Ambient light Application for

Vsevolod Aleksandrov

About this app

Adaptive background lighting Ambient light, without exaggeration, an amazing technology. With its adaptive illumination, eyes become less tired when you watch TV in the dark. Also the presence effect enhances, the image viewing area extends, etc. Ambient light is applicable not only to video and photo content, but also to games. The implementation of such a feature on the Android TV set-top box or Android TV based on Android OS above 5.1 (Lollipop) is now possible using the Ambient light Application for Android program.

!!! It is important to know !!!
The picture from the TV tuner is not processed at the Android OS level, the backlight with regular tv channels will not work. The backlight works only in Android OS applications that do not use protected content. 4K performance depends only on the capabilities of the equipment. Unfortunately, programs such as YouTube and Netflix use protected content, the backlight in such programs will not work. This may not work properly on the latest Android 9 Xiaomi firmwares.

Ambient light Application for Android is one of the few programs for Android based devices that allows you to implement Ambient light backlighting directly on your smart TV with no need of PC. There are three operating modes, that are:

SINGLE COLOR MODE – his mode allows you to include all the backlighting with one color selected in the program settings. This mode suits well as a night room lighting, surprisingly changing the familiar interior.

COLOR EFFECT MODE – This is the mode for displaying color effects. Dynamic backlighting can change colors, depending on which preset effect you have selected in the settings.

SCREEN CAPTURE MODE – This is probably the most in-demand mode of the backlight, which allows you to change its colors depending on what content is currently displayed on the screen.

Ratings and reviews

Works well for me with my NVIDIA Shield. Of course, it does not work with copy-protected content like Netflix or Amazon Video, but it works fine with Plex, YouTube, etc. My only wish is that you could set a transition/smoothing time for the LEDs responsiveness, because sometimes they will flicker based on what's on the screen. It seems like a bug with the screen capture, since changing the capture settings (like frame rate or capture quality) will affect when/where it flickers but it won't get rid of it completely. That's the reason for the -1 star, otherwise the app is perfect for me. I don't think it is an issue with my setup, because if I do "color effect mode", it will never flicker. It only seems to flicker when it's screen capturing a mostly white/grey screen. It will also flicker when there's fast panning on the screen, but that's to be expected (and why I would want a smoothing setting). I think the flickering bug on a mostly white screen is a separate issue. Thanks

When I finally managed to get it to communicate with the board and the lights and it flashed up the connected sequence I thought all was well. I tried the solid colour setting and but the LEDS in to the correct order. I then tried the lights in twinkle mode and all was good, it was looking really promising so I moved on to the next step and selected screen capture... again all seemed to be going well! until I opened up netflix and all of the lights went out, next I tried it on normal digital tv, again the lights went out :( It appears that what you end up with is a fancy control to make pretty patterns around the screen but not actually an ambilight for watching films and tv etc. If by some chance the programmer comes back to me and can advise what the problem is and get if fixed then my rating will be changed, for now its next to useless for me on my Sony Bravia Android TV (which was selected from the list of devices on playstore so should be compatible) UPDATE the programer has commented below that the application is not really designed to do what I need, if you are looking for something for third party integration it could be fine for you.

Really great app! I was looking up Hue HDMI sync box and came across this app and it just saved me a fortune when I just got some D1 mini and strips laying around. Although when having the test background on and trying to adjust the settings, the app slows down and not very responsive. Not sure if it's the app or just the TV is slow. It would be great if the dev can add MQTT feature to remotely control the light when the TV is off.

What's new

Bug fixes;
Improved stability;