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I've installed XBMC on my Raspberry Pi, which is connected to my Samsung SmartTV via HDMI cable.

Everything worked as expected, the XBMC has been installed and showed up on my TV screen.

The strange thing is, that I can control my Raspberry Pi (the XBMC software) with my TV remote of my SmartTV! How is this possible? The communication channel between the Raspberry Pi and the SmartTV is the HDMI cable.

Setup: I use the Raspberry Pi B+ model and Samsung UE40F6500 SmartTV, both are connected to the internet via RJ45 cable.

XBMC version: 13.2 “Gotham”

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  • OT: Can you post a video of it in action?
    – Bibhas
    Dec 21, 2015 at 12:31

1 Answer 1

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This feature is called CEC. It allows a device to be controlled with a remote from a TV through the HDMI cable. You can even switch on/off automatically a device when you switch on/off your TV.

It works out of the box with many devices such as PlayStation 3, A/V receivers, and Raspberry Pi as well (from my exprience, only with the OpenELEC distribution, but now, maybe with others). CEC has commercial names depending on manufacturers such as Anynet+ for Samsung, or SimpLink for LG.

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    Works also quite well for archlinux by simply installing xmbc pacman -S xbmc-rbp.
    – Ghanima
    Oct 3, 2014 at 10:39

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