Vizio SmartCast TV Driver

Version 0.10

Two-way IP control for Vizio SmartCast televisions. Up to 16 TVs per driver instance.

READ THIS FIRST - every TV needs Quick Start Mode

This is a blocking step. Until it is done, the driver cannot power a TV on, and no amount of driver configuration will change that.

Vizio televisions leave the factory set to Eco Mode. In Eco Mode the TV shuts down its network connection when you switch it off. While it is off it is not listening for anything - not for the driver, and not even for a Wake-on-LAN packet. Nothing can turn it back on except the remote or the button on the set.

Every TV must be switched to Quick Start by hand, on the TV itself, using the Vizio remote:

1. Press Menu on the Vizio remote.

2. Go to System, then Power Mode. On newer sets this is under Admin & Privacy, then Power Mode.

3. Select Quick Start.

4. Repeat on every TV.

There is no way to do this over the network, because the setting controls the very network connection you would need in order to reach it. Budget the time: on a fifteen screen site this is fifteen visits to fifteen televisions.

If a TV powers on from the panel but the others do not, the first thing to check is always Power Mode on the ones that failed.

Requirements

- A Vizio SmartCast TV on the same network as the RTI processor

- Power Mode set to Quick Start on every TV (see above)

- A fixed IP address for each TV, using a DHCP reservation on the router

- The MAC address of each TV, needed to wake it

- Wired Ethernet is strongly recommended. Waking a TV over Wi-Fi is unreliable, and on a multi-screen site it will be the difference between all the screens coming on at open and most of them coming on

- The TV must be powered ON while you pair it

Setup

1. Add the driver and set Number of TVs.

2. For each TV, enter a Name, its IP Address and its MAC Address.

3. Set the Port. Use 7345 for firmware 4.0 and later, or 9000 for older sets. If you are not sure, leave it at 7345 and use the Probe step further down.

4. Download to the processor.

Wi-Fi and Ethernet have DIFFERENT MAC addresses. A TV has one MAC for its Wi-Fi adapter and a different one for its Ethernet port. Enter the MAC for the connection the TV is actually using. If a set is later rewired - moved from Wi-Fi onto a network cable, or the other way - its MAC changes, and Power On will silently stop working while every other function keeps working normally. That looks exactly like a broken driver, so update the MAC Address setting whenever a TV is rewired.

Finding the MAC address. It is on the TV under Menu, System, System Information, or on the sticker on the back of the set. Your router's client list will also show it next to the TV's IP address. Enter it in any common format, for example 00:11:22:AA:BB:CC or 00-11-22-AA-BB-CC.

The MAC is used only to wake the TV. Everything else works without it, so if you leave it blank the driver still reports status and still switches inputs - but Power On will only work on a TV that happens to already be awake. The MAC Configured variable tells you at a glance which TVs are missing one.

Pairing (required once per TV)

Each TV must be paired before it will accept any command. Pairing produces a token that is stored on the processor and survives reboots, so this is a one-time step.

Use the Setup Page. It is the only comfortable way to do this. With the driver loaded, browse from any PC, phone or tablet on the same network to:

http://[processor-ip]:9090/

You get a card for every TV. Switch a TV on, press Start Pairing, read the four-digit PIN off the TV screen, tap it into the keypad and press PAIR. The card turns green. Repeat for the next TV. Nothing else to do - the token is written to the processor immediately.

The page also shows, for each TV, whether it is answering, whether it is on and which input it is on, and gives you Test Power, Refresh and Forget buttons. Bookmark it - it is the fastest way to check a site.

Important: do not send the project file part way through pairing. Start Pairing opens a live session with the TV that lives in the running driver. Sending the file reloads the driver and throws that session away, so the PIN you are holding stops working. Start and finish each TV in one go on the setup page, then send the file whenever you like.

For the same reason the Complete Pairing macro function is only useful if you already know the PIN before the file is sent, which normally you will not. It is left in place for automation, but the setup page is the intended route.

The debug console does the same job if you prefer a terminal:

pair 1

pin 1 1234

TV numbers start at 1, not 0. A single TV is TV 1.

If pairing fails, check the TV was powered on before you started. Vizio sets sometimes discard the PIN if they were switched off beforehand. If the PIN clears off the screen before you finish, press Start Pairing again for a fresh one - you can do that as often as you like.

Tip for commissioning from the rack. Once the MAC address is entered you can use the Wake (Wake-on-LAN) function to turn a TV on without pairing it first, then pair it while it is awake. This saves walking back to each screen a second time.

Powering TVs on

Powering a Vizio on over IP takes two steps, and the driver handles both for you.

First it sends a Wake-on-LAN packet to the TV's MAC address, which brings the TV's network connection back up. Then it sends the power command, retrying for a few seconds while the TV finishes starting up. A single command sent the instant you press the button would usually arrive too early to be heard.

Two settings control this, both in the Setup category:

- Wake TVs on Power On - leave this on. Turn it off only if every TV is already being woken by something else.

