The light fantastic
Add a touch of pizazz to your media centre with a border of colourful Ambilight-like, picture-reactive LEDs.
Y ou might have seen the Ambilight system found on some Philips TVs, sometimes known as Bias Lighting. If not, the idea is quite simple: a perimeter of RGB LEDs is fixed to the back of the television, and these are light up in correspondence with what’s happening on screen.
This has the effect of extending the image onto the walls behind the screen.
There are a number of approaches to recreating this system with open source tools and plugging this into Kodi. The most popular is called Hyperion, which has been around for about as long as Ambilight TVs. Hyperion is flexible, and a common setup is to have Kodi running on a device, your PC say, and connected to an HDMI splitter and capture device. The HDMI capture is then sent (over USB) to a Pi running Hyperion, which drives the LEDs.
That setup is a little complicated for our liking, so we thought we’d try and come up with our own, ideally with fewer moving parts. Annoyingly, there’s no way to run everything on a Pi 4, since no one has figured out how to reliably capture the frame buffer (see https://github.com/hyperion-project/hyperion.ng/issues/983). So if we were to use the latest Kodi we’d need to invest in some capture hardware, either in the form of a loop capture (if we were to do everything on the Pi) or separate splitter and capture devices (if the Pi is just running the LEDs). Both can be achieved for less than £20 with a little Amazon scouring. The advantage of using a capture device is that you can use it for whatever HDMI input you happen to be watching, so your Pi can ambient-light your Smart TV’s interface, your desktop background or the frantic explosions from your CS:GO exploits.