Hopper and Consumer Electronics Control (CEC)

I answered this on the other board ....

The Hopper and Joeys use ZigBee RF4CE profile.. For there remote controls.. Don't know if that is CEC or not.. Hope this helps..

gokartergo said:

I answered this on the other board ....

The Hopper and Joeys use ZigBee RF4CE profile.. For there remote controls.. Don't know if that is CEC or not.. Hope this helps..

Click to expand...

Thanks for your input, but ZipBee is wireless control with the remote, while CEC uses a protocal over pin 13 on HDMI cable to communicate commands to other A/V components. If all components in your home theater support CEC you can control them with one remote and one click of a button.

I wouldn't hold my breath regarding CEC catching on on this side of the pond.

I think it much more likely that the US will settle on using HDMI 1.4's Ethernet facility as it is ultimately more flexible and doesn't require anything new in terms of software. If you don't have HDMI 1.4, you can implement the same protocol over your home LAN. It is a win-win.

I disagree. It's apparently already caught on. All my devices except Dish current support CEC, and it works rather well. I control my PS3 and 3 other blu-ray players with it, all different makes. It's greatly simplified all my macros and negated the need for me to buy an expensive IR adapter for my PS3. It may not be obvious how ubiquitous CEC really is because everyone calls it something different (bravia sync, regza link, viera link, anynet, etc.). It's all CEC and it all works great.

I don't like CEC... and when I was using a Samsung HDTV and Samsung Blu-ray player, I purposefully disabled CEC control.

Why?

Because... it always switched to the Blu-ray input whenever I powered it on... and sometimes I didn't want it to do that.

Also, if I was watching a movie but wanted to pause it and switch over to satellite and check something like the weather really quickly... it would power off the Blu-ray player whenever I switched off of that input.

It became annoying more than it was "cool" as an automated feature.

Some makers handle that better than others. My tv lets you choose whether you want that power behavior or not without turning off CEC entirely. I have the power feature enable on my simpler systems and disabled on my more complex ones where I'd want to switch sources a lot like you are doing. CEC also doesn't play nice with state tracking remotes like harmony, so it usually needs to stay off in that case too.

If all CEC does is make the most recently turned on device active, that's hardly a remote control protocol. I also wonder if it really helps with remotes that keep track of the state of the various devcies it controls.

That's not it at all. It also automatically switches inputs on your display device and relays transport, menu, guide and nav commands, about 30 in all, reducing or eliminating the need for a universal remote or complicated macros. As I said before, it's invaluable on something like the PS3 which can't use an IR remote at all.

mdavej said:

It also automatically switches inputs on your display device and relays transport, menu, guide and nav commands, about 30 in all, reducing or eliminating the need for a universal remote or complicated macros.

Click to expand...

Being an EU standard, free documentation is hard to find.

What are the available commands?

The protocol was last updated in 1999 so I wonder if it is sufficient to cover the modern DVR.

That's odd. According to THIS spec, CEC was updated in HDMI 1.3a when they added timer and audio commands to the bus. But looking at that document, it doesn't look very well thought out or future-proof with only 256 possible user control commands