Simple Remote and my Samsung TV
Okay, this is odd. I have a 12-year-old Samsung TV (an LN52A750 if we're being specific) down in the basement, and I hooked my old Roku 4 up to it so my little girl could watch her cartoons down ther...
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Ah. A bit more experimentation reveals that it doesn't have to be both buttons at once. Either button by itself will turn the TV on.
Now I just need a way to turn it off!
It sounds like HDMI-CEC is probably what is turning on the TV. I don't use it myself, I do have a "TV Off" in my Roku channel grid (at the bottom - but you can get to it by going up from the top, too.), so I assume that would turn the TV off for you.
More info here:
No, it's not CEC. The Samsung does have a feature they call Anynet+ but in the settings menu the item for is says Anynet+ (HDMI-CEC). So that's CEC, but I'm guessing some early ur-version of it that can't really talk well to current CEC. It was switched on when I found it, but the manual talks about it as a way to use your Samsung remote to control other devices hooked up to the TV, like stereo receivers or video players and so on, not as a way to control the TV from something else.
Anyway, the TV Off tile doesn't work. With the CEC switched off, it just grinds its gears and says The TV isn't responding. But with the CEC switched on, it fails differently. It says CEC is disabled and needs to be enabled for this to work. Even though it is enabled. So, yeah, some kind of weird early or proprietary variant of CEC that the Roku can't deal with.
But I think I've solved the real problem. I was looking around in the Roku remote settings and found the item for controlling the TV, and it said this remote doesn't support that. It's an old Gaming Remote. So I wondered, huh, would a more recent remote support it? And I do have a voice remote for the main TV upstairs. Brought it down, paired it to the basement Roku, and boom, On/Off, volume, mute, worked like a charm.
So I ordered a new remote, and that will free me from having to grope around the bezel until the Samsung's control buttons come up.
Would still love to know why the home and back buttons can turn the thing on, but that's just curiosity at this point.
This page says Anynet+ is one of many trade names for CEC.
Pressing the home button on my Roku Express (simple remote without TV control) used to turn my Samsung TV on, so I turned Anynet+ off and it not longer does. That way, I can press Home on my Roku remote to make sure it's not streaming without it turning the TV back on. (Which I had usually just turned off before pressing the Roku home button. ;)) At the time I did this, Roku hadn't yet added that TV off tile so I never tried that.
If it's not CEC then it could be just one of those random IR code overlaps that has been known to happen ever since IR remotes came out. However, since my Samsung no longer turns on from the Roku remote, I think it was CEC at least on my Samsung.
