A flat TV picture can feel like it stops at the bezel, and this build tackles that head-on with reactive lighting behind the screen. The maker put together an Ambilight-style backlight for a television, with LED strips sitting behind the panel and along the wall mount, throwing colored light onto the wall in sync with whatever is playing on screen. The whole thing was first set up around a desktop PC before being moved over to the TV, which shows the approach scales from a small screen to a big one.
The hardware side is clean: an ESP32 running WLED drives the strips, while HyperHDR does the color analysis from a homeserver, fed by a capture card connected over USB. For desktop use, HyperHDR simply runs as its own desktop app instead. One detail worth noting is the maker's advice to pick a capture card with HDCP2, which seems like a sensible call for anyone planning something similar.
The path here was not straight. Early attempts grabbed the picture with software on Android TV, but that produced too much noise, so the capture card route replaced it, and the maker now calls the result flawless, running at 60fps and keeping pace with the TV picture itself. On the strip side there are roughly twelve LEDs per twenty centimeters, with the LED count and power configured in WLED and colors plus the gap fine-tuned live while everything was running. Brightness sits at about ninety percent of maximum, since the aim is to match or stay slightly under the TV's own brightness.
The maker notes every TV is different and that matching matters, and they are still openly asking for points of improvement, so the tuning story is not fully closed.