Paid Control4 drivers are locked to the controller: what to do before you swap, and what happens when the vendor is gone

Where this came from: this question was asked on c4forums/General Control4 — not here. We answered it there, in public, and this is that answer.

msgreenf is right and I'd not soften it: paid Control4 drivers are licensed against the controller, so replacing the controller invalidates them. For Annex4 specifically there's no route back, because there's nobody left to re-issue anything. That part is settled.

But Neo1738's question deserves a better answer than "there isn't one", because there is — it just has to happen before the swap, not after.

The licence is issued against a controller you still own and can still see. So the step that gets skipped is the inventory. Before you move to new hardware, go through the project in Composer and write down every device whose driver did not come from the Control4 database — the driver name and manufacturer are right there on each device. That list is your exposure. Then contact each of those vendors while you still have a working system, and ask what their process is for moving a licence to a new controller. Vendors that are still trading generally have one. The ones that don't answer, you've just learned something important about, and you've learned it while you still have a choice.

Do that and a controller swap costs you a couple of emails. Skip it and you find out the way the OP just did — after the old controller is out of the rack, which is the one moment you have no leverage at all.

For the OLEDs themselves: the honest position is that it depends on what those specific sets will accept, and I'd want the model numbers before saying anything definite. IBZICON, if your dealer's driver ends up being available I'd follow that first — a driver written this year against currently-shipping sets is worth more than anything I could tell you in a forum post. Failing that, the Control4 database driver is worth trying before you go shopping, purely to establish what still responds over IP on those particular models. It costs you an evening and it tells you whether the problem is the driver or the TV.

One thing I'd add for anyone reading this later: this is not really an LG problem. It's the general shape of paid third-party drivers, and it bites hardest on exactly the systems most likely to be upgraded — older, well-built, lots of custom integration. If you're running a system with several paid drivers on it, that inventory is worth doing this week, whether or not you're planning to change anything.

Full disclosure: I'm a Control4 and Lutron dealer and I do this remotely for a living, so I have an obvious interest in controller swaps going well. Happy to talk through the inventory with anyone who wants a second pair of eyes on it, and no charge for that — it's twenty minutes and it saves a genuinely bad afternoon.