MCE receiver/blaster

[flyswatta]

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

[JonnyCam]

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.

[zed]

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.