Philips hue sync with movies how to#
Philips hue sync with movies full#
Philips hue sync with movies plus#
Philips hue sync with movies series#
Philips hue sync with movies tv#

It requires the Hue Bridge (if you don't have one already), which connects to your router and acts as a control unit for all Hue lighting in your home.

Philips hue sync with movies how to#

How to control your Hue lights when away from homeĪlthough named to fit into the rest of the Play range, the Hue Sync Box works with any color Hue lights, including all shapes of bulb and LED light strips.

Hue Play Sync Box gets voice control, HDR and Dolby Vision support.

Philips Hue Gradient Light Strips are the multicolored smart lights you've been waiting for.

Philips hue sync with movies tv#

However, it does not work with any apps installed on your TV – the content has to come through an HDMI cable. That means video game consoles, streaming sticks, satellite boxes, Blu-ray players, and anything else you consume video from. It can be controlled by speaking to Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant, and works with anything plugged into your TV using an HDMI cable. If you can deal with the cost and potential setup frustrations, the Hue Sync Box does take TV, movies gaming and music to another level – it just needs support for Dolby Atmos music to make this a near essential purchase.At its simplest, the $230 Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box – we'll go ahead and shorten that to Hue Sync Box – is a device that controls your smart lighting to match whatever is on your television. I bought one such cable to replace one that I thought might be the weak link, but the issue remained, and the only new edition was the Sync Box, so you might end up having to spend a fair bit extra on new cables. It seems that only the highest bandwidth HDMI cables work reliably and 8K compatible Premium Certified cables are recommended. I did occasionally get momentary picture loss while running content through the switch box. I then tried it with games via PS5, and it was great to see the lights behind the screen dance around as a slashed my way through Ghosts of Tsushima. Eventually, you'll really notice it when it's off. If it gets distracting you can tone the intensity and the brightness down in the app, and you'll soon find a setting to your liking.

What's impressive is how fast the lights respond to the content on the screen, and it really does enhance the impact on what you're watching. It features strong colors and the contrast in the dark between the lights and the rich colors on my OLED TV made for a cool effect.

Philips hue sync with movies series#

The episode Zima Blue from the remarkable Netflix series Love, Deaths Robots is a great test. It works particularly well with animation, which tends to have areas of strong color. The lights lit up the white alcove perfectly in sync with the content on the screen. right, the yellow of the football shirt against the red hoarding combine to create and orange affects. Reconnecting everything was a bit of a faff as these things always are, and I used just two Hue Play lights but as soon as I got it up and running it was an “oh, wow” moment.Īs you can see see in the picture the lights respond to content on each sided of the image. My TV sits inside an alcove with a white background. This also has a receiver and surround sound setup, but here is where it all started to make sense.

Philips hue sync with movies full#

However, it was clear that I wasn’t using the Sync Box to its full potential, so I moved it to my TV in the other room. The app lets you choose between four levels of intensity – as in how much the lights react, and there is also a brightness slider.

Philips hue sync with movies plus#

On the plus side, if I switched to stereo music the music sync effects did work and were impressive. However, it turns out that while the Sync Box supports Atmos from HDMI video sources, it does not recognise Atmos in music mode, which seems like a missed opportunity. Second, a feature I was looking forward to was having all the lights in the room syncing to Dolby Atmos tracks from Apple Music, specifically, Dawn FM by The Weekend. First, the light show didn’t do any favors to my projector-based system, merely washing out the image and not adding that much to the experience. On my first try I set up the Sync box in my dedicated cinema room, with a total of 10 lights (six GU10 bulbs in the ceiling, two Hue Play lights, and one Gradient lightstrip) – with the gradient light resting on the top edge of my projector screen, and the Hue Play projecting upwards, so quite the setup. You tell the Hue Sync up where your lights are physically located in your space, so you get the most.