How to get HDMI CEC working on a 7th gen intel NUC

Question

I have an NUC7i5BNH with an Iris plus graphics card with hdmi cec. The tv(Hisense) detects, connects and works well with my bluray player (Sony) but can't detect the NUC. I have turned on HDMI CEC in the bios and installed Kodi (which installs libCEC) but the peripherals option is greyed out like there are no CEC devices.

Any ideas to troubleshoot this? Has anyone got CEC in the 7th gen NUCs working in Ubuntu?

I'm running Ubuntu 16.04.

Solution

UPDATE: I received an answer from Intel (finally):

As per our investigation, you will need an add-on device to use your TV remote with Kodi.

The onboard HDMI CEC controller that is controlled from the BIOS, supports bidirectional power on/off control for TV and NUC.

So you can NOT use the remote with the built in CEC.

PREVIOUS ANSWER (more in depth):

So from https://www.intel.com.au/content/www/au/en/support/boards-and-kits/intel-nuc-kits/000023500.html it states:

The following Intel NUC Kits have the above external CEC header as well as an onboard HDMI CEC controller that is controlled by the BIOS, which supports bidirectional power on/off control:

And then lists a bunch of NUC's including the Gen7 ones. From this (and other readings) it seems that the CEC controller in the NUC's are only for use in the BIOS (NOT the OS) and so can only be used to do power options (wake, power on/of etc) and so are really just a HDMI version of wake-on LAN.

So the fact that the place I got it from (and Intel) don't make this clear and just say there is a built in HDMI CEC controller is beside the point and hopefully people will find this post before purchasing.

YOU CAN NOT USE THE TV REMOTE TO CONTROL ANY NUC'S WITH THE BUILT IN HDMI CEC CONTROLLER. (At the current time up to the Gen7's)

In order to do this you will need something like https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/154/intel-nuc-hdmi-cec-adapter (internal, NUC specific) or https://www.pulse-eight.com/p/104/usb-hdmi-cec-adapter (External, multiple devices).

I will update this if I see any new firmware etc that changes this.

Comments

[rgs258]

Any update on Gen8 models?

[MicWit]

I don't have a Gen8 model to test on, would be interested to know if anyone has one

[doki42]

I have a NUC8I5BEK, I'd be glad to test it. I'm looking for a solution to turn on and off the TV through htmi cec.

[MicWit]

Turning the TV on and off should work, it's all other control (media buttons) that don't work.