Having jazzed up my home entertainment space with smart accented lighting by two Philips Hue Play light bars, I decided to up the ante to sync the lighting effects with the movies that I was watching on my TV, as well as my music and gaming – to achieve a more immersive experience.
The Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box is a fantastic way to liven up your entertainment space for movies, gaming and music. Before (bottom) and After (top). Note how the corresponding coloured light leaps off the TV onto the surroundings.
We are all familiar with surround sound, where the sound is expanded beyond a mono or stereo speakers to encapsulate the listener for a more immersive audio experience.
Signify is offering surround lighting with its Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box (RRP: S$419) – extending the visual experience from the confines of the television (or computer monitor) to beyond the display itself to the surroundings.
What you’ll need to set up a synchronised surround lighting from scratch (sold separately): Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box, Philips Hue Play light bars, Philips Hue Bridge. You’ll also need the free Philips Hue app and Philips Hue Sync apps to set up and program the lights and synchronisation.
You can set this up by emplacing Philips Hue smart lights around the TV and then syncing the colours and intensities of these lights to whatever is displayed on the TV screen.
So imagine a scene in your movie where there is cool blue ocean on the left half and a ship on the right exploding in a fiery fireball.
The Philips Hue lights to the left of the TV will light up with a corresponding cool blue while the lights to the right would shimmer in tones of red corresponding to the hue and intensity of that exploding fireball in the TV.
The Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box includes the Sync Box itself, a power supply, an HDMI cable, a power cable, as well as the User Manual and Safety Instructions.
The lights most suited are the Philips Hue Play light bars (RRP: S$209) or Hue light strips.
You’ll need the Philips Hue Bridge (RRP: S$89) to control the lights and the Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box to synchronise the lights to the TV content.
Both are sold separately from the lights.
Likewise, you’ll need the free Philips Hue App (for either Android or iOS) to program the Hue Bridge to control the lights and the free Philips Hue Sync App to program the settings for the synchronisation.
The Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box acts as an HDMI hub with four HDMI input ports and one HDMI output to the TV.
So instead of connecting the HDMI devices directly to the TV, you connect them to the Sync Box instead – which forwards the signal on to the TV.
These HDMI devices could be a set-top box, game console, streaming box, PC or anything with an HDMI output.
The Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box has four input HDMI ports and one output HDMI port. It uses the same smart plug that can take up to three devices whilst plugging into a single wall outlet. That smart plug can accommodate the Sync Box and two light bars.
Being the man-in-the-middle, the Sync Box analyses the signal going through it to determine what colours (and intensities) are being displayed on theTV screen.
This information is then used to control the lights (via the Hue Bridge) around the TV to output the corresponding colours and intensities.
Using the main Philips Hue app, you can define the entertainment space you are programming eg. living room, bedroom, home theatre etc. and specify the TV and the lights to be synchronised with that TV, including details such as the position of each light with respect to the TV viz. left, right, height, top, bottom etc.
This is so that the Hue Sync app knows the relative position of each light to the TV and output the corresponding colour and intensity to each light.
In the Hue Sync app, you can control how the synchronisation is to be done.
The Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box is a great way to liven up the entertainment space with “surround lighting” to extend the visual effects of the content you’re watching on the TV to beyond the confines of the TV screen.
Watch the colours leap off the TV screen while you watch movies or play games, or create lightscapes synchronised to the music you’re listening to.
You can select the sync mode – whether you’re syncing video, music or game.
Or the intensity – whether you want the syncing to be subtle, moderate, high or extreme.
And also the brightness of the synced lights.
These settings can be quite subjective.
For first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty, I tend to set it to game, extreme and full brightness.
For action-packed movies such as Transformers and movies from the Marvel franchise, I’d set video, high and 80% brightness.
For sitcoms, I actually switch off the syncing since I don’t think there’s really any point to syncing.
But these settings are highly personal – what is exciting to one viewer could be too distracting to another.
What I like is that there is no noticeable latency in the synchronisation so that enhances the realism and immersiveness of the surround lighting.
The Sync Box works with Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri shortcuts, and supports content with Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and 4K.
You can program an infrared TV remote control to control the Sync Box
Because the Sync Box needs to intercept the video signals being sent to the TV from external HDMI sources, it is unable to synchronise the lights with content originating from within the TV itself, such as movie streaming apps that are built-in within smart TVs.
It also helps to have a flat white wall behind the TV to better appreciate the colours – the wall behind my TV has a yellow sponge effect, so although the warm hues show up well, the bluish tints are tainted with the yellow colour on my walls.
Tags: HDMI, Home, Hue, IoT, light bars, Philips, reviews, Signify, Singapore, smart home, sync box
I have an old TV with a single HDMI input. Can I use the Sync Box to double up as an HDMI splitter to connect more than one HDMI source to the TV.
Yes, you can. I wouldn’t pay S$390 (current price online) just to get the Sync Box as a HDMI splitter. The Sync Box is a great way to set up “surround lighting” for your entertainment space. But the HDMI splitter ability is certainly a bonus!