Couch Slouch uses the Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) portion of the HDMI standard to integrate with your home theatre. As such, everything in the chain between your Mac and your TV needs to support CEC.
Your Mac
Your Mac needs to be running Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) or greater to use Couch Slouch.
At the moment, no Mac supports CEC out of the box so you need an adapter to get started. The good news is that this allows your Mac to use Couch Slouch even if it doesn't have a HDMI port! The adapter connects to your Mac's USB and display connectors, then to your CEC-enabled TV or AV receiver via HDMI.
At the moment, the only supported adapter is the USB-CEC Adapter made by Pulse-Eight.
Your Home Theatre System
Unfortunately, TV manufacturers often call CEC by a different name. To find out if your device supports CEC, look in your manuals for references to CEC, CEC Control, HDMI-CEC or any of the following names:
- Samsung: Anynet+
- LG: SimpLink
- Sony: Bravia Link or Bravia Sync
- Panasonic: HDAVI Control, EZ-Sync, or Viera Link
- Philips: EasyLink
All names are trademarks of their respective companies.
If you have a PS3 "Slim" or newer, just try it!
If you have a Playstation 3 "Slim" or newer (any PS3 that isn't the original "Fat" model), you can quickly check if your TV supports CEC.
Switch on your PS3 and TV. If you can use your TV's remote control to navigate the PS3's XMB menus and/or control DVD or BluRay playback then you're good to go!