This is one installment in a series of articles in which we'll lift the veils of misunderstanding from the lingo of the AV industry. You can see the rest of our Know the Lingo series in AV University, where you can earn AVIXA CTS certification renewal credits while you learn!
Technical lingo is a kind of shorthand that's used to express concepts common to a specialized area of focus. Technical lingo is important because it provides a precise or unique "shorthand" description of a device, effect or concept. Unfortunately, if you aren't comfortable and familiar with the lingo of a topic it can be a tall hurdle to communicate efficiently with folks who consider the jargon of their field to be "self-explanatory."
Consumer Electronic Control, often referred to simply as CEC, is a feature that is part of the HDMI standard. CEC is designed to allow one device to control up to 15 other connected CEC-enabled devices using an HDMI interface. For example, a Blu-ray DVD player may be able to control an attached display such as a flat panel LCD TV. CEC allows two forms of control—user initiated, and device initiated.
An example of user-initiated control would be pressing the volume button on a Chromecast with Google TV remote control and controlling the display as a result. It's important to understand this isn't the same as a "universal" remote control as the controlling signals are actually traveling through the HDMI cable from the streaming player to the display.
An example of a device-initiated control would be automatically changing the input of the attached display to "DVD" when the play button is pressed on the BluRay player. Again, the control signal is sent via the HDMI cable.
CEC is a one-wire bidirectional serial bus. One conductor in the HDMI cable is designated to carry the CEC signal. While CEC wiring is mandatory in all HDMI connections beginning with the very first HDMI 1.0 release in 2004, the actual implementation of CEC capability is not mandatory. Each manufacturer is free to include or exclude CEC functionality in particular products.
Manufacturing companies often give proprietary names to their implementation of CEC functionality in a family of products. Trade names for CEC include Samsung's Anynet+, Sharp's Aquos Link, Sony's BRAVIA Link and Panasonic's VIERA Link. Despite these copyrighted names, all of these systems are implementations of the CEC standard.
As might be expected, Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) is often not implemented on products designed expressly for the commercial market. For example, an LG commercial display may not respond to CEC commands, while the corresponding model from the consumer line does. Typically, this is because the CEC functionality has the ability to be turned on or off via a menu selection on a device's service menu.