Wake up Kodi using TV's remote

Troubleshooting
1

Hi and thanks for the best RPI distro!

I’ve set up mine to act as an HTPC light. It boots to Kodi and is plugged in to my TV through HDMI. I have no keyboard nor mouse connected. Kodi is controlled exclusively via TV’s remote (fantastic feature, I was kind of chocked the first time I realise it works!).

There’s one problem though. After a certain amount of idle time (e.g. a day after I’ve used Kodi last time) all I see on the TV is blank screen. RPI itself is awake and kicking (I have SSH on it so I can log in and all is fine, I can see in htop that Kodi is running). I guess that there’s some kind of screensaver or something similar going on here. Probably a simple keypress would wake it up, but I have no keyboard connected as mentioned before. So what I usually do is login via SSH and reboot. Not the most optimal solution.

Any idea why RPI isn’t responding to keypresses from TV’s remote? It works flawlessly prior to this “blank screen event”.

2

Have you checked Kodi’s power saving / blank screen settings?

ALso you may need to “wake up” the CEC feature of your TV - for example on my Samsung TV I need to press the tools button.

John

3

Great distro, fantastic community. Thanks John, I had no idea that this functionality is called CEC, which upon some googeling turned out to be called Vera Link on Panasonic. Pressing that button on the remote seems to wake Kodi up. Thank you!

4

I have a similar problem - after reboot I can use my LG remote control do scroll through Kodi menus, but if I go back to Kodi after some idle time it doesn’t work anymore and I have to reboot the whole system.
Any idea about what might be the issue?