There’s some interesting stuff lurking around in the HDMI spec, and at DEF CON, [Joshua Smith] laid the Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) part of HDMI out on the line, and exposed a few ...

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes This might be the first time you’ve heard of Consumer Electronics Control or CEC. So let’s go over a bit of information before we jump into how to enable it.

There's a lot you can do with HDMI-CEC; for example, with the one-touch play feature, if you turn on your gaming console, your TV will automatically switch to the correct HDMI input.

So all the CEC wires of all HDMI ports are connected together. If then one device shorts that wire or messes up the transmissions of the other devices in some way, nothing works anymore.