[Mister-Art]

My first post here, and very new to both Kodi and Raspberry Pi, so please be gentle if I'm not doing this right.

I am running Kodi 17.6 under Raspbian Stretch on RPi3. I have been trying without success to use CEC for control of my Vizio M-series TV. 

The TV is connected to Raspbian (and Roku), but they appear as grayed-out options in the Settings menu, and I can not get the Vizio remote to control Kodi.

I have been struggling with this for days, wearing out my Google as well as looking in various forums (here, raspberrypi.org, etc) for an answer. I found nothing that helped. (What I found was either not on point or beyond my technical understanding.)

On a whim today I decided to try a more scientific approach to troubleshooting and connected my RPi3 to a different TV: a crappy Insignia set that must have cost the original owner something like $89 at Best Buy three years ago. Nevertheless, it worked immediately and flawlessly without issue. This is using the same little Raspberry Pi, same software, same HDMI cable. The only thing that changed was the TV.

So the problem would seem to be with that Vizio TV. 

At the suggestion of several online experts, I did unplug the Vizio for 5, 7, 10 minutes (the experts vary...). But it didn't make any difference.

Any thoughts? Thank you!
Mister-Art
Arlington, Va.

[Klojum]

There is the CEC implementation on each TV per manufacturer.
And there is the CEC implementation software-wise.

So many combinations, so many opportunities to get it wrong.

From what I've experienced with an older LG TV, the CEC implementation done by the manufacturer various. If I compare my CEC-capable devices, I'd say the Nvidia Shield has the best CEC implementation. Or perhaps I should say, the NV Shield has the least problems with my 2012 LG TV.

My Raspberry PIs 2 and 3, as well as my Wetek HUB, do work okay for basic functionality, but Kodi's screen saver claims HDMI ports whenever they are being activated. Also the RPi seems to turn on the TV when it itself is powered down. So I disabled all that jazz as much as I could. Perhaps connecting 3 CEC devices onto one TV was not foreseen by LG at the time.

So, YMMV... Your mileage may vary.

[DarrenHill]

On some TV's you have to enable CEC (wiki) at that end, either as a one-off or when you power it on (my LG is the latter).

So I'd check in the TV's menus if there's anything there that needs enabling.

Most manufacturers brand CEC (wiki) as something different - there a list available via the wiki page which may help.

[Mister-Art]

Klojum, Thanks for your quick reply, which if I can boil down to a few words, amounts to "CEC implementation is flaky." That corresponds to what I have read in numerous places. 

Thanks, too, DarrenHill. Vizio is one of the few manufacturers that don't obfuscate by attaching a proprietary name to the CEC function, so it was easy to find in the Settings menu, and (seemingly) easy to use: (a) Set CEC to "Enable" and then (b) Discover Devices.  When I do that, the RPi (and also my Roku) quickly pop up on the screen, but as I mentioned in my original post, they are grayed out and the TV remote does not seem to work in Kodi.

Mister-Art