Microsoft Teams Room Systems front of room displays — can I control them?
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So you purchased a Microsoft Teams Room system and you want the front of room displays to turn on and off with the system as this is one of the requirements of the conference room systems. Whats the answer and how do I figure this out?
WHAT DOES MICROSOFT RECOMMEND?
Microsoft does reference CEC (Consumer Electronic Control) on their Microsoft Teams Room documentation, that it has put out and you can find that blurb here.
So it does say that the front of room display need to support/enable CEC, but the truth is that there is not CEC control in any of the Microsoft Team Room system hardware currently.
The bottom line is there are 2 limitations that exist currently at the time of writing that prevent CEC from working with the room systems.
- CEC is a hardware item as seen below that it needs to be on pin 13 and the current hardware does not support this feature.
- CEC is a “best effort” technology that exists and although it had potential, display manufacturers have not always had the same interpretation of that control protocol
CEC as you can see from the wikipedia link has a large amount of different names from different manufacturers.
Without getting into the weeds of what the protocol is and how the different manufacturers interpret it, lets just take the examples of ON and OFF and explore how that simple state might be misinterpreted.
When the device issuing the command tells the display to turn OFF, what does that mean? Well some manufacturers have interpreted this as the display goes off and shuts down the HDMI board which in turn means the display cannot turn back ON by CEC…
