NextPVR Forums

After struggling with using my serial IR blaster, I've decided to give a USB one a shot. I can pick up an MCE receiver w/ 2 emitters for around $20 but I have a couple of questions that maybe y'all can answer. Oh, and for right now, I'm only interested in using the blaster functions, not the receiver/remote.

1. I have Windows XP Pro, do I need to install any sort of device drivers or software? I thought I read somewhere that they're already installed for XP Pro, but I'm not sure.

2. If XP Pro already does have the drivers/software, how do you configure the STBs?

3. How do you call a specific receiver from GBPVR? Do you pass a receiver 'name' or something?

4. About how reliable is the blaster? I know I was getting about 85% with the serial one and that was pretty irritating. Can I expect 99 -100% with the USB one?

- I'm not a big fan of Hip, since it crashed every time I tried to configure it to use my serial blaster, so I'd prefer to use the M$ solution if it's free

Quote: 1. I have Windows XP Pro, do I need to install any sort of device drivers or software? I thought I read somewhere that they're already installed for XP Pro, but I'm not sure.

I think you have to use the alternative drivers if you are not using the MCE version of XP.
I have one of these devices and works great (but I use the receiver more than transmitter) but to transmit, you would need to use the third party programs to send IR commands. (or HIP?)

For controlling 2 x STB's - Do you have 2 seperate boxes with different channel line ups on them? In the channel changer part of the capture source config, I guess you could use different parameters between the 2 sources (as part of the commandline is choosing which blaster to use 1 or 2)

I would say to try HIP though, as there are preset commands for receiving and I had no issues setting up with the MCE. (again, I don't use for sending IR - not sure how that would work with HIP)

http://www.byremote.com.au/Hip/mce_remote_faq.htm
This is the stand-alone sending application & new drivers http://burningzeroad.free.fr/MceIrApi.rar


And the receiver comes with nice long usb cables - one great design feature from MS.

Hope that helps.

I'm using XP Pro with the MS driver and HIP, so you don't need the alternate driver. It all works pretty well and is quite reliable. As part of the set-up, you teach HIP the commands for your STB...all it needs is the digits 0-9. There's a setup guide on the wiki, I think.

One thing to watch out for...if you don't use the actual Microsoft brand blaster you may not be able to use both outputs. Some of the non-Microsoft 'MCE' blasters don't seem to be able to handle both outputs for some reason. I have one that was bundled with a PVR500 card that will only work with one output but the real MS unit will handle both.