiver you find on Facebook Marketplace for $20 will typically suffice here as long as you check for the TOSLINK port first, but you do need a separate actual amplifier somewhere along the line to drive a speaker larger than a pair of headphones unless the speaker has its own amp built-in.
I find all this stuff fun so my own setup has that chained to a series of other receivers acting as subwoofer amplifiers as well as using the pre-amp output to drive a Mesa Baron tube amplifier/Acoustat electrostats I was gifted, but most people don't need anything so complex.
The jack is not driving the bookshelf speakers. They're active. They have their own internal amps. It's simple if you use a receiver. If someone can point me to a receiver that's more like 4 inches than 18 inches, then I'd consider that a solution. Receivers are big boxes as far as I've seen. I don't have space. Or maybe I don't want to make space.
Fosi ZD3 (https://fosiaudio.com/products/fosi-audio-zd3-fully-balanced...). Supports HDMI with CEC. I turn on my Apple TV, it turns on the TV, which in turn turns on the Fosi DAC - all connected with HDMI. The DAC then turns on a ZA3 amp via 12v trigger cable. Volume control etc is via the Apple remote.
All very cheap really. Total cost I think was about $550 (refurbished TV, second hand Apple TV, new Fosi DAC and amp). All this and I get to keep the TV in 'dumb' mode. Never even use the TV remote.
Some of the bigness is just tradition and buyer expectation (big = expensive). But also, modern AVRs are like 1000W devices amplifying 7, 9, even 11 channels of passives. That’s a lot of componentry and corresponding heat to shed— if you open one of those up, it’s not just empty space in there like an NES cartridge or something.
Have a look at Fosi Audio. I'm currently using a BT30D to drive the passive speakers from an old Samsung integrated amplifier+receiver+2014-era "Smart TV" type system that died. It only has 1 analog input and Bluetooth, but it looks like they have other products in a similar form factor that can take multiple inputs (e.g. the P4 Mini). I was skeptical but needed something cheap to drive those speakers and am quite impressed.
Apart from Sonos in general being awful[1][2], their web site seems to be pretty bad, too. Not only is there a modal "subscribe to our newsletter" box in that link, there's also a separate modal cookie warning which blocks the modal newsletter box. It's like frustrating users is core to their mission.
I had a houseful of overpriced speakers, some only 3 years old when they decided they were too old to support in their rewritten app, or some lazy crap like that.
For GP; I use some cheapo (sub $50) "100W mini amps" from Amazon. They seem fine to me.
It sounds like your speakers work for you then. On a modern TV without a headphone jack you would probably be served perfectly well by bluetooth speakers that sync to the TV. Though I'm surprised if a 3.5mm output is really that uncommon, because I just bought an LG C1 a few years ago and it has one. You can also find a small bluetooth receiver that would output to a headphone jack at WalMart.
I was kind of in OP's shoes a few months ago. My 2000-2010 era stereo receiver crapped out and I was looking to see if I could simplify my system a bit. Unlike OP, I didn't need anything that could extract audio from the TV. My requirements were:
1. A decoder with at least 5.1 output since that's how many speakers I have
2. At least 3 HDMI inputs + 1 HDMI output to my TV
3. An amplifier with a volume control
That's it! I don't need an FM tuner. I don't need multiple zones. I don't need wild listening modes and DSP effects. I don't need an on-TV setup display. I don't need fiber optic digital audio inputs. I don't need fucking rows and rows of 20 RCA jack inputs, composite video, component video, S-Video. You'd think I could find a small cheap box the size of an AppleTV that I could just hide somewhere that could do this, but I couldn't find anything sufficient. So I got another $20 gigantic, ugly, old 18-inch receiver again from Craigslist and just leave all those features and inputs unused.
I never understood the "ugly" perception. At worst some might look boring to me, but at best some of them are absolutely beautiful. For example, my favorite in my collection appearance-wise has a 70s-style wooden finish on all but the front plate with a polished silver look on the front plate: https://imgur.com/a/DAUeJJW
This is going to sound kind of sexist, but I have never met a woman who was OK interior design-wise with 18 inch stereo equipment in the living room. I mean look at the OP article: He's got all this stuff hidden away in a closet. This seems to be the only viable way to keep an "A/V stack" full of black boxes and a marriage.
