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

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 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.)

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.

> 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.

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"

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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

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.

Huh, is that why my Steam Deck won't wake up my TV?

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.

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.

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.