I bought the Pulse-Eight USB CEC adapter a few months back and so far it’s been a great addition to my XBMC setup. For a long time I wanted to control my TV from my Android phone, for a few reasons. First, I usually have it with me and charged up, unlike my TV remote which might be misplaced or out of batteries. Second, I find it annoying that the infrared TV remote requires line-of-sight. And finally, a smart phone remote just seems like the right way to control a TV in this day and age.
For such a tiny package the Pulse-Eight adapter enables a lot of functionality. I can turn my TV on and off from my phone over Wi-Fi, using the Official XBMC Remote Android app and a slightly-hacked version of XBMC. But there’s more. Guests who prefer using a TV remote can use its extended buttons to control XBMC playback. The adapter enables communication in both the TV-to-XBMC and XBMC-to-TV directions by passing CEC commands over the HDMI bus. And its inventors maintain a Free Software library, libcec, to control it. This is a much cleaner and cheaper solution than the various Wi-Fi-to-IR converters I’ve looked at.
If you run XBMC make sure to check out this adapter.