HOW TO CONTROL YOUR FIRE TV STICK WITH YOUR TV REMOTE

Lost Remote?  No Problem!  How to Control Your Fire TV Stick with Your TV Remote in Three Easy Steps.  Mommy Standard Time.
Stop the tiny remote stress! Ditch it for good with one trick. - Mommy Standard Time
Hand holding a small remote with text overlay.  Tired of tiny remotes?  Clear the clutter in three easy steps.  Mommy Standard Time.

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Did you know that you can control your Fire TV Stick (or pretty much any HDMI device that has its own remote) with the remote control for your TV?! 

No more wasting time digging through couch cushions for that tiny little remote. 

You no longer have to stress about the fact that these tiny little remotes are toddler magnets.

And no more cluttered end tables, with fifty different remotes.

Nope. 

That’s all in the past now, because I have learned the coolest secret.  Read on to find out how you can ditch all those little remotes for good.

Control Your Fire TV Stick With Your TV Remote in Three Easy Steps - Mommy Standard Time Blog

Somewhere in the move to our new house, we misplaced the remote for one of our Fire TV Sticks.

Now, this isn’t normally a big deal.

We’ve temporarily lost the remotes to our Fire TV Sticks in the past, so we’ve just used the app on our phones until we tracked down the actual remote.

Well, since cancelling our TV service last week, I decided to try and plug in our remote-less Fire TV Stick in order to get our streaming services back up and running in our bedroom. 

I wasn’t really thinking too much about it and figured I could just use my phone as the remote. 

What I failed to realize was that the Fire TV Stick was still using the wi-fi name and password from our previous home, so it was stuck on the “Network Connection Lost” screen.  I couldn’t use my phone to control the Fire TV Stick and set up the wi-fi because the Fire TV Stick was not connected to the same wi-fi as the phone.

Vicious cycle.

So I decided to do some Googling.  I read about all sorts of craziness:  Turning your phone into a hot spot, switching your wi-fi name and password to what it was at the old house, tricking the Fire TV Stick, using two devices, and so on.

My head started spinning and I was about to give up.

But then I found a random comment on the bottom of a discussion board that talked about something I hadn’t seen before:  CEC.  And, better yet, the original poster came back and said that it worked like a charm.

CEC? 

I was intrigued, so I did a little bit of research.

CEC stands for Consumer Electronics Control and it basically means that your TV has the capacity to control things that are plugged into your HDMI ports and vice versa. 

You might have noticed sometimes that when you turn on your Blu-Ray player, your TV automatically switches to the correct input.  Or maybe your TV turns on when you hit a button on your Fire TV Stick remote.  This is CEC at work, and you can use this feature to your advantage to streamline your remote situation or to replace a lost remote.  In three simple steps, you can put CEC to work for you!

STEP ONE: Find the CEC Function on Your TV

The biggest chore in using CEC is finding it in your TV menu.  A lot of companies call it something different, so take a minute and put your TV manufacturer’s name along with “CEC” into your search engine and see what happens. This step is helpful because knowing what your TV manufacturer calls the CEC function on your TV might help you find it more quickly on your TV menu.

search results for Magnavox CEC

For example, I googled “Magnavox CEC” and I started seeing a bunch of articles and documents mentioning “Fun-Link”.  I was a little bit skeptical, because I had NEVER seen that on my TV before.  But, sure enough, after checking what seemed like every menu possible on our TV, I found it.

Fun-Link Control Menu for CEC

STEP TWO:  Enable CEC

Once you find your TV’s CEC menu, you just want to make sure that the CEC function is turned on and enabled.

STEP THREE:  Choose an HDMI Port

Enabling CEC is not quite enough.  In fact, you might have noticed that the CEC function was already turned on when you finally found it on your TV.  So this last step is the most important.

Activating HDMI Port for CEC

There will probably be another option within this same CEC portion of your TV menu that will allow you to turn on CEC for specific HDMI ports.  I went ahead and turned it on for all of the ports, but you can just turn it on for the port that houses the device you want to control.  (Do you see the “Device List” option at the bottom?  My TV was able to search for devices plugged into the TV that work with CEC and activate them that way as well.  So your TV might have that option, too.)

And that’s it!  After you’ve enabled CEC on your TV and turned it on for the appropriate HDMI port(s), you can ditch the tiny Fire TV Stick remote that keeps getting lost in the couch cushions and just use your TV’s remote control.  It’s that simple.

“But Stephanie, my TV is pretty old.  I doubt I have the CEC function.”

If your TV is new enough to have an HDMI port, I would highly suggest giving this a try anyway.

The TV in our living room is a flat screen, but it is pretty old (almost ten years).  I was extremely skeptical that it would have the CEC function, but I decided to take a look anyway.  Sure enough, it had a crazy name like AquosLink and never mentioned CEC, but it was there!

So there you have it!  I am excited to start saving a bunch of remote-hunting time now that I’ve figured out this neat little trick.

But now, I’m curious…was I just late to the party?  Does everyone know about this already?  Leave me a comment below and let me know!

3 thoughts on “HOW TO CONTROL YOUR FIRE TV STICK WITH YOUR TV REMOTE”

  1. I can find all steps to use my tv remote to turn on fire stick but can’t navrgate thru the apps.

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