MCE infrared replacement driver

[mjfoxtrot]

Please help me with a critical issue involving the WAF (Wife
Approval Factor.) I'm sorry for the length of this post, but this
does require a little explanation.

I have a WinTV PVR USB2 device that came with what strongly appears
to me to be a PVR150 Model 1062/232 remote (it matches the picture
exactly as seen on the GBPVR Wiki page.) Now, as has been said many
times on this forum and others, GBPVR doesn't always play nice with this
remote -- specifically, it won't change channels on my Scientific
Atlanta 2200 digital cable box. However, thanks to the excellent
guide on the Wiki site, I was able to successfully program HIP so
that the remote now works perfectly with GBPVR. It changes channels
smoothly on the cable box now, and I am very impressed with GBPVR
overall. I run two other tuners in addition to the USB2 device (a
WinTV 350 and an ATI HDTV Wonder) and they all work seemlessly
together thanks to GBPVR.

Now the problem: my wife has grown very attached to Windows MCE 2005
and wants that to be available on the machine as well. So I fire up MCE for her and . . . Argh!!! I finally get GBPVR working and now it's MCE that won't change the channels.

Initially I didn't think it would be too much of a problem to run both MCE and GBPVR, as I can just toggle the MCE services on and off with a batch file I made, but the issue is with the MCE infrared replacement driver that I had
to install in order to get HIP to work properly. Windows MCE keeps
looking for the original driver (which was called ehome infrared
receiver before the replacement driver changed it.) As a result, it won't change channels because MCE can no longer see the USB infrared box. I've seen several other posts relating to this problem, but no one has ever mentioned a solution. I know this isn't an MCE 2005 forum, but I'm sure there are people out there who would like to run GBPVR and MCE on the same machine. Is it possible to make MCE 2005 work with the MCE infrared replacement driver? Or, conversely, is there a way to make HIP work with the ehome infrared receiver driver?

If such a solution doesn't exist, I'd alternatively settle for advice on how I could run two USB blaster devices -- one for MCE 2005, the other for GBPVR (i.e., the blaster I have now, plus maybe a USB-UIRT, perhaps???)

Many thanks in advance for any help.

[ricklous]

Or, conversely, is there a way to make HIP work with the ehome infrared receiver driver?

Yes...im doing this at the moment.

I wrote the HIP guide on the wiki, but ive moved away from the setup that you end up with, as the replacement driver has some missing power management functionality that the ehome does have.

So currently, i have the ehome driver loaded in device manager, but still have HIPs output device set to use 'MCE' (HipMCE.DLL). the codes that i taught HIP(with the alterative driver) when i wrote the wiki guide are still sent corrently via the MCE blasters despite the device itself not using the alternative driver. Actually the timings seem more consistent too, and so reliable channel changing has improved. Might just be me seeing things though lol

Now that the eHome driver is loaded, the 'input' side of things can also be simpler as you can just select 'mce remote' in the config app, set HIPs Input device to 'Generic' and away you go.

Now, if you want to remap the keys to do the same as what they do in MCE (to keep WAF confusion low), thats slightly more complicated. you will have to select the input device in HIP as the 'MCE'(you dont need to change drivers to do this), but this will result in the arrow buttons being received twice by GBPVR (once from the ehome driver as fake keyboard presses and once from HIP), so you need to set GBPVRs remote config to something other than the mce remote (the default is fine), which will stop the double receipt of arrow commands, but will also loose ANY recepit of the other buttons. The answer to this is to program the buttons into HIP in the same way as on the Guide, but leaving the 'primary command' fields blank in HIP for those commands from the eHome driver that GBPVR is still reacting to.

so you'll end up with MCE happy as larry cos its got the driver it wants to see, and a mashup of a config file in HIP, and the result will be that you'll effectivly be controling GBPVR via both the eHome drivers (when your using the arrow keys) and the HIP MCE plugin (for everything else)

I dont know if thats clear....it may not be until youve played around with it.:o

Once you go back to the eHome driver, it wont be so simple to teach HIP your STB codes, so make sure you take a copy of all the files from the c:\program files\HIP\MCEIR folder before you do any jiggerypokery!

Oh and ive not ironed it out myself yet or id have just posted my config file instead i should be working on it tomorrow/day after though so let me know how you go on....

[mjfoxtrot]

Thanks very much for this excellent reply, Ricklaus, as well as for writing the HIP wiki. I'm hopeful that the WAF will greatly increase because of this! You've given me several options to try out and I will let you know how it works . . . being able to run the ehome driver is certainly the key here and with a little luck I might be able to get both programs running fine.

[mjfoxtrot]

Success!! Ricklous, your instructions were right on. I got the ehome infrared receiver working with both GBPVR and MCE 2005, and the WAF is very high right now!

The key was definitely to go with the generic input on HIP. Once I did this, everything seemed to fall into place quite easily. I can change the channels on my STB, regardless of which PVR program I use. Very nice.

Might be worth re-writing part of the Wiki to let people know they can use the ehome infrared receiver with HIP. It seems to be a real advantage to be able to use ehome instead of the MCE replacement driver.

Thanks for the help!

[masterng]

I hope you both are still around and shed some light on this. Can you confirm if the IRblaster still work when running MCE? I followed your setup and could get all buttons to work properly, however, when running MCE, LiveTV won't work and I got an error message like "STB Error - remote sensor is not connected". Thanks

[ricklous]

Which driver are you using for the beanbag/remote?

I dont use MCE but i think thats the error message people get when MCE cant find the eHome driver loaded. Could be wrong though...

[masterng]

Yes, that's the message I got when running MEC. I tried both drivers and got the same result. Reboot after each time. It sounds like your IR blaster is still functioning with HIP loaded?

[ricklous]

yeah my blasters still work when fired by HIP / HIPs MCE plugin regardless of weather I have the eHome driver or the 3rd party driver.

Maybe the guys over at TheGreenButton forum could help you out with MCE loosing the blasters? or someone here who has GBPVR and MCE running in tandem if they're watching...

does the blaster work when using GBPVR?

[masterng]

Uhm, I haven't tried GBPVR yet; just tried to see if I can load some simple keyboard commands to launch an application (i.e. Ctrl+Alt+Home to start WMPlayer) and already ran into this weird problem.