Pulse-Eight is proud to announce the latest release of libCEC, version 1.6.1 is the culmination of our hard work over the last several months to implement wake-on-usb functionality to the USB-CEC Adapter, with this change, you are now able to wake (and possibly) boot your HTPC from the source menu in your TV. This now allows for the first time a full integration of your HTPC into the HDMI-CEC stack.

Along with this major update to the firmware we have also implemented a raft of new features and bug fixes

Features:

• Add support for additional user control codes (Setup Menu, Contents Menu, Favourite Menu)
• Added firmware version in XBMC’s peripherals menu and cec-client
• Respond to <Get Menu Language>
• Option to shutdown the computer when the TV is switched off
• Support more than 4 HDMI ports in a single device in XBMC peripherals menu
• Settings are now stored on the adapter so multiple applications can share the same configuration

Bug Fixes:

• XBMC Crashing when shutting down/suspending and have a CEC Adapter connected
• libCEC was always assuming it was the active source and would respond to offer messages when they were not intended for it
• Setting to not use the TV language was not being followed

To update to v2 firmware, please download the latest firmware version from http://packages.pulse-eight.net/windows/ and install the latest version of XBMC from our website http://packages.pulse-eight.net/

Right now our firmware updating system is only available for Windows and for Linux, we have no plans at this time for a OSX firmware updater, so please transfer your adapter to a Windows PC to perform the update.

For Linux if you have our PPA installed run  (sudo apt-get install cec-firmware-upgrade)

We hope you enjoy this new feature as we now move onto our next project, Windows Media Centre support!

Pulse-Eight is pleased to announce the release of libCEC v1.5, this release brings together our development team’s work over the last several weeks enhancing our vendor specific support for LG devices.

If you have an LG TV you might already be feeling the benefit with out latest PulseOS releases, if not and you own an LG TV you can now expect a much fuller experience from our USB – CEC Adapter. As you may or may not be aware, LG’s own support for SimpLink (their name for CEC) can be buggy at best, we have done our best to work round these flaws and we can now say with confidence that you will get a seemless ‘ON’ experience from turning your XBMC installation on, right through to your TV automatically switching on and selecting the correct source.

Within XBMC, we’ve been busy making enhancements too, to make it easier to understand the settings in the Peripherals menu, we’ve replaced Power Up TV with “Make XBMC the active source when starting up” this we hope makes it clear what is going to happen and will reduce a few support questions we get.

Furthermore we’ve improved the granularity in which devices can be powered up or shut down, instead of only controlling one device, you can effectively script a series of devices to wake or sleep when XBMC starts or shut’s down, this can be great if you only use your AVR for XBMC and take advantage of its standby pass through option at other times.

Another gripe people had been we would blindly issue a standby command when XBMC was shutting down, but it was not the active source, we’ve fixed this as it was rightly getting on a few people’s nerves!

libCEC v1.5 is available now and is in your favourite flavours of XBMC already. As always for the best experience grab our maintained packages at http://packages.pulse-eight.net/ for the best CEC support.

As has been hinted already, v1.6 will bring together months of hard work and culminate in the release of our v2 firmware, this will allow you to wake the pc from your TV or other device over CEC. We’re pretty psyched about this new feature and we are keen to get it into the hands of our beta testers (who have not yet been informed)

Following on from that, v1.7 is our planned version for our TCP daemon and windows media center support. Allowing users of that media center platform to take advantage of our adapter.