A-V control within wiser (please be kind!)

Viera-link seems to be appearing in a few places, its from Panasonic. But its not universal.

There are attempts to make some control protocol thingy on HDMI into a universal standard. I looked at it. Its huge, complex, horrible, and relies on routing and knowing the topology of your equipment. (In other words, its complex and it sucks).

Oh, and the HDMI standard thing is a moving feast - changes have just been announced for it. Maybe in 5 years time there will be a standard. Maybe.

Apart from that, there is no consistent way of doing things, apart from blasting IR. And you can use cbus and wiser for that. It needs an IR output unit, and some programming. Yuk, but possible, and universal.

 

"Viera Link" is Panasonic's implementation of HDMI-CEC. Samsung call it "Anynet", Sony call it "Bravia Link"... everyone calls it something different.

On the plus side, it is defined as part of the HDMI standard. On the minus side, it appears there is scope for manufacturer specific behaviour, and it's up to the manufacturers as to what level of features they support.

I have a Panasonic plasma, Panasonic blu-ray player, and an Onkyo receiver with HDMI switching... they all play nicely together... the TV and the blu-ray player can control the receiver volume, and if the system is all off, you can put a disc in the player and hit play, and it turns everything on and selects the right input on the receiver and TV.... so there is hope that this may extend across other manufacturers as well.

Yeah... up until they announced HDMI 1.4 a few weeks ago, I thought it looked like HDMI-CEC might become a good standard for controlling linked AV gear.... now as far as I can tell they have screwed it all up and defined multiple new cable/connector standards, included ethernet (maybe at the expense of the CEC channel - there is no detail yet that I can find, but they seem to have added more features onto less wires... so something has to go)

Nick

 

You can use a cbus Infra-Red output unit to control all your AV gear (provided they are controlled by IR).

This has been done for many years by the home theatre integrators.

And the latest CIRCA for commissioning it supports macros as well, so your actions can be very complex indeed.

 

Investigate the NIRT. It's a cbus device. Wiser talks cbus. No need for IP. The NIRT blasts IR codes out. Program it with the codes you want to sent. Set up cbus triggers for those codes. Program wiser to issue triggers.

 

Sort of... the IR stuff is done through the 5034NIRT IR transmitter, or the Matrix Switcher (which actually has the guts of a 5034NIRT built in). You can use Wiser to control the Matrix switcher (eg select a "Watch DVD" scene, which tells the NIRT in the Matrix switcher to send out all the IR commands to turn on your AV gear etc), and to select/control MRA zones/sources/volumes etc.

No problem... you've got to start somewhere.. although this is jumping in at the deep end

Also be aware that the Wiser is available only through pointOne integrators... hopefully you will be able to find one who will work with you on this. If this is for your own home they may allow you a bit more leeway... if it were me I wouldn't want to be learning about this myself on a customer's site though.

Nick