- Power On Timeout (seconds) - how long to keep retrying before giving up and reporting the TV as not responding. The default of 12 seconds suits most sets. Slower sets may need 20.

While a TV is coming up its Waking variable is true. If the timeout passes with no answer, Wake Failed turns true and the TV's Status explains why. On a new site the cause is almost always Power Mode still set to Eco on that TV, or a missing or mistyped MAC address.

Power Off is a single command and needs none of this.

Selecting inputs

Vizio has changed the way it names inputs across firmware versions. Older sets report an input as HDMI-1, while sets from 2024 onward report the same input as hdmi1. Some newer sets do not answer the older request at all. Because of this you should never type an input name by hand.

The driver reads the real input list from each TV and matches your choice against it, so you pick the input you want and the driver works out what that particular TV calls it.

The easy way. Each TV has ready-made functions for the common inputs - Input: HDMI 1 through HDMI 4, Tuner / Antenna and SmartCast - each with its own tag, for example TV 1 HDMI 2. Drop the tag on a button and you are done. There is also a Select Input function with the same choices in a drop-down, for use inside macros.

The complete list. If a TV has an input that is not in that list, or the customer has renamed their inputs, use the browse list instead. Drop the TV n Inputs tag onto a list widget. The list fills with that TV's actual inputs, using the customer's own names, and tapping one selects it.

Checking what a TV reported. Run Refresh Input List for a TV, then look at these variables:

- Input Count - how many inputs were found

- Input 1 Name through Input 6 Name - what the TV calls each one

- Input List Source - which request the TV answered, useful when comparing an old set against a new one

- Current Input and Current Input Label - what is selected now, in the TV's own wording and in the customer's

You can also do this from the debug console with inputs 1.

Select Input by Name is still available for unusual cases, such as a composite or component input that a particular set names in its own way. It is marked advanced because it depends on you already knowing the exact wording that TV uses, which you can read off the Input Name variables above.

Larger installations

The driver handles up to 16 TVs in one instance and is built for it, but a few settings are worth understanding on a big site.

Vizio provides no push notifications of any kind, so the driver has to ask each TV for its status. Every one of those requests is an encrypted connection, and the processor can only set up so many per second. To stay well inside that, the driver polls one TV at a time rather than all of them at once.

Poll Interval (seconds) is therefore a target for each TV, not a fixed timer. Because the TVs are polled in turn, the real gap between updates for any ONE TV is at least the number of TVs in seconds - and DOUBLE that whenever Lightweight Mode is active. With twelve TVs at the default 30 second interval, Lightweight turns itself on and each TV still refreshes roughly every thirty seconds. That is normal and is not a fault.

Poll Interval and processor load

This is the one setting worth thinking about before you leave site.

The Vizio control API is HTTPS only, so the driver cannot ask a set anything without first building an encrypted connection, and a Vizio will not hold that connection open for a follow-up question. Every poll therefore pays for a fresh handshake, and on an RTI processor a handshake is expensive - measured in the field at roughly half a second of processor time per request.

Because the Poll Interval is a target for EACH TV, the total load rises with the number of sets. Rough figures, measured on an XP-8s:

- 1 TV at 30 seconds - around 3 percent processor

- 2 TVs at 30 seconds - around 5 percent

- 4 TVs at 30 seconds - around 10 percent

- 8 TVs at 30 seconds - around 20 percent, or around 10 percent at 60 seconds

- 12 TVs at 60 seconds - around 12 percent, or around 6 percent at 120 seconds

A serviceable rule of thumb is to allow about 15 seconds of Poll Interval per set, then look at the processor. Treat these as ballpark numbers from one processor model rather than a specification - a processor already busy with other drivers will read higher.

Raising the interval costs you very little. Anything the RTI system does itself - a button press, a volume change, an input change - jumps the queue and is confirmed in well under a second whatever the interval is set to. The Poll Interval only governs how quickly the driver notices somebody picking up the TV's own remote and changing something behind its back. For reference, Home Assistant polls Vizio sets every 30 seconds by default.

The default is 30 seconds and the setting accepts up to 300. If the processor is working harder than you would like, a longer Poll Interval is the first thing to change.

Lightweight Mode reduces the polling work by asking for less detail on each pass. It is a THREE-WAY choice, not a tick box: Auto (recommended), Always On and Always Off. Leave it on Auto and the driver switches it on by itself at nine TVs or more.

If you run more than one instance of this driver on the same processor, read this. Lightweight Mode counts the TVs in ITS OWN instance, not the TVs on the processor, and it switches itself on at nine. So if you split twelve sets across four instances of three, every instance looks at its own three sets, decides it is a small install, and never turns the protection on - leaving the processor doing roughly six times the work of a single instance handling all twelve. On any multi-instance site, set Lightweight Mode to Always On and use a long Poll Interval on EVERY instance.

Always On and Always Off are permanent overrides that disable the automatic behaviour. If you have set one by mistake, put the setting back to Auto (recommended). On a large site there is normally no reason to override it at all.