I've got a great sounding 5.1 system with a receiver and a game console and everything set up. You know where it is? My garage.
Is it really love if it hinges on the presence of high quality stereo equipment? Also, I have a friend who has similar stuff out in the open and is happily married.
You’ve either been meeting the wrong women or you need more rooms. One room where people can sit and talk to each other and a completely different room where people can sit and listen to music or watch a screen. Ideally if you want music in that first room you would put a piano in there, because playing the piano (and singing along) is a social activity that people can actually do together. Neither of these activities should be relegated to a garage.
Others have mentioned toslink and I'd like to expand upon that.
When you get a new TV and no longer have a headphone jack to plug your powered speakers into, then you can just add a DAC that converts the toslink digital audio that your new TV outputs into the bog-standard line-level analog audio that your speakers understand.
DACs like this are available at all price points.
At the low end of the scale, some are less than $15 -- and they're tiny. If you can't hide it somehow then I might insist that you're not really trying.
And that's it. That's the entire missing link for where we are in 2025, wherein: A new TV will still have a toslink output, and your powered speakers still have an analog input.
It's quite hard to know if the DAC is actually decent quality though. I've bought two from Amazon (admittedly at the low price point) and both of them have line noise - one of them even has a ground loop buzz, which surprised me, since it's powered by USB-C. I'm unconvinced that any of the higher price points (that are still within my budget) aren't just these cheapo ones in slightly fancier cases.
My old TV had real analogue out for speakers and it really did sound a lot better than what I've been getting through TOSLink and this cheapo DAC. Same Hi-Fi and speakers. I'm sure the problem could be solved with a more expensive DAC, but which one? How could I know?
I find this is one of those things where it's quite hard for the uninitiated to see through the cloud of 'audiophiles' saying that you must buy gold cables or your audio will sound like garbage, and still getting decent quality audio.
A receiver has always been a pretty standard part of even really simple AV setups - you can get half decent ones pretty cheap, and then you just run either the HDMI ARC port or the optical/coax digital audio out from your tv to the receiver so that everything you plug into your tv has it's audio go out to the speakers.
Personally I use an eARC extractor to run S/PDIF to an audio interface (MOTU Ultralite Mk5) and an RPi running camilladsp handles room correction and active crossovers. Overkill at the moment for just a few studio monitors and a sub, but it'll be a great solution when I get around to building some custom speakers.
Yep, I have a bunch of those audio extractors, they're awesome. In my home office setup I even have an HDMI output that's mirrored to several screens and extract audio at various points along the same path (two using the dedicated mini extractor boxes, one just using the headphone out on a monitor).
I'm not going to buy a TV just to "try" to figure out how to get audio out of it. I mean, I'm sure there must be a way to do this. I've seen a few options in this thread. If I were to buy a TV, I would want to avoid making it more difficult than I have to. To that end, I'd want to figure out specifically how to get audio to the speakers. In my case, they're active bookshelf speakers without HDMI input.
If the only possible way of doing this is with a bulky receiver, I'd feel justified in complaining about modern AV stuff. Not because of the cost, but because of the size.
Nah man I'm with you. I've gone chest-deep into this pool and still get issues 5-10% of the time with pretty simple use cases. And I've got a top-of-the-line TV and a pretty good receiver. It's maddening that such conceptually simple use cases don't "just work" even when you DO sink hundreds or thousands of dollars on the stuff you're supposed to.
It seems you have amplified speakers. The low friction solution is to use a Toslink to RCA/TRS adapter. That will be a bulletproof digital output readily available on many TVs.
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.
Active bookshelf speakers with HDMI Arc input are getting more common. Kanto Ren, Kef LSX II, Klipsch The Fives, Elac Debut ConneX
There's also the compact, simple alternatives to bulky receivers that are becoming available: Wiim amp, Sonos amp, Eversolo play, and the cheaper chinese makers like SMSL and Fosi. Each of those brands has a small device the size of an apple tv that will take an HDMI Arc input, and output an amplified signal to power some passive bookshelf speakers.
There are a couple of brands that sell them, that’s what I meant. I prefer bookshelf speakers over a soundbar due to the larger drivers and better stereo separation
Another infuriating issue is TVs with so few HDMI inputs. I have tried many different HDMI switchers and none of them work reliably, so it kind of puts me off of buying a receiver which would also have that function.
