In this video I'm going to show you how to make the most out of your Philips
Ambilight TV with hue. Make sure you stick around, and if you like what you see
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Hi I'm Will from Will Surridge Tech and today we're going to be looking at the
Philips Ambilight TV. We're going to look at setting up Ambilight on the TV, the
different modes and features it's got, and then configuring it with hue to create
a truly immersive feel. If you stick around until the end I'm going to show
you how you can trigger any event or scene using a Philips hue light switch
and node-red. Remember anything I mention will be
listed in the description below if you want to check it out. My TV is the
55PUS7304. From the name you can tell it's a 55 inch TV and it's in the 7300 series.
When I was looking to buy last September there were three main ranges within my
price bracket the 6700 series the 6800 series and the 7300 series. Now the two
6000 series options were basically a big no from me because they run on the
Philips Saphi operating system, whereas a 7300 series runs on Android. This
obviously has the added benefits of more apps and the ability to integrate into
home assistant. It can also integrate with Google home and Amazon echo. Before
we have a look at settings, let's see what Ambilight actually is. An Ambilight
TV will have a row of LEDs on the back of the TV along the edge. The TV will
look at the image being displayed and then will extend it onto your walls
using these LEDs. For example if you have a blue sky in green field the top LEDs
will be blue and the bottom ones will be green. As the image changes the colour of
these LEDs will update accordingly. The purpose of Ambilight is to reduce
strain on your eyes whilst watching TV, and also to provide an immersive feel. If
you're watching a bright and colourful TV against a dark unlit wall then there's
such a high contrast that your eyes are focusing on a really small area, and then
your peripheral vision has nothing to do. Whereas if we introduce Ambilight, your
whole field of view is being used and this reduces the stress on your eyes. If
you don't have an Ambilight TV then you can use an aftermarket alternative to
achieve the same effect. There are two main ways of doing this. You either get a
little box that sits inline in your HDMI lead, so between your Sky box or your
games console and the TV, this will analyse the
image and then tell the LED strip that you stick around the back of your TV
what colour to be (or in the case of the hue sync box it'll tell your hue bulbs
what colours be). Alternatively you can get a little camera that sits on top of your
TV pointing at the screen - it'll analyse the image in the same way and tell the
LED strip what to do. Now we can have a look at the Ambilight settings. At the
top of settings is the style - there are five different styles and we're going
to have a look at each one. Obviously when Ambilight is turned off
you're just back to a normal TV. The first style is 'follow flag' - this acts as
though the whole screen is taken up by a flag and it expands those colours
outwards on the pixels. Next we have 'follow colour' - again this is a static
option where you can select a predefined colour such as a deep red or a royal blue.
After that we have 'follow music'. Now these follow the music with a
varying level of disco. You have some that just pulse to the music, Lumina also
looks at the video and combines that with the music to react.
You've got effects like Scanner and then you've got Party which is just a
combination of them all. Now this is the one that you're most likely to be using
'follow video'. The different modes have different benefits and are suited to
different kinds of TV watching or different times of the day. Standard is
comfortable to watch - this is your typical day to day option, it's not too
fast or distracting, and it's not too slow. Football I presume is setup for
football - I imagine it's a little quicker responding and probably has a better
response to green, but I couldn't tell you for sure! Natural is more truthful to
the colours - it'll also turn off when the part of the screen is black which is a
very nice feature. Relaxed is quite slow to respond - it gently fades between
colours, nothing that distracts you from the main content. Vivid does what it says
on the tin - it saturates the colours a bit more, very quick to respond - almost
pre-empting the screen by filling the Ambilight faster than the screen fills.
Game is what I use - it doesn't light up if the screen is black, it's nice and
quick to react, and will only react to the part of the screen it needs to so
it's much more specific in the coulors and which pixels it uses. It feels like a
high-definition version of the others. And lastly we have Comfort. This is about
halfway between Standard and Relax - it's slow but still keeps up with the picture,
It's not particularly saturated - it's a comfortable view really.