Signs you are polling too hard: TVs dropping in and out of Connected for no reason, or slow response from other drivers on the same processor. The fix is a longer Poll Interval, not a shorter one.

For a site where every screen is switched on at open, set to a fixed input and switched off at close, use the All TVs functions - All TVs Power On, All TVs Power Off and All TVs Input: HDMI 1 through SmartCast - rather than building a macro that calls each TV in turn. The driver staggers the work internally so the processor is not asked to do everything in the same instant.

If a TV does not respond

Work through these in order.

1. Power Mode. If the TV will not power on but responds fine once it is on by hand, it is still in Eco Mode. See the top of this document.

2. MAC address. Check the TV's MAC Configured variable is true and the address matches the TV.

3. Port. The control port differs by firmware version, and the wrong choice simply times out rather than giving a useful error. Connect to the debug console and run:

probe 1

The driver tries 7345 then 9000 and reports which one answered. Set that value in Driver Properties.

4. Pairing. Check the Paired variable. A token normally lasts indefinitely, but a TV firmware update can clear it. If several TVs go unpaired at once, overnight, a firmware update is the likely cause - simply pair them again.

5. Network. Confirm the TV still holds the IP address you configured. A DHCP reservation prevents this.

What you can control

Power on, off and toggle. Wake-on-LAN on its own. Volume up, down and set to a level. Mute. Input selection, by button, by drop-down or from a live list. Input list refresh. Status refresh. All TVs power and input.

Feedback

Power state, volume level, mute state, current input, connection state and pairing state are reported back to the panel for each TV, along with the model and firmware version once the TV has been contacted.

For power-on there are three extra states worth putting on a commissioning page - Waking, Wake OK and Wake Failed - plus MAC Configured. At driver level, TVs Not Responding counts how many failed to wake and Any TV Not Responding is a single flag you can show on a status bar.

Tags

Each TV exposes its own tags, numbered to match its slot:

TV 1 Power On, TV 1 Power Off, TV 1 Power

TV 1 Volume Up, TV 1 Volume Down, TV 1 Volume

TV 1 Mute On, TV 1 Mute Off, TV 1 Mute

TV 1 HDMI 1, TV 1 HDMI 2, TV 1 HDMI 3, TV 1 HDMI 4

TV 1 Tuner, TV 1 SmartCast, TV 1 Input

TV 1 Inputs (drop on a list widget)

TV 1 Connected, TV 1 Waking, TV 1 Wake OK, TV 1 Wake Failed

There are also whole-system tags:

All TVs Power On, All TVs Power Off

All TVs HDMI 1 through All TVs HDMI 4

All TVs Tuner, All TVs SmartCast

Any Wake Failed

Dropping one of these tags onto a button wires the command. Three tags per TV also carry feedback, so they wire the command AND its indicator in a single action: TV n Power On, TV n Power Off and TV n Inputs.

The per-input tags (TV n HDMI 1, All TVs Tuner and so on) are command only - they send the input change but carry no active indicator. To show which input a TV is currently on, bind a list widget to the TV n Inputs tag: it lists exactly the inputs that TV reported and marks the active one. Use that rather than expecting a per-input button to light up.

Debug console

Telnet to the processor on port 12548 for commissioning and diagnostics. Type help for the full list. The ones you will use most:

status driver and all TV state

pair 1 start pairing TV 1

pin 1 1234 finish pairing with the on-screen PIN

probe 1 find the right port for TV 1

inputs 1 refresh and show TV 1's input list

on 1 / off 1 power TV 1

input 1 HDMI1 select an input on TV 1

mac processor MAC, for a licence key

Setting the port to 0 in Driver Properties disables the console.

Known limitations

These are limitations of Vizio's own control interface, not of this driver.

- A TV left in Eco Mode cannot be powered on over the network by any means. This is a Vizio design decision and the reason for the Quick Start step at the top of this document.

- No push notifications. All feedback is polled, so changes made at the TV itself appear at the next poll rather than instantly. On a large site that can be ten to fifteen seconds.

- Current app reporting is unreliable. Vizio returns an unknown-app value while on an HDMI input, so the driver does not expose app state.

- Input names differ between firmware versions. The driver reads each TV's own list to hide this, which is why input selection should be done with the supplied buttons or the browse list rather than typed by hand.

- Absolute volume and input changes require the driver to have contacted the TV at least once beforehand. This happens automatically within a few seconds of connecting.

- Newer sets sold since Walmart's purchase of Vizio may ask for a Walmart account before the TV's own smart features work. Input switching, tuner and volume are unaffected.

Licensing

The driver runs for 120 minutes without a licence key so you can evaluate it. After that, commands stop while feedback continues.

To obtain a key, connect to the debug console and type mac, or read the MAC For Key variable. Send that value to support.

Support

Smart Home Programming

support@smarthomeprogramming.com.au

https://smarthomeprogramming.com.au