Unless you are something of a technical whizz, there are likely to be many things about your home entertainment system that you don’t fully understand. Take your HDMI cables and how they work, for example. These brilliant devices have many useful features and functions to make life easier for home entertainment fans, but not everyone knows how to make the best of them.

One of these features is something known as CEC, which stands for Consumer Electronics Control. This is a technology that is included in many HDMI cables, and all versions from HDMI 1.0 to HDMI 1.4 cables should have it.

The CEC technology is designed to carry commands from your remote between devices in your home entertainment system that are connected to each other via HDMI cables. The idea is to allow you to switch between devices using just the one remote, rather than having to search around for a different remote for each device each time you want to switch.

CEC often has different names depending on the manufacturer of the device. In Samsung products it is called Anynet+, in Sharp devices it is known as Aquos Link, whilst for Sony the name is BRAVIA Link or BRAVIA Sync.