I’ve mostly had no issues with HDMI through Yamaha receivers and that includes weird things like an OSSC and Framemeister.
On the other hand, HDMI switchers haven’t fared as well. I built a mini console rack with a switch and it doesn’t recognize several devices, even when manually selected.
In my limited experience, Yamaha handles HDMI-CEC significantly better than Denon/Marantz. As evidenced by the fact that I currently own a Marantz receiver and am reading this page, but back when I owned a Yamaha receiver, I had no need to care about all of this crud. Things somehow worked on the first try! I did not expect that. However, it conditioned me to expect that again with a different receiver (the sources and sinks are the problems, right? the receivers are super well tested because sitting in the middle and passing these commands around is their entire job, right? right?) which was a mistake.
(The actual issue with the Marantz is that it seems to be eating some kind of power-on command from the source, and not passing it on, so the TV never turns on if you try to turn on the receiver or the source. I have no idea how to fix this, short of following in the path of this article.)
Personally, I run a Yinker 4x4 matrix (in: nintendo switch 1, chromecast, mac pro 4.1 I use as a gaming rig, raspberry pi 5, out: projector, TV, pi 5) and am quite happy with it - no outages so far in half a year of uptime.
I desperately need to work with CEC though lol, never had the time to actually test that.
A "receiver" has been one of the standard options for making bookshelf speakers work for more than 50 years. A receiver is also not expensive. You can get a basic used one for under $100. I paid $30 for a perfectly working 5.1 Denon receiver with HDMI.
Your problem is that you aren't even using "Modern" AV stuff. If you were, your speakers and TV would both have HDMI Arc ports. Arc has been a thing since 2009.
> 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.
Receivers are big because of the amplifiers. AV receivers have to drive lots of channels. They are all 5.1 or 7.1. But stereo receivers are also huge.
I suspect that some of this is tradition because there are small solid state amplifiers. I'm surprised no one has made a small receiver for 2.1 system cause would be pretty common.
If you open a standard sized receiver up, you'll probably see that 50% the space is empty for airflow, 25% of the space is for a large heatsink because they're passively cooled to minimize noise (thus the need for airflow), and 20% of the space is really big capacitors.
They do make half size receivers, but they typically only have half the power output. The space savings comes from removing space for airflow and the heatsink, and using smaller capacitors for less heat and smaller power output.
If you only need 2.1 output and a quarter of the power, there are offerings that are basically the size of the minimum amount of ports: 2 pairs of speaker terminals, a pair of RCA terminals for subwoofer out, a HDMI port, a optical port, and power. But then it's not really a receiver and more just of an amplifier+DAC because they only have one HDMI input/output, having space for multiple HDMI ports or speaker terminals basically increases the size to the offering above.
They're big mostly because consumers demand a lot of big connectors on them.
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!
Optionally: Throw away/recycle away the supplied chinese noname power supply. Buy a used laptop PSU from a reputable brand locally for cheap instead. I scored a Lenovo 135W/20V laptop PSU for $5 at my local Goodwill equivalent. Solder on a 5.5mm barrel jack connector.
1. His speakers are powered already. He doesn't need an amp.
2. Even if they weren't, how is he supposed to connect to the Fosi without a headphone jack coming out from the TV? The Fosi only has RCA input.
You suggested an amp. The fact that I'm able to use a headphone jack to connect my speakers should tell you I don't need an amplifier.
The question posed is how to connect those speakers if I no longer had access to a headphone jack. Currently the headphone jack is working fine.
For what it's worth, here's a comment that seems like it's get a perfect solution for me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
(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.)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That little headphone jack is seriously driving bookshelf speakers to a reasonable volume? If it works it works but that doesn't sound right, unless these are actually self-powered speakers with their own amplifiers inside. I'd really like to know the details because this sounds crazy.
Also, I collect a lot of old receivers and speakers. It's really not that complicated and the basics have been the same since the 70s and 80s. Any flatscreen TV made in the past 20 years typically has a TOSLINK output which will be compatible with receivers stretching back to the 80s - I have my LG C1 connected to some 90s Marantz receiver this way. Any old receiver you find on Facebook Marketplace for $20 will typically suffice here as long as you check for the TOSLINK port first, but you do need a separate actual amplifier somewhere along the line to drive a speaker larger than a pair of headphones unless the speaker has its own amp built-in.
