homebridge-vieramatic - the Homebridge plugin for Panasonic™ Viera™ TVs

features

• full support for 2018 and later models

  Pin code and encryption (encapsulated in AES-CBC-128 encryption with HMAC-SHA-256) was added as a requirement for communication with TV models released on and after 2018 which has broken previously existing plugins.

  Please do note that older models are still supported too, as first class citizens.

• HomeKit TV Accessory
• Power TV On & Off
• Input switching
• Automated TV Apps handling
• Fully configurable via the Homebridge UI. No more need to manually edit homebridge's config.json nor to run shell commands.

requirements

• iOS 12.3 or later

• Homebridge v1.3.0 or later (since homebridge-vieramatic@3.0.0)

  before upgrading to Homebridge v1.3.0 check please its ChangeLog specially the breaking changes section in order to see if anything there applies to your particular setup.

• An actively supported LTS nodejs release. So, the minimum from 4.x onwards is Node 14.

TV setup

1. On your TV go to Menu -> Network -> TV Remote App Settings and make sure that the following settings are all turned ON:

   • TV Remote
   • Powered On by Apps
   • Networked Standby

2. Then, go to Menu -> Network -> Network Status -> Status Details and take note of your TV ip address.

plugin setup

the simple way [recommended]

1. Get homebridge.

2. install the homebridge UI, if not using it already.

3. From your browser, access the homebridge's ui, and jump to the plugins tab.

   there, search for vieramatic, and install it.

4. Restart homebridge

5. Go again to the 'plugins' tab, click on 'settings' from this plugin and follow the instructions.

6. add your newly configured Viera TV to HomeKit.

7. that's it! The plugin will even detect automatically all TVs on your local network (and if it doesn't you can still add them manually...)

   early 4.x releases shipped with automated discovery of available TV on your local network, via SSDP multicast discovery. That is causing issues in several setups - namely docker ones, so it become disabled until it becomes completely reliable for the common case.

8. If for some reason, things do not progress as expected, it is probably a bug. Please just report it.

This plugin assumes and expects that the user has homebridge-plugin-ui-x installed for all its UI functionality. So, there's no integration UI wise of any kind for third party homebridge UIs like HOOBS. So, if you are an HOOBS user you need to use viera-pair (see bellow) to generate the encryption tuple!

the old fashioned way [you shouldn't need to do this anymore really, except if using HOOBS or similar]

1. Get homebridge.

2. Install this plugin

    $ sudo npm install -g homebridge-vieramatic

3. run the pre-flight setup script, and take note of the output

    $ viera-pair YOUR_TV_IP_ADDRESS_HERE

4. Update your homebridge's config.json file per the output of viera-pair in the step above.

5. Populate the hdmiInputs section according to your input switching list.

   "platforms": [
      {
         "platform": "PanasonicVieraTV",
         "tvs": [
            {
              "friendlyName": "YOUR_TV_NAME_HERE",
              "ipAddress": "YOUR_TV_IP_ADDRESS_HERE",
              "hdmiInputs": [
                {
                  "id" : "1",
                  "name": "Apple TV"
                }, {
                  "id" : "2",
                  "name": "VodafoneTV box"
                },
              ]
            }
         ]
      }
   ]

   • please do note that if have more than one TV you add its config to the tvs array and not as a whole platform duplicate, along the example bellow...

     "tvs": [
       {
         "friendlyName": "YOUR_TV_NAME_HERE",
         "ipAddress": "YOUR_TV_IP_ADDRESS_HERE",
         "hdmiInputs": []
       }, {
         "friendlyName": "YOUR_TV_NAME_HERE",
         "ipAddress": "YOUR_SECOND_TV_IP_ADDRESS_HERE",
         "hdmiInputs": []
       }
     ]

6. disable the custom volume slider (optional)

   By default each TV will appear on HomeKit with an additional volume slider (of Fan type) in order to provide a visual way to control the volume (in addition to the hardware volume controls)

   In order to disable this feature, for each defined TV, just add

      "customVolumeSlider": false,

7. [re]start homebridge

tips and tricks

TV naming

If you'd prefer for Vieramatic to automatically detect and consume the name on your TV, then you can remove the tvName field from your config.

Your config.json file will look like this:

"tvs": [
  {
    "ipAddress": "YOUR_TV_IP_ADDRESS_HERE",
    "friendlyName": "OPTIONAL_CUSTOMIZED_TV_NAME_HERE",
    "hdmiInputs": [
      {
        "id" : "1",
        "name": "Apple TV"
      }, {
        "id" : "2",
        "name": "VodafoneTV box"
      }
]

supported TV sets

This plugin should support ALL the TV models supported by Panasonic's own "Panasonic TV Remote TV 3" mobile app (IOS install link and Android install link).

