I think this is probably going to have to be your solution. If the TV is not automatically activating CEC on boot I don’t know of a way to tell the RPi to send an activate command when it sees the TV turn on. It may be possible, but off the top of my head I don’t know how you would go about doing this. I’m fairly confident this is the TV not initializing correctly on boot. That is assuming your not using a harmony remote and it is sending some odd signal on boot.
That is probably sending a CECinactive command to the TV so the TV wouldn’t be trying to send commands to an inactive source. I suspect if you swapped inputs in the TV back and forth it would start working like with the initial power on situation.
No, I’m not using any other remote, just the factory TV & amp ones.
I’ve tried with a 2nd RPi and getting exactly the same behaviour. I think you’re probably on the right track with the cause of this, but do you know if my logs show anything else that could be a factor?
I just can’t get over how it was working fine one night and then this situation started without changing anything.
I didn’t spot anything in either of the logs you posted. I don’t think it has anything to do with the RPi or its software. I think there developed some kind of fault in the TV such that it stopped initializing CEC on the current input. Twelve years is a long time for a piece of modern electronics and they can pick up really weird faults over time. You could check your Firestick to see if it acts the same way which should provide confirmation, although I think the second RPi you tried probably already did. The Firestick has pretty crappy CEC support but I know from personal experience it accepts the navigation and select commands.
Tried the Firestick in all 3 HDMI inputs. Same on each. No CEC control. The only thing I could get it to do was power down (screen goes black) then power back up from that state, despite the TV protesting that it cannot control the device.
No such luck. CEC on the Firestick was enabled. I’m going to see if I can find a factory reset option. I’ve managed to get into the service menu but as far as I could see, there were no user selectable options.
And then… just when I couldn’t sleep and decided to get up and try a factory reset, as a last ditch attempt before accepting “The Kuro King’s” quote of £200 for parts and labour to get it fixed… it starts working again all by itself.