There are discussions about integrating some kind of home AV equipment to ST. There’s a lot of discussion about IR blasters to control some devices (which, if I could find a good Zigbee/z-wave IR blaster that plays well with my setup, I’ll order it in a heartbeat).
As a (free) alternative for those with smart TVs would be to see if they have an API to send commands to. I have Samsung SmartTVs and I know they do have some level of support, as they allow apps on the same network to control them. I thought I’d share (what little) I know to see if anyone would have any suggestions or be interested in moving this along.
During today’s Office Hours, it was announced that they’ll soon enable limited support for the ST hub to control devices within the network, thereby removing most security concerns - opening a port to send commands through. So, with this change, I think this idea could inch closer to being doable.
Most (all?) Samsung SmartTVs run some kind of server on them. You should be able to see this if you can find the IP your router assigns it and access: http://192.168.0.100:55000/
It shouldn’t display anything, but it’ll let you know something on the other end is listening (connection refused or some such instead of the standard “not available” error).
Here, someone has reverse engineered the control setup in Python: https://gist.github.com/danielfaust/998441.
There’s some more discoveries being made here: http://forum.samygo.tv/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1792&sid=d1c9c0a6aca3c5da07c594fdabb9a4f2&start=10
I’m not very familiar with Python, but from the first link, it seems like there’s quite a bit of non-standard stuff going on. From an example in PHP (which I am familiar with), they open a socket to the TV and base64 encode chunks of data and write to the socket in “chunks”.
Not sure if there’s any interest in pursuing this.