Hiya.
I setup the samsung tv binding, wich works great. But the thing is, when i adjust the tv’s volume it works fine.
But i have an LG Soundbar wich i use for the sound, so the tv’s speaker is always turned down to 0. Is there a way for me to control the soundbar’s volume instead of the tv’s volume? Its connected to the tv via a small plug going into a red lighted thingy on the back of the tv. (Sorry, no clue what this cable is called…)
That is called an audio optical cable. That cable is one way. There is no way to control the soundbar through that cable.
If you connected using HDMI then you MIGHT be able to control the volume on the sound bar if both your TV and the soundbar support it. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
My guess is you have a plastic optical fibre TOSlink between the Samsung TV and LG soundbar:
I’ve never seen any reference to control data being transmitted down a TOSlink cable - e.g it is one-direction audio only. OpenHAB may have control of the TV via the Samsung binding, but it can not control the sound bar.
My Samsung TV has settings to control volume of outputs other than the internal speakers, but as the optical signal is raw audio, the TV output volume may be fixed. My Samsung sound bar uses Wi-Fi direct or Bluetooth giving full control from the TV, but still fails occasionally.
Some separate sound bars turn themselves off when there is no sound input. You can probably test this by disconnecting the optical fiber and waiting to see if the sound bar goes into standby and then reconnecting it.
You could try controlling the bar directly via a mains switch controlled by OpenHAB, or even an IR transmitter. There are many options for this, from Z-Wave, enocean, to Wi-Fi, but the cheapest are probably Sonoff if you are confident with electronics (search for Sonoff in Tutorials and Examples for the guide).
A cheap ESP8266 microcontroller can apparently be programmed to act as a controllable IR transmitter via Wi-Fi and MQTT - something which is on my own to-do list.
Yeah, you are right it is one of those optical fibres.
Tho i can use bluetooth on it. Also there is a usb port in the front of it…
Any of those could be used instead?
Actually that’s not quite right. You can send data down the optical cable. I have a LG TV connected via optical cable to the LG Soundbar. The TV can send volume data to the soundbar. For this I have to set the audio output on the LG TV to “LG SoundLink (optical)”. This is probably a proprietary LG protocol, but it may be worth playing with those settings.
In my case, openHAB sets the volume of the TV which controls the volume of the soundbar.
Tried setting my tv to remote speakers. But no change. I dont suppose there is a way to get LG SoundLink to work on a samsung tv?
Unfortunately I don’t know. I don’t a Samsung TV so I can’t test.
Only if your TV is able to connect to the soundbar via BT instead of through the optical cable. The USB port is almost certainly designed so you can plug in a drive with a bunch of audio or video files on it to play through the speakers. There might be some way to get into a debug mode through the USB but I suspect it would require some major reverse engineering effort to figure out whether it’s there and how to use it.