MCE Blaster problem-Working erractically

[Nieve]

I have a HVR-1600 with a HP remote & dongle/blaster trying to control a Dishpro381. I follow the guide to setup everything up and figure out how to make the dish box shoot the codes to my MCE dongle so I could program it since I have a UHF remote. I can control everything in GBPVR but I have erratic channel changing problems.

The IR blaster port 1 wouldn't do anything. The blaster port 2 works sometimes and when it does it has a hard time changing the channel. For instance I will say change to channel 182 and it will change to 82 or 2 or some combination of the number. I tested the codes over and over to make sure the blaster is placed right and that the codes are working.

Does anybody know why the IR blaster ports work sometimes and how to get the channels to change correctly?

[Nieve]

Apparently no one has an answer. I am still getting very mixed results. One time I will boot my computer the the blaster ports are working. Other times I will boot my computer and neither port works. Am I the only person experiencing this problem?

Please I need some help? Without the blaster working with my Dish box my setup is worthless.

[sub]

I dont really have any experience with this myself, so I'm not a good position to answer questions on it. Are you using the built in MCE IR Blaster support, or HIP? You should be using the latter.

[Nieve]

I am using HIP. I installed the MCE replacement driver from here which comes from the guide:
http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/mce-re...ete-29024/

My remote is this (got it for free):
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/produ...g=en&cc=us

I program the codes into the MCE receiver using this method from the dish website since my dish remote is UHF:
http://rweb.echostar.com/departmental_co...Trou.shtml

From what I have read the HP MCE blaster port 2 is the only port that works. I keep getting mixed results. Not sure what to do.

Is it worth getting something else like the USBUIRT or something else?

[sub]

I dont really know. I've never used the IR Blasters on the MCE devices. I know lots of others are using them successfully.

[jberries]

Well here is a shot in the dark...
You might want to try this
http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/mce-re...ete-29024/
i.e. go back to the original eHome driver and see what happens.

[Nieve]

Well, I have the ehome driver installed and have learned and re-learned the CCF codes from my dish remote but I can't seem to get things just right. I have played with the hipsend timing for hours and can't seem to get consistent results.

Is it my dish receiver (Dishpro 381) or placement of my blaster or what? Any ideas. Help?

[Etacovda]

use the test IR function in hip to make sure hip is working correctly at sending the keypresses rather than gbpvr so you can eliminate hip being the problem.

It took me a fair while to get it to function reliably, and even now when coming out of hibernation/restarting etc the first change (say, waking and doing a recording) is hit and miss... but changing channels on live tv is perfect for me. Id imagine its something to do with the way the usb device is woken up, not sure. Im going to try setting up a script that restarts hip on resume from standby/power on/startup that restarts hip + sends a few fake blasts and see if that will help, but im not holding my breath. Extremely annoying since it changes channels perfectly from live tv 99% of the time....


edit - try IR server suite, its fantastic!

[Retired2k]

use the test IR function in hip to make sure hip is working correctly at sending the keypresses rather than gbpvr so you can eliminate hip being the problem.

It took me a fair while to get it to function reliably, and even now when coming out of hibernation/restarting etc the first change (say, waking and doing a recording) is hit and miss... but changing channels on live tv is perfect for me. Id imagine its something to do with the way the usb device is woken up, not sure. Im going to try setting up a script that restarts hip on resume from standby/power on/startup that restarts hip + sends a few fake blasts and see if that will help, but im not holding my breath. Extremely annoying since it changes channels perfectly from live tv 99% of the time....


edit - try IR server suite, its fantastic!

I'm having the same issues as you folks with erratic channel changes. My setup is XP PRO W/MCE and utilizing GBPVR instead of MCE for all the obvious reasons. I had all kinds of problems with the MCE transceiver and IR buds, so the creator or the custodian of HIPsend/HIP (BTMI) suggested I get a USBUIRT transceiver, which I did.

I thought I had everything working with GBPVR, HipSend and HIP ultimatly sending the 3 digit channel changes to my Direct TV SAT-A55 STB. I could either send the digits with a remote or with the keyboard and everything worked great. I then setup GBPVR to wakeup my PC from S3 standby and record a program. GBPVR woke the system fine but like you folks, the first digit might be sent or maybe the first and third or any combination of the three and the STB responded to those digits accordingly.

In trying to narrow the problem down I bypassed GBPVR and used HipWSend to send digits to HIP after resuming from S3 standby. The results were the same, erratic channel changes. After a few bad channel changes, the combination starts sending the correct signals to the STB and continues to function until I resume from standby again. If I set up GBPVR to use USBUIRT plugin as the channel changer instead of the HipWsend/HIP combination, channel changes are consistant and it didn't matter if the system is resumed from the S3 power state or hibernation. Not knowing what else is involved DLL's, code etc., to me this puts the problem in the HipSend or HipWsend and HIP configuration. By the way I could send IR blasts to the stb all day via the IR test page in HIP and they worked everytime.

There are many systems out there using HIP and I assume are not experiencing this problem but it's nice to know that I'm not the only one who is.

PS
I've posed the problem to BTMI on the DVBOwers forum, to be fair he did respond back and me to do some tests, which I did but didn't work. He did say he was involved in several projects so he hasn't gotten back to me yet.

[Etacovda]

do yourself a favour, try ir server suite + get rid of hip. Fixed all my problems perfectly, ive had 50+ unfailed recordings in 2 weeks.