The Big Picture

At the end of this guide, you will be able to take advantage of some of the more advanced features of your Philips Hue solution and integrate them into your Kodi HTPC with CinemaVision. If you haven't already, check out our Philips Hue Setup guide before you continue reading this guide.

What you won't need:

1. To be a programmer, or have working knowledge of any programming language.

What you will need:

1. Kodi installed and configured on an HTPC, with content scraped into the local Kodi database (not streaming).
2. The Kodi CinemaVision Add-on installed, with a working Sequence (a working knowledge of setting up CinemaVision).
3. A working Philips Hue Bridge with scenes programmed in, and some knowledge of the Hue interface.
4. Notepad++ installed, or a similar plain text editor other than Notepad.
5. Sample Action Files for your Hue solution.
   • Philips Hue Action Files
6. The patience to do some work to get the solution up and running. It's not hard, but it's not plug-and-play either.

Querying Your Hue System

Our first stop in our advanced features guide is API queries. 

1. Open Google Chrome or another browser.
2. Using the address bar, browse to the following URL to find the internal IP Address of your Hue Bridge.
   • http://meethue.com/api/upup
3. Copy the internal IP Address for use later in this guide.
4. Using the address bar, browse to the following URL to open the CLIP API Debugger.
   • http://<hue-bridge-ip>/debug/clip.html
     

Now that we have the debugger open, lets run a few commands.

Display a List of Group Numbers
http://<hue_bridge_ip>/api/<hue_bridge_user>/groups/ then press the GET button.

Display a List of Light Numbers
http://<hue_bridge_ip>/api/<hue_bridge_user>/lights/ then press the GET button.