BT TV Pro Box eARC source switching issues

[Midnight_Voice]

@davecm 

Yes, our setups are very similar, my soundbar being the analogue of your receiver and carrying the BluRay, but as it only has the one input, my YouView box is plugged into the TV instead.

You might like to try, as an experiment, plugging your YouView box into the TV and then, with everything in standby, turning the YouView box on, see what happens.

I consider the BluRay player as operating correctly; if I switch the soundbar to HDMI, the player doesn’t come on unless I switch it on.

So I think that when I switch the YouView box on first, and it sends what I think is a broadcast (ID 15) CEC ‘turn on’, the TV gets it, and the soundbar gets it, and the BluRay gets it too.

A couple of things to know about CEC; it travels along the HDMI connections, and these are always available, even if the equipment they are in are not powered at all, and not even in standby. And the devices negotiate CEC IDs in the range 0-14 between themselves, so they can talk to each other individually, with 15 used for broadcast to all CEC devices in the network of HDMI connections.

Some clever logic is obviously stopping the broadcast signal getting to the other devices connected to the TV, or they are ignoring it, so it only goes out from the TV over the eARC cable; I don’t pretend to understand it all completely, though.

If I do switch the BluRay on, with everything else in standby, it fires up the soundbar in HDMI (In) mode, which in turn fires up the TV on the eARC HDMI connection, by dint of this also being the HDMI In from the soundbar, and I see the Bluray’s menu on the TV screen. This I think is the absolutely correct and expected behaviour.

So the culprit in all of this, and the only culprit I think, is some wrong CEC behaviour from the YouView box.

EE/BT might like to report this back to YouView for investigation, and, hopefully, correction, especially if the issue is present on the Pro boxes.

[naylor2006]

I think in many cases that actually the source CEC triggering device may not be the one powering on the other devices, I mean that if you power on a device and it wakes the TV, the TV waking alone can trigger other devices attached to it to wake up, depending on the attached devices of course, some behave differently.

Surely though your setups are not similar, isnt the OP using an AVR where all his devices attach to that and then he has one uplink to the TV and they arent using eARC?

From an expected behaviour point of view I see the two setups as too different to compare. If OP connects the YouView to the TV then they will also need to enable ARC on the AVR and TV to use it that way unless by default its on.

That is of course unless I have entirely missed the point.

[davecm]

Thank you all for your input. That gives me enough evidence that the BT box is not working as well as it should, and similar issues arise with a variety of setups and multiple users. I'll try initiating a BT tech support online chat and provide them with a link to this thread.

I'm guessing the HDMI-CEC and eARC functionality are determined by the hardware manufacturer Sagemcom, so any fix would probably need to be provided to BT by them rather than by Youview, for inclusion in a future firmware update.

I'm not holding my breath, but if you don't report issues they don't get fixed.

[naylor2006]

Can you clear something up for me before I lose my mind 🙂

Youre not using eARC though right, your BT Box is connected to your AVR not your TV?

Im trying to figure out if I missed something here.

[davecm]

All my sources are connected via HDMI to the receiver, which is connected to the TV by a single cable, via its eARC HDMI connector, to the corresponding connector on the receiver. The only source which misbehaves is the BT TV Pro box.

Nothing else is connected directly to the TV.

It's actually not the only issue with the BT TV box. It usually needs a reboot every couple of weeks, as sometimes there's no program guide. Sometimes the required device switching off sequence I described earlier doesn't work, and whatever I do on the TV or the receiver to select the TV box as the source, I can't.

Sometimes when playing back a recording, it just stops and reverts to the home screen. If I start playback again, sometimes it restarts from where I left off, and sometimes from the start of the recording.

Rebooting the TV box fixes any of these issues, until the next time,

[naylor2006]

This is what I mean....right, my bad, when I think of eARC I am thinking about the audio returning from your TV to your AVR, you are not using this function because audio is being hijacked by your AVR before it even gets to the TV and presented right away through your speakers.

eARC can also negotiate source switching to avoid the requirement for HDMI CEC but I'm not overly sure how that part of it would work with just the one uplink to the TV.

Just because the ports are labelled eARC doesnt mean much unless its enabled and in use, it just means those ports can do it. If it were me and considering you are not using audio return I would be disabling e/ARC where ever I found it to ensure its now screwing around with a signal chain that isnt actually using it, or just uplink your AVR to your TV into one of its normal HDMI ports, provided that port also has max bandwidth.

[davecm]

The receiver, TV and other sources are connected exactly as per the receiver user guide.

Everything mostly works as expected, apart from when switching the BT box on or off.

I just had the promised online chat with BT tech support and sent them the link to the forum thread. They are apparently aware of this particular issue and are already working with Sagemcom to see if it can be resolved.

The fact that the online chat agent immediately knew what I was talking about was somewhat reassuring, so they must have had lots of queries about it.

[naylor2006]

Yeah I get that but youre not using eARC anyway.

For example it would be for if you had your Bluray player and EE TV box connected to different HDMI sources on the TV directly, then the audio for those sources would pass back down the HDMI connected to the eARC ports and out the receiver's speakers.

In your case, you dont need to...your AVR likely will only have one output of course and it will be labelled eARC because it supports it:

This is the back of my AVR, under the white 'Monitor' port in small writing you can see 'eARC', its just to signify that port supports it, but its irrelevant as its not used and I dont need to worry about what port on the TV it connects to.

Dont get me wrong, I am not saying you have connected things up wrong, I just mean I dont think you are actually using eARC at all and might as well disable it.

Anyway, good news, hopefully devs get it fixed.

[davecm]

When I had the cabling installed in the wall, I had 2 HDMI cables to the TV, as at that time I didn't have the receiver, and only the original Humax BT TV box, and a DVD player, so I used both cables.
I can try connecting the BT Pro box to the spare cable instead of to the receiver.

If the result is positive and worth sharing, I'll post it here.

[davecm]

I tried connecting BT TV Box directly to TV with the spare HDMI cable. So the original HDMI cable was still providing ARC between TV and the receiver as required for the other receiver connected sources.

The result initially looked positive. The on/off and source switching was more reliable, with none of the faff to ensure devices were switched off in the necessary order.

However, correct sound sync for the BT TV box could only be achieved via the TV speaker, and with the BT Box delay set to 0. If the sound output on the TV was set to receiver, then the sound sync was way off.

Fortunately there's tennis on TV all day today, so it was easy, but disappointing, to prove that none of the delay settings (from 0 to 240ms) on the BT TV box via receiver sound achieved anywhere close to correct sync when the racket hit the ball. 😂

The delay can also be adjusted on the TV and on the receiver, but both of those would affect all sources, so not an option.

Guess I'll continue to use the current turn-off sequence faff method and pray that BT come up with a better solution sometime.