Smart Home Stuff

[WiteWulf]

I suggested something similar to the Plex forums a few years, either real-time analysis of screen data and control of Hue lights, or offline analysis and storage of metadata to playback alongside a movie. Never got anywhere, though. I guess it's quite a big job.

[Rhythm]

I suggested something similar to the Plex forums a few years, either real-time analysis of screen data and control of Hue lights, or offline analysis and storage of metadata to playback alongside a movie. Never got anywhere, though. I guess it's quite a big job.

Hue links in with my Ambilight TV to line up effects in the lights in the room. It's pretty effective stuff.

I'd love if the Hue/Ambilight API allowed for non-visual triggers. As it stands at the moment it's watching the edges of the screen, looking for colour and contrast then broadcasting the same to the Ambilight array or lights in the room.

But what if, for example, you were watching a horror film and, during a creepy scene, the movie instructed lights in your room to give the impression of movement behind you? Lights turning off quickly to give a "there's someone walking round your room casting a shadow" vibe?

[Mat]

That's one of the cool things about the GoVee; it can also react to audio cues instead of using the camera. Nifty when playing music through the telly.
But I must admit, 99.9% of the time, I'm using it to react to content on screen.

Still, having different options available is nice.

Witewulf:
Those third-party apps I mentioned work in tandem with Plex (or any media player), and sync lights to the action on screen. In fact, they only work with Plex and similar, or rather, the DRM-free media you're likely to be playing through it.

[Rhythm]

That's one of the cool things about the GoVee; it can also react to audio cues instead of using the camera. Nifty when playing music through the telly.

Ambilight (and Hue) does the same - I'm talking about the idea that there might be a separate inaudible track that can be used for lighting fx. So even if you just have Ambilight (or Govee) with no extra lights, it could trigger things like shadow effects in the lights coming from your TV without it showing on screen.

Of course the real goal is to get to that reverse Kinect that Microsoft showed off a few years ago

Whilst OLED really hasn't impressed me as a screen technology, I love Ambilight (and similar). I'd love for it to become more widespread (Philips, just license it to other manufacturers FFS) and for people to get experimental with it.

I'm due to ditch my telly soon, go back to a projector. I'll miss the lighting effects when I do

[Whiteball]

2022-2023 Samsung TVs going to get Philips Hue ambient lighting integration.

The Philips Hue Sync TV app lets owners of a newer Samsung TV seamlessly synchronize Philips Hue lighting in the home to the action on-screen.

So I presume you need to already have the Hue lights etc and the TV just has an app to control them?

[Rhythm]

2022-2023 Samsung TVs going to get Philips Hue ambient lighting integration.

The Philips Hue Sync TV app lets owners of a newer Samsung TV seamlessly synchronize Philips Hue lighting in the home to the action on-screen.

So I presume you need to already have the Hue lights etc and the TV just has an app to control them?

Yep. My 5 year old Philips OLED has this built in and it works great. You use the app to tell the system where in your room all the lights are located and they all sync properly with different effects coming from the right spots in the room.

Samsung are supposedly charging $130(!!!!) for the app add-on

[Whiteball]

Samsung are supposedly charging $130(!!!!) for the app add-on

Wow! didn't hear about that part. If true, that should kill it before it gets any traction.

[Rhythm]

Samsung are supposedly charging $130(!!!!) for the app add-on

Wow! didn't hear about that part. If true, that should kill it before it gets any traction.

They're suggesting it's good value because the alternative (the official Hue Sync box) is $249

TBH I didn't know Philips sold Ambilight full conversion kits. Happy that their tech is about to hit many more TVs though

[WiteWulf]

I can understand the high price (don't want to erode sales of either their own Ambilight TVs, or the external box (which I wouldn't imagine is all that popular)), but conversely, no one's gonna buy it, and those who do will be pissed off in a few years when it's either a) discontinued and/or b) they buy a new telly and find they can't transfer the license

[Mat]

I suspect the price on the app is artificially inflated thanks to Intel keeping the license for HDCP ridiculously high (which I suspect is also the reason for the high price on the box).
Effectively, to monitor the stream from one of the DRMed providers, the app has to be able to decode HDCP on the fly, and the only way to do that officially is with a license from Intel.
HDCP in all its forms has been effectively cracked, but I suspect no-one's interested in putting an app on the Play store that circumvents it.

I really hate DRM, especially when it's controlled by a single, for-profit actor.

In smart home news, I had a Virgin Media outage the other day, and my "smart" home became remarkably stoopid. While the lights continued to work, they defaulted to their last profile and couldn't be changed. That's not so bad; motion sensing was still working, and they switched to the night-time profile at the right time.
But every other "smart" device went stoopid, thanks to my set-up centering around Google Play Home.
The Nest Hub in the bedroom and Nest Hub Max in the kitchen stopped working, the Nest Thermostat did too, and I could no longer control my smart plugs or GoVee via voice, as my Nest Audio speakers also wouldn't work without an internet connection

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised because it's Google, but I thought they would have planned for internet outages.

