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cec anyway

A small application to help control xbmc by CEC. Licensed under GPL2. (C) 2013 Magnus Kulke.

What?

CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) is an HDMI feature which is implemented in many A/V products (TVs, receivers, consoles) these days. Manufacturers of course use their own brands for it (Sony: BRAVIA Sync, Samsung: Anynet+, Onkyo: RIHD). Among other things CEC allows controlling several devices with a single remote.

There is an open source library called libcec which provides an interface to cec hardware. This is not only handy to limit the amount of remotes with redundant buttons, but especially useful for devices like the raspberry pi, which do not have ir hardware built in. Meanwhile it has been integrated well into XBMC.

Why?

Imagine the following scenario:

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 |`.    |`.                 |`.    |`.                  |`.    |`. 
 |  `+--+---+               |  `+--+---+                |  `+--+---+  
 |   |  | o=|=================o |  | o=|==================o |  |   |  
 +---+--+   |               +---+--+   |                +---+--+   |
  `. |   `. |                `. |   `. |                 `. |   `. |
    `+------+                   +------+                    +------+

 Raspberry Pi with             CEC-enabled               TV, panel or beamer 
 libcec installed              A/V receiver              without CEC support

Now, in theory the XBMC instance on Raspberry Pi could be controlled by the A/V receiver's remote. If you enable CEC input in XBMC and inspect the debug logs you can see the keypress events if you press butons on the remote. However it does not work, the buttons are ignored. This is because the spec requires a root display device (usually a TV) to be present, so it is not a bug in libcec or XBMC, but rather an unsupported scenario. Your TV might be older or your display device unusual (like a beamer or a computer monitor). In this case you cannot use handy CEC. Therefore i wrote "cec anyway", which ignores the spec, captures button presses, and uses those to control XBMC.

How?

cec anyway is a tiny c++ app, which uses libcec and can be run as daemon in the background. It communicates with xbmc using its json-rpc api. It has been tested and developed on debian linux, but it might work on other platforms as well. The following description assumes a linux setup.

Requirements:

  • libcec2
  • xbmc 11

Installation:

make
sudo make install
chkconfig cecanyway on
/etc/init.d/cecanyway start

Installation instructions for Raspbmc (Oct. 2013):

Raspbmc has bundled libcec2, while the underlying raspian distribution offers only libcec1 in its repository. So we need to grab the appropriate headers of libcec2 to compile it.

  1. Deactivate built-in cec support in XBMC (System -> System -> Input Devices -> Devices -> CEC Adapter -> Activated [ ])

  2. Go download libcec2, unzip, and link the header in the cecanyway directory

    cd /home/pi wget --no-check-certificate https://github.com/Pulse-Eight/libcec/archive/libcec-2.1.3.tar.gz tar xzf libcec-2.1.3.tar.gz tar zxf cecanyway-1.0.tar.gz cd cecanyway-1.0 ln -s ../libcec-libcec-2.1.3/include libcec

  3. compile and install it

    sudo apt-get install make g++ make make install sudo update-rc.d cecanyway defaults sudo service cecanyway start

Usage:

By default the CEC key events left, right, down, up, select, exit, play, stop, pause, rewind, backward, ff, forward are mapped to their XBMC equivalents.

If you want to map more key events or overwrite the default mapping you can specify that in a configuration file. To add new mappings cecanyway can be run standalone with logging enabled. You should see the key codes when the you press buttons on the remote.

/etc/init.d/cecanyway stop 
/usr/bin/cecanyway -l

Those keycodes can be mapped in a config file ( /etc/cecanyway.conf ) using the following syntax (no newlines in the json parts):

22 => {"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Stop", "params": { "playerid": 1 }, "id": 1}
66 => {"jsonrpc": "2.0", "id": 1, "method": "Input.Back"}

The XBMC json-rpc api is described here: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=JSON-RPC_API/v6

Available options:

  • -d (daemonize)
  • -l (log key events)
  • -f </path/to/myconf.conf> (change path to config file, default: /etc/cecanyway.conf)
  • -p (change json-rpc port, default: 9090)