I find all this stuff fun so my own setup has that chained to a series of other receivers acting as subwoofer amplifiers as well as using the pre-amp output to drive a Mesa Baron tube amplifier/Acoustat electrostats I was gifted, but most people don't need anything so complex.
The jack is not driving the bookshelf speakers. They're active. They have their own internal amps. It's simple if you use a receiver. If someone can point me to a receiver that's more like 4 inches than 18 inches, then I'd consider that a solution. Receivers are big boxes as far as I've seen. I don't have space. Or maybe I don't want to make space.
Fosi ZD3 (https://fosiaudio.com/products/fosi-audio-zd3-fully-balanced...). Supports HDMI with CEC. I turn on my Apple TV, it turns on the TV, which in turn turns on the Fosi DAC - all connected with HDMI. The DAC then turns on a ZA3 amp via 12v trigger cable. Volume control etc is via the Apple remote.
All very cheap really. Total cost I think was about $550 (refurbished TV, second hand Apple TV, new Fosi DAC and amp). All this and I get to keep the TV in 'dumb' mode. Never even use the TV remote.
Some of the bigness is just tradition and buyer expectation (big = expensive). But also, modern AVRs are like 1000W devices amplifying 7, 9, even 11 channels of passives. That’s a lot of componentry and corresponding heat to shed— if you open one of those up, it’s not just empty space in there like an NES cartridge or something.
> If someone can point me to a receiver that's more like 4 inches than 18 inches
S.M.S.L. make some good ones: https://www.smsl-audio.com/portal/product/index
I use their AD-18 and really love it: https://www.smsl-audio.com/portal/product/detail/id/566.html
Have a look at Fosi Audio. I'm currently using a BT30D to drive the passive speakers from an old Samsung integrated amplifier+receiver+2014-era "Smart TV" type system that died. It only has 1 analog input and Bluetooth, but it looks like they have other products in a similar form factor that can take multiple inputs (e.g. the P4 Mini). I was skeptical but needed something cheap to drive those speakers and am quite impressed.
https://www.sonos.com/en-us/shop/amp
Sonos makes this specifically. Has an RCA and HDMI input, along with being a Sonos device for streaming audio.
The only downside is the price.
Apart from Sonos in general being awful[1][2], their web site seems to be pretty bad, too. Not only is there a modal "subscribe to our newsletter" box in that link, there's also a separate modal cookie warning which blocks the modal newsletter box. It's like frustrating users is core to their mission.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683753
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21895086
And that Sonos is terrible to its users.
I had a houseful of overpriced speakers, some only 3 years old when they decided they were too old to support in their rewritten app, or some lazy crap like that.
For GP; I use some cheapo (sub $50) "100W mini amps" from Amazon. They seem fine to me.
It sounds like your speakers work for you then. On a modern TV without a headphone jack you would probably be served perfectly well by bluetooth speakers that sync to the TV. Though I'm surprised if a 3.5mm output is really that uncommon, because I just bought an LG C1 a few years ago and it has one. You can also find a small bluetooth receiver that would output to a headphone jack at WalMart.
I was kind of in OP's shoes a few months ago. My 2000-2010 era stereo receiver crapped out and I was looking to see if I could simplify my system a bit. Unlike OP, I didn't need anything that could extract audio from the TV. My requirements were:
1. A decoder with at least 5.1 output since that's how many speakers I have
2. At least 3 HDMI inputs + 1 HDMI output to my TV
3. An amplifier with a volume control
That's it! I don't need an FM tuner. I don't need multiple zones. I don't need wild listening modes and DSP effects. I don't need an on-TV setup display. I don't need fiber optic digital audio inputs. I don't need fucking rows and rows of 20 RCA jack inputs, composite video, component video, S-Video. You'd think I could find a small cheap box the size of an AppleTV that I could just hide somewhere that could do this, but I couldn't find anything sufficient. So I got another $20 gigantic, ugly, old 18-inch receiver again from Craigslist and just leave all those features and inputs unused.
I never understood the "ugly" perception. At worst some might look boring to me, but at best some of them are absolutely beautiful. For example, my favorite in my collection appearance-wise has a 70s-style wooden finish on all but the front plate with a polished silver look on the front plate: https://imgur.com/a/DAUeJJW
This is going to sound kind of sexist, but I have never met a woman who was OK interior design-wise with 18 inch stereo equipment in the living room. I mean look at the OP article: He's got all this stuff hidden away in a closet. This seems to be the only viable way to keep an "A/V stack" full of black boxes and a marriage.
