With the Play HDMI Sync Box Philips Hue users can finally sync their lights to their TVs. One of the dreams of having smart lights is being able to sync those lights with whatever movie or TV show you’re watching to create a symphony of light and sound. However, for people with Philips Hue smart lights, the main avenue for doing this up until now has been the Hue Sync app, which only worked on PCs or Macs, which meant you often had to do awkward things like connect a laptop to your TV, or have a really long cord running to a nearby desktop to make things work.
But with the new Play HDMI Sync Box, Philips Hue is finally giving people a way to easily harmonise their smart lights with the content on their TV screens. The device itself is super simple, it’s just a small four-port HDMI pass-through hub that connects to all your media boxes like an Apple TV, cable box, Nvidia Shield, game console, etc.
From there, the Play Sync Box analyses the visual data from whatever content your watching, so that it can simultaneously send that video out to your TV while controlling connected smart lights to match your content.
The Play Sync Box can automatically switch between any of the four HDMI inputs depending on which device is currently in use. It supports HDMI CEC so you can control those connected devices with a single remote or voice commands, and it supports HDMI 2.0 so you shouldn’t have any issue with 4K HDR content at 60fps or lower.
[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2019/08/philips-hue-play-light-bars-review/” thumb=”https://gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/maxresdefault-410×231.jpg” title=”These Philips Hue Lights Nearly Blinded Me, But I Still Love Them” excerpt=”Sometimes, a gadget comes along that seems to have no discernible purpose or function. But there’s a small part of your monkey brain that insists you need it. Whether it be something shiny, strange or just plain ‘cool’, there are just some things you convince yourself you absolutely need. The Philips Hue Play light bars are one of those things. Nobody needs them, and yet…”]
On the lighting side, the Play Sync Box can be paired with up to 10 different Philips Hue Colour Ambiance lights, while the standalone Hue Sync Mobile app allows you to adjust settings like the brightness, speed, and intensity of your lights. This is a good thing, because even though I can’t believe I’m saying this, when I saw a demo of the Play Sync Box in action, I actually found the setup a tiny bit overwhelming when all the lights were set on full blast. It’s that intense.
Also, a small bonus that makes setting up smart lights around your TV just a little easier, the Play Sync Box’s power adaptor includes a brick with two extra Hue-compatible power outputs, so you can cut down on the number of outlets your lighting system is hogging.
The downside to all this is that at $US230 ($335), the Play Sync Box ain’t cheap. That’s a decent chunk of change just so you can make your smart lights flash and change colour in tandem with what’s on your TV. But if you’ve been waiting all this time for Hue to bring colour syncing to the living room, the Play Sync Box is it.
The Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box goes on sale starting October 16 in the U.S. with an Australian release date and local pricing yet to be announced.