So, if experiencing setup problems, do make sure, in advance, that the TV is discoverable/manageable by the mobile app while connected to the exact same network as your homebridge setup, because if it isn't there's not much that the plugin could do.

some older sets became unreachable from the network either immediately after entering into stand-by, or after a while, and a subset of those sets supports being awaken via 'Wake On Lan'. If your set is one of those, you'll need to specify your TVs MAC address, either via the Homebridge UI's or directly into the TV's definition in homebridge's config.json along:

  "tvs": [
    {
      "ipAddress": "YOUR_TV_IP_ADDRESS_HERE",
       (...)
      "mac": "YOUR_TV_MAC_ADDRESS",
      (...)
     }
   ]

so that the the plugin could turn the TV ON.

Please do note that, on older sets, the Wake On Lan feature is only expected to work if the TV is connected to the network via a cable and not via wi-fi. On some sets, specially less older ones, it may work also wirelessly.

Disabling TV app support in very old TV sets

Early Panasonic SmartTVs APis either didn't expose TV apps using the current API or simply lacked that functionality at all. So, in order to support those sets a new options was added in 2.0.16 that allows the plugin's support for TV's apps to be disabled. For each affected TV just add to its' section (in config.json), or (preferable) turn that option ON via homebridge's config UI.

   "disabledAppSupport": true,

How to power on TV on (very old) unsupported TV sets

On some TVs, WoL (wakeup from lan) functionality is not even available, but a similar effect can can be achieved by using taking advantage of plain CEC hdmi.

Requirements

• Your homebridge device will need to be connected to your TV via HDMI.

• You will need to available a script executor for Homebridge (Script2 is used in this guide). Install it per npm install -g homebridge-script2

• You will need to have available in your homebridge host cec-client.

  on a Raspberry Pi running Raspbian cec-client is provided by having installed the cec-utils package

• You will need to activate CEC-HDMI on your TV (the system that automatically turns the TV on or off if an hdmi device is turned on or off). You will also need to ensure that, on boot, the homebridge host does not turn on the TV, or change its' HDMI source input (to it).

  On a rPI (per here) you'll achieve that goal by adding the hdmi_ignore_cec_init=1 config option to your /boot/config.txt.

script snippets

adapt absolute paths accordingly to your local setup and mod name from default ("TV ON/OFF") bellow to whatever suits you best.

• homebridge.conf

  {
     "accessory": "Script2",
     "name": "TV ON/OFF",
     "on": "/var/homebridge/TV-ON-OFF/on.sh",
     "off": "/var/homebridge/TV-ON-OFF/off.sh",
     "state": "/var/homebridge/TV-ON-OFF/state.sh",
     "on_value": "ON",
     "unique_serial": "1234568"
  },

• /var/homebridge/TV-ON-OFF/on.sh

  #!/bin/sh
  echo 'on 0' | cec-client -s -d 1 && echo "ON"

• /var/homebridge/TV-ON-OFF/off.sh

#!/bin/bash
echo 'standby 0' | cec-client -s -d 1 && echo "OFF"

/var/homebridge/TV-ON-OFF/state.sh

• #!/bin/bash
  state=$(echo 'pow <DEVICE #>' | cec-client -s -d 1)
  if [[ $state == *" on"* ]]; then
     echo "ON"
  else
     echo "OFF"
  fi

  restart homebridge and You should now have TV ON/OFF capabilities exposed to your HomeKit setup.

input switching - how to get Siri to do it

As far as the author knows, currently, the HomeKit TV integration spec from Apple sadly does not allow to switch inputs with Siri directly (would love to be proven wrong).

The workaround is either to make shortcuts that do the input change and invoke those from Siri, or to create scenes straight in the home app that achieve the same and then invoke them.

upgrading from pre 2.0.0 releases of this plugin

The upgrade should be transparent, and painless.

The only expected side effect is that you'll need to set again the visibility of your inputs and apps as they 'll get back to the defaults. If you experience other kinds if issues then it is a bug so, please report it with as much context as possible.

contributing

Contributions and suggestions or bug reports are gladly welcomed!

licensing

This is an open source project released under the Apache License 2.0.

acknowledgments

• George Nick Gorzynski's homebridge-panasonic plugin which served as the base inspiration for this new one.
• Florian Holzapfel's panasonic-viera python library which documented the new pin code authentication and communication scheme of 2018 and later models.
• the Homebridge community at large without whom this wouldn't just be possible.