Putting the fear of AirPlay into Yamaha YAS-207 soundbar

Basic jobs get expensive invoices from pros because they'd rather be out there working a more substantial job. They don't want to drive out to your house, maybe need to make a trip to the store, and then be out of a job for the rest of the day since they couldn't schedule in anything else afterwards. I don't bother calling a pro for something unless I know it's something that will either take the whole day or isn't something I can finish before it must be done by. I can take my time redoing a spare bathroom or painting the exterior but a kitchen renovation would need to be finished quickly.

You could apply your logic to home building though. Builders get volume discounts on materials and labor. When someone is working the same repetitive job for months on dozens of homes, they can afford to charge their base hourly rate because they know their schedule will be full. If I built the exact same home the builder cranked out, it's going to cost me more despite using the same materials and people. When people build their own homes, they are usually going for something custom so a builder-grade starter home is not the goal.

What I've learned is that sometimes I do wanna spend a bunch of time and tinker so I will take the hard route.

Sometimes I don't want that headache and do the calculus of time & effort and spend the extra $ to get a speaker set that works with my phone :)

Home maintenance isn't being built by the thousands though, so that makes some sense.

That has nothing to do with the quality of a product, rather a personal preference for having something that's not internet connected.

> to avoid pointless shit like "Alexa" or "Google Home"

Or you have to spend more to buy useful shit like alexa or google home.

> hit or miss

What a polite way to say it.

CEC and DDC-CI, are these two things that should be absolutely nailed given in terms of low level commands how simple they really are and how long they've been around, yet are thoroughly broken through and through in so many subtle ways, from broken payloads to timing issues.

And even when the low level protocol is correctly implemented you can be sure that the high level behaviour of the devices is not doing what you'd want it to, with no workaround possible.

e.g one device turns -all- devices on/off no questions asked, another would not allow separate configuration of being controlled vs controlling, and/or power on vs power off, a third one would disable CEC the moment you select headset audio output because it goes in the way of their MegaMagicSync+ feature (which is just CEC with a bunch of useless proprietary stuff to talk to other devices of the same brand, coz gotta "add value" and "differentiate")...

I did have a quick look before posting and I thought I saw that bar had a hdmi input (for the pi) and then an output with ARC for the TV. I thought that would work but I admit it's been a while since I tinkered with CEC. But as others have said, it is flakey. I was subscribed to the libcec issue tracker for a while and it was relentless with per-device issues. I had a mostly good experience with a Sony TV but it seems to be pot luck.

Relatedly, does a £300 soundbar in 2020 still only come with one HDMI input!?

Couldn't they plug it in to the TV? My AppleTV can control my soundbar volume and it's plugged into the TV and not the soundbar.

That’s a good way of looking at it.

And yes, it is one of the unvoiced assumptions: as long as I heard two devices speaking, I can’t be breaking any EULAs or what not. Decompiling something would be another kettle of fish entirely.

Not to mention that often times apps (even Java/Android apps) are obfuscated, which might make the reversing much harder (than sniffing traffic).

It doesn't but you have to stream from somewhere and my phone and Mac can turn the soundbar on/off.

Nice work and I bet was a great sense of achievement.