I'll keep this video playing so you can see the difference for yourself, or if
Now we're on to the other settings. First of all we have Brightness - if it's too
dim you start to lose the colour accuracy and you don't really notice it, but if
it's too bright it can overpower the screen. I like to have mine at about 7
but it's all personal preference. Next up we have Saturation. At minus 2 all the
colours are pretty much whitewashed and at plus 2 the colours are much more accurate
and bright. I find that plus 2 is a little bit too
distracting for me, but I still like the vibrancy so I leave mine at about plus 1.
In advanced settings we have Wall Colour. This adds an offset to the lights so
they match accurately against a coloured wall. For example if your wall is green
it'll add more blue to the colours to cancel out the effect, and give you a
more seamless feel. Next up we have TV Switch Off - this is a nice little feature
that just fades the Ambilights down once you've turned the TV off - gives you
a little opportunity to get up and leave the room in the light. Now on to linking
with Hue. We click configure and start and it will scan for your hue
bridge, once found select it, press start and you'll have 30 seconds to press the
button on your hue bridge to connect them. Once connected it will give you a
list of all the coloured bulbs in your setup. You can then select the ones that
you want to connect with your Ambilight - so for me is the two orbs and the go as
they're the ones in the sitting room. Once they're linked we need to configure
them individually. When we click on a bulb it will flash so we can
identify it; we can then select the angle that we want the bulb to be positioned in.
It's annoying we can't select that angle to be at the bottom of the TV, only
around the sides on the top. Also unlike the Philips hue entertainment zone in
the app you can only have it in the plane of the TV and not behind you or to
the sides. Personally I don't think it works as well having light bulbs behind
you is it's outside of your field of view so it can be a bit distracting. You
can also change the brightness of each bulb here if you need to. Testpilot have
gone all out with their setup they've linked 7 hue bulbs with their Ambilight TV
and have a video linked below showing off its full capabilities. Now we're into
the Ambilight + hue settings. In here we can turn it on and off.
There's an immersion setting which I believe is for the first generation hue bridge as
it doesn't seem to be doing anything with mine. And then there's the lounge
light feature. Now lounge light is the Ambilight button on the top of your TV
remote. If you press this you can turn the Ambilight on whilst the TV is off to
provide a nice ambient light. Now the lounge light + hue means that
when you press that button, your hue bulbs that are linked will also come on.
We can also view the configuration and reset it in here. You may have noticed
earlier that there's another follow option - 'follow app'. Now the Philips TV
remote app is absolutely useless - I've only managed to get the follow app
feature to work once and even then it wasn't very good, it was really slow and
unresponsive. But in theory you can use the app to change the follow mode or
even set a custom colour or effect. If you've managed to get this to work then
let me know in the comments below. I said I'd show you how to trigger
events using a Philips hue light switch so here we go. Let's go over to Home
Assistant and into node-red. You're going to need HueMagic for this to work so go
to the drop down menu on the right, click on manage palette, go over to install, and
search for HueMagic. Here you can click install and then the HueMagic nodes
will appear in your list of nodes. Now we can drag in a Hue-switch node, a switch
node and a call service node. By using a debug node we can see the outputs of our
hue switch node. As you can see you get different payloads depending on whether
it's a short press, a long press, a hold, or a release. Now we can use these to
trigger different scenes if we like. I want to trigger my recording scene using
one type of press, and my festoon switch using another. I'm going to use the on
switch and the off switch for this but you can equally use the dim up or the
dim down if you prefer. We're going to need another switch to determine the
action we want it to trigger with. I only want my scenes to trigger on the long
released action; that means it's been pressed down for a long time and now
released. And I want that to be the case of both of my scenes. Now we join them
together and test them out. By long pressing the on button my recording
scene happens and by long pressing the off button my festoon switch is on now!
By making use of the short presses and the long presses we can repurpose these
light switches to trigger eight different things - triggering anything we like.
And there we go! We've unlocked the full potential of our
Ambilight TV, looked at all the settings and features and we've linked it with
hue. We've also unlocked the ability to
trigger any scene we like using a Philips hue light switch. Now make sure
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