I've got a great sounding 5.1 system with a receiver and a game console and everything set up. You know where it is? My garage.
Is it really love if it hinges on the presence of high quality stereo equipment? Also, I have a friend who has similar stuff out in the open and is happily married.
You’ve either been meeting the wrong women or you need more rooms. One room where people can sit and talk to each other and a completely different room where people can sit and listen to music or watch a screen. Ideally if you want music in that first room you would put a piano in there, because playing the piano (and singing along) is a social activity that people can actually do together. Neither of these activities should be relegated to a garage.
So many problems and more money could solve every one of them!
Some googling found this, but it might be under-powered if you have 8 ohm speakers:
https://www.snapav.com/shop/en/snapav/episode-mini-51-avr-ea...
the only way it could have a smaller back-panel and all of your requirements would be to eliminate the ethernet connector.
Depends on what he means by 'bookshelf'. I've still got these collecting dust in a condo in Germany, where I rarely visit anymore.
https://www.highfidelityreview.com/creative-sbs260-speakers....
Clear and distortion-free. Probably depending on how you drive your line-out, but mine just worked.
Stereo 2.0! (Giggle..)
The room isn't that large, but they really could fill it with sound, or the nearest neighborhood, if put on the balcony on summer evenings :-)
The audio part can still be made to be simple.
Others have mentioned toslink and I'd like to expand upon that.
When you get a new TV and no longer have a headphone jack to plug your powered speakers into, then you can just add a DAC that converts the toslink digital audio that your new TV outputs into the bog-standard line-level analog audio that your speakers understand.
DACs like this are available at all price points.
At the low end of the scale, some are less than $15 -- and they're tiny. If you can't hide it somehow then I might insist that you're not really trying.
And that's it. That's the entire missing link for where we are in 2025, wherein: A new TV will still have a toslink output, and your powered speakers still have an analog input.
(Tomorrow? Who knows, man. We aren't there yet.)
It's quite hard to know if the DAC is actually decent quality though. I've bought two from Amazon (admittedly at the low price point) and both of them have line noise - one of them even has a ground loop buzz, which surprised me, since it's powered by USB-C. I'm unconvinced that any of the higher price points (that are still within my budget) aren't just these cheapo ones in slightly fancier cases.
My old TV had real analogue out for speakers and it really did sound a lot better than what I've been getting through TOSLink and this cheapo DAC. Same Hi-Fi and speakers. I'm sure the problem could be solved with a more expensive DAC, but which one? How could I know?
I find this is one of those things where it's quite hard for the uninitiated to see through the cloud of 'audiophiles' saying that you must buy gold cables or your audio will sound like garbage, and still getting decent quality audio.
But you’d be left without volume control, or at least from the same remote you control the TV with.
I've successfully set up sound bars with toslink and used the TV's remote to run the volume up and down. Toslink doesn't have to be a fixed level.
If future-TV lacks this functionality: DACs that have remote volume controls are very nearly as inexpensive as those that don't.
Thanks. Those are some helpful search terms.
A receiver has always been a pretty standard part of even really simple AV setups - you can get half decent ones pretty cheap, and then you just run either the HDMI ARC port or the optical/coax digital audio out from your tv to the receiver so that everything you plug into your tv has it's audio go out to the speakers.
I know I could do this. But I don't really have space for a box. And I'd rather not have it.
I've solved the problem by slapping myself whenever I catch myself looking at sound bars, receivers etc for the living room.
> How am I supposed to get the audio to the speakers without a bulky expensive receiver box?
You can get a small ARC/eARC audio extractor with RCA or S/PDIF output and use your favorite amplifier or DAC with it.
Correct answer, HDMI audio extractor.
Personally I use an eARC extractor to run S/PDIF to an audio interface (MOTU Ultralite Mk5) and an RPi running camilladsp handles room correction and active crossovers. Overkill at the moment for just a few studio monitors and a sub, but it'll be a great solution when I get around to building some custom speakers.
Yep, I have a bunch of those audio extractors, they're awesome. In my home office setup I even have an HDMI output that's mirrored to several screens and extract audio at various points along the same path (two using the dedicated mini extractor boxes, one just using the headphone out on a monitor).
