In the Raspberry Pi CEC automation I mentioned that my Samsung TV is on ARC (not eARC). This is the backstory: eARC wouldn’t stay put, so dropping back to ARC was the only reliable option.

Setup

Samsung S95B hangs on the wall, its eARC port feeds a Denon AVR-X1700H, and every source runs through the receiver with CEC enabled.

With HDMI eARC Mode = Auto, the S95B would sometimes boot to TV Speakers instead of “Receiver (HDMI-eARC),” silently fall back to TV Speakers after source changes, and after the 1651 firmware update it would wake up that way every single time even with an ARC/eARC device attached (Samsung Community).

For years I treated HDMI-CEC like a house spirit: sometimes helpful, mostly temperamental, never fully understood. My living-room stack is straightforward: Samsung TV on ARC (NOT eARC - story for another day), Denon AVR-X1700H hidden in a closet, Apple TV plus a bunch of consoles connected to the receiver, and a Raspberry Pi 4 already doing Homebridge duty. When it comes to CEC, the Apple TV handles it like a dream, but every console behaves like it missed the last week of CEC school. They wake the TV, switch the input, then leave the Denon asleep so I’m back to toggling audio outputs manually.

Steps I took

1. Go to the homebridge terminal, you can SSH or I just used the homebridge UI.

2. Install Playactor sudo npm install -g playactor.

3. Run playactor browse and find your PS5, remember its name like “PS5-XXX”, you’ll need it later.

4. Run playactor login --host-name PS5-XXX --no-open-urls to register your device as a remote play controller. The --no-open-urls is important here because by default it tries to open a browser which isn’t gonna work if you’re using SSH or homebridge UI.