Thankfully, my connection is usually very reliable, but let this serve as a warning to those with spotty internet who might be thinking of delving in to the "smart" home.

I'm guessing Home Assistant may be the way to go if you want that level of redundancy, and indeed, I've got it set up on a Pi, but I just haven't gotten around to configuring it properly, as it seems a bit of a faff with compromised functionality.

[WiteWulf]

Indeed, pretty much everything you control from an Echo/Google Home/whatever involves sending a command to assistant company, ie. Amazon, who then forwards the command to the manufacturer, who then sends the command back to your home device. Very little, if anything, works directly from the assistant hardware to the hardware in your house.

Even when Home Assistant start doing what they're promising, you're still going to have a layer of abstraction whereby you talk to your assistant hardware, which is processed in the cloud and the resulting command is sent back to your HA instance. Voice assistants require a *lot* of storage and processing, and that's not something most homes are able to host, and it certainly can't be performed in the assistant hardware itself.

[Whiteball]

There is no reason why any device can not have voice control with simple key phrases without being online.
They get you to record the phrase and then off you go. Had it years ago and on less capable devices too.

I also hear Amazon is losing money (approx 10Billion+ ?) on Echo devices as they sell at cost (or lower) and have not monetised it in any way profitable yet. Could they ever call it a day and they all stop?

[Rhythm]

I suspect the price on the app is artificially inflated thanks to Intel keeping the license for HDCP ridiculously high (which I suspect is also the reason for the high price on the box).
Effectively, to monitor the stream from one of the DRMed providers, the app has to be able to decode HDCP on the fly, and the only way to do that officially is with a license from Intel.

HDCP costs less than 10 cents per device and is usually included within the HDMI connector license price (still cents per device). There's a 5 figure annual membership fee but it's at a level that Samsung/Sony/LG etc would find pretty trivial

The issue isn't with decoding HDCP per se, it's whether the device sufficiently re-encrypts the content on the way out to the TV. Otherwise an Ambilight box just becomes a "piracy" box, stripping HDCP for easy copying. I suspect Govee and other players aren't willing to jump through whatever hoops the makers of the Hue Sync box did, hence over-engineering solutions by sticking cameras out of the telly

The usefulness of a device that sits in between your other TV inputs is getting lower every day. Smart TV apps are genuinely as good as what's delivered via set-top boxes and of course if you're using that functionality there's no "input" to tag into.

The price is nothign more than Samsung/Philips colluding. Ambilight lights cost enough as it is ($250 for lights for a 55" set) - the app license should just be included with the hardware.

[WiteWulf]

There is no reason why any device can not have voice control with simple key phrases without being online.
They get you to record the phrase and then off you go. Had it years ago and on less capable devices too.

I also hear Amazon is losing money (approx 10Billion+ ?) on Echo devices as they sell at cost (or lower) and have not monetised it in any way profitable yet. Could they ever call it a day and they all stop?

Voice control is very different to what a voice assistant does.

Having a set of pre-configured phrases in a local box will enable you to be able use those exact phrases, and nothing else, and you'd probably need to record each phrase for the different people in the household, too. There's a whole load of AI for language interpretation that goes on in the cloud services that back up these voice assistants and enable you to use far more natural language with them. That's what makes them popular and useful: the ease of use and flexibility of phrasing that users can use with them.

But yes, the money side of things appears to be very true and is affecting Apple, Amazon and Google. All attempts to offer services via the voice assistants that drive revenue appear to have failed. They're incredibly popular, though, so it would be a massive PR bungle for them to withdraw them, imho.

[zip accident]

There is no reason why any device can not have voice control with simple key phrases without being online.
They get you to record the phrase and then off you go. Had it years ago and on less capable devices too.

I also hear Amazon is losing money (approx 10Billion+ ?) on Echo devices as they sell at cost (or lower) and have not monetised it in any way profitable yet. Could they ever call it a day and they all stop?

Voice control is very different to what a voice assistant does.

Having a set of pre-configured phrases in a local box will enable you to be able use those exact phrases, and nothing else, and you'd probably need to record each phrase for the different people in the household, too. There's a whole load of AI for language interpretation that goes on in the cloud services that back up these voice assistants and enable you to use far more natural language with them. That's what makes them popular and useful: the ease of use and flexibility of phrasing that users can use with them.

But yes, the money side of things appears to be very true and is affecting Apple, Amazon and Google. All attempts to offer services via the voice assistants that drive revenue appear to have failed. They're incredibly popular, though, so it would be a massive PR bungle for them to withdraw them, imho.

I suspect you are mistaken, no offence intended. The Raspberry Pi 4 is a hugely different beast than the ZX Spectrum was. To generate an AI net takes a lot of time and processing power, to run it once it's generated, a Pi 4 is probably enough, in most cases.