It's still very simple and you have never needed anything expensive to do so. Stop with the learned helplessness and "being afraid to try a new TV"
I'm not going to buy a TV just to "try" to figure out how to get audio out of it. I mean, I'm sure there must be a way to do this. I've seen a few options in this thread. If I were to buy a TV, I would want to avoid making it more difficult than I have to. To that end, I'd want to figure out specifically how to get audio to the speakers. In my case, they're active bookshelf speakers without HDMI input.
If the only possible way of doing this is with a bulky receiver, I'd feel justified in complaining about modern AV stuff. Not because of the cost, but because of the size.
Anyway, thanks for your input.
Nah man I'm with you. I've gone chest-deep into this pool and still get issues 5-10% of the time with pretty simple use cases. And I've got a top-of-the-line TV and a pretty good receiver. It's maddening that such conceptually simple use cases don't "just work" even when you DO sink hundreds or thousands of dollars on the stuff you're supposed to.
You can get a WiiM Amp or Ultra with HDMI eARC, but you can go cheaper if optical out is good enough. Many TVs still have that one
It seems you have amplified speakers. The low friction solution is to use a Toslink to RCA/TRS adapter. That will be a bulletproof digital output readily available on many TVs.
> 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.
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.
Active bookshelf speakers with HDMI Arc input are getting more common. Kanto Ren, Kef LSX II, Klipsch The Fives, Elac Debut ConneX
There's also the compact, simple alternatives to bulky receivers that are becoming available: Wiim amp, Sonos amp, Eversolo play, and the cheaper chinese makers like SMSL and Fosi. Each of those brands has a small device the size of an apple tv that will take an HDMI Arc input, and output an amplified signal to power some passive bookshelf speakers.
There are a couple of brands that sell them, that’s what I meant. I prefer bookshelf speakers over a soundbar due to the larger drivers and better stereo separation
TVs seem to expect you to use HDMI-ARC to return sound to the receiver or soundbar. I wonder if there's any HDMI-ARC to audio dongles out there?
Another infuriating issue is TVs with so few HDMI inputs. I have tried many different HDMI switchers and none of them work reliably, so it kind of puts me off of buying a receiver which would also have that function.
I’ve mostly had no issues with HDMI through Yamaha receivers and that includes weird things like an OSSC and Framemeister.
On the other hand, HDMI switchers haven’t fared as well. I built a mini console rack with a switch and it doesn’t recognize several devices, even when manually selected.
> Yamaha receivers
In my limited experience, Yamaha handles HDMI-CEC significantly better than Denon/Marantz. As evidenced by the fact that I currently own a Marantz receiver and am reading this page, but back when I owned a Yamaha receiver, I had no need to care about all of this crud. Things somehow worked on the first try! I did not expect that. However, it conditioned me to expect that again with a different receiver (the sources and sinks are the problems, right? the receivers are super well tested because sitting in the middle and passing these commands around is their entire job, right? right?) which was a mistake.
(The actual issue with the Marantz is that it seems to be eating some kind of power-on command from the source, and not passing it on, so the TV never turns on if you try to turn on the receiver or the source. I have no idea how to fix this, short of following in the path of this article.)
Personally, I run a Yinker 4x4 matrix (in: nintendo switch 1, chromecast, mac pro 4.1 I use as a gaming rig, raspberry pi 5, out: projector, TV, pi 5) and am quite happy with it - no outages so far in half a year of uptime.
I desperately need to work with CEC though lol, never had the time to actually test that.
[1] https://www.amazon.de/Yinker-hintergrundbeleuchteter-Unterst...
> It seems like AV stuff used to be so simple.
> without a bulky expensive receiver box
A "receiver" has been one of the standard options for making bookshelf speakers work for more than 50 years. A receiver is also not expensive. You can get a basic used one for under $100. I paid $30 for a perfectly working 5.1 Denon receiver with HDMI.
Your problem is that you aren't even using "Modern" AV stuff. If you were, your speakers and TV would both have HDMI Arc ports. Arc has been a thing since 2009.
> 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.
Or you could unplug it and plug it back in.
Why are receivers so big? It's not exactly a money issue. I just don't want the big box.
Receivers are big because of the amplifiers. AV receivers have to drive lots of channels. They are all 5.1 or 7.1. But stereo receivers are also huge.
I suspect that some of this is tradition because there are small solid state amplifiers. I'm surprised no one has made a small receiver for 2.1 system cause would be pretty common.
If you open a standard sized receiver up, you'll probably see that 50% the space is empty for airflow, 25% of the space is for a large heatsink because they're passively cooled to minimize noise (thus the need for airflow), and 20% of the space is really big capacitors.
They do make half size receivers, but they typically only have half the power output. The space savings comes from removing space for airflow and the heatsink, and using smaller capacitors for less heat and smaller power output.
If you only need 2.1 output and a quarter of the power, there are offerings that are basically the size of the minimum amount of ports: 2 pairs of speaker terminals, a pair of RCA terminals for subwoofer out, a HDMI port, a optical port, and power. But then it's not really a receiver and more just of an amplifier+DAC because they only have one HDMI input/output, having space for multiple HDMI ports or speaker terminals basically increases the size to the offering above.
They're big mostly because consumers demand a lot of big connectors on them.
HDMI Audio Extractor is what you need. Look at OREI.
Perfect! This looks like the one.
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!
Your quest is thankfully unrelated to ARC/CEC.
Find a tiny TPA3255- or TPA3116-based amp. These are class D amplifier chips made by TI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class-D_amplifier
Buy one of these from e.g. Amazon.
Optionally: Throw away/recycle away the supplied chinese noname power supply. Buy a used laptop PSU from a reputable brand locally for cheap instead. I scored a Lenovo 135W/20V laptop PSU for $5 at my local Goodwill equivalent. Solder on a 5.5mm barrel jack connector.
My fav for your use case: Fosi Audio TB10D.
1. His speakers are powered already. He doesn't need an amp. 2. Even if they weren't, how is he supposed to connect to the Fosi without a headphone jack coming out from the TV? The Fosi only has RCA input.
1. That information just arrived as a reply to my comment.
2. "Luckily, I have one of the last remaining TVs with a headphone jack."
I'm using active bookshelf speakers with integrated amps. They are working fine.
I really dislike this behavior. You presented a problem, but you didn't want a solution. You wanted attention.
I do want a solution. You haven't provided one.
You suggested an amp. The fact that I'm able to use a headphone jack to connect my speakers should tell you I don't need an amplifier. The question posed is how to connect those speakers if I no longer had access to a headphone jack. Currently the headphone jack is working fine.
For what it's worth, here's a comment that seems like it's get a perfect solution for me.
Sorry if I was unclear.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
try rebooting the remote: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102569 it always fixes problems with either turning the tv on/off or volume issues for me
This has happened to me several times. I believe what fixes it is power cycling my AV receiver, in case it helps you.
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.
this. power cycling my Marantz fixed it. Otherwise Apple TV is rock solid.
I've had pretty good luck with the Steam Deck for CEC, at least with the Apple USB-C hub.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Huh, is that why my Steam Deck won't wake up my TV?
A long time ago I used one of these HDMI-CEC-to-USB/serial bridges: 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.)
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)
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...
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.
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.
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.
Would love to know more about the magic Apple bytes and why the Denon is behaving differently with consoles.
“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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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 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.
I'm assuming he could have used a Pi zero instead
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.
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
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!
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.
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!
Nice hack! The cat seems to be happy with the setup, too!
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.
I wrote related kind of thing a while back: https://github.com/askvictor/ChromecastControls . Though I haven't used it since upgrading most of my AV gear.
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.
Well, from the article I learned about Homebridge, which integrates non-Homekit products into Homekit.
Yay!
that was an interesting read. glad I do all of my video watching & games playing on a computer instead of consumer grade hardware!
Genius. I might have a pretty good use for this, since I have constant issues with my consoles fighting for the TV.
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.
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:
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.
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)!
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.
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.
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.
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?
Isn't DDC the I2C bus? Interesting article about that here: https://mitxela.com/projects/ddc-oled
Doh, you’re right. I’m over here getting my protocols mixed up. IIRC it is very similar though.
It's electrically similar, but not directly compatible. (if you know better than me, please let me know)
This is the content I come here for.
"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.
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.
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
I think it will be a while. There is not even a Pulse-Eight clone on Aliexpress
Someone invent the cornucopia machine