EGreat M34A Client

[Jaggy]

Right, just to make me look like a bigger idiot than I did yesterday I decided to put the batteries back into the mvp remote & try again (even though I tried like 100 times before) & what do you know the coloured keys work now.......I have noticed with all the remotes getting the osd from the blue button when playing a recording is a bit difficult & I also wonder if I need to move the nmt to be more in straight line of sight to the remote.

[mvallevand]

Do you have the same problem with the MCE and Hauppauge remotes? I consider the Hauppauge quite sensitive and it might be sending two keys.

Martin

[Jaggy]

Line of sight has a lot to do with it, the nmt is about 2'6" over to the right & about 12 to 14' away from where I sit & if I hold my arm out to the right & press the coloured buttons it works a lot better....odd the other keys don't seem to mind being out of line so much. The mce is a bit easier to get to display the osd & I'm not sure how good the batteries in it are as when I grabbed it this morning the batteries were flat & I had to steal some out of another remote to get it going, the mvp remote does suffer from double key presses, but I am getting better at not pressing the buttons as long as I did for the mvp.

[mvallevand]

i was more interested in the fact you can plug it into the pc:"eSATA host and slave (plug to PC to copy media files "

It's better than the slave because you can just move the drive and leave M34a installed, but I leave it to you to judge the WAF. I think it is best diskless, as a GBPVR client.

Martin

[mvallevand]

Line of sight has a lot to do with it, the nmt is about 2'6" over to the right & about 12 to 14' away from where I sit & if I hold my arm out to the right & press the coloured buttons it works a lot better....odd the other keys don't seem to mind being out of line so much. The mce is a bit easier to get to display the osd & I'm not sure how good the batteries in it are as when I grabbed it this morning the batteries were flat & I had to steal some out of another remote to get it going, the mvp remote does suffer from double key presses, but I am getting better at not pressing the buttons as long as I did for the mvp.

Honestly I can't think of any reason the response on specfic keys on the remote would vary too much. The idea of bending light might be possible to Newton and Einstein but I don't think they meant in your living room.

Martin

[SLR_65]

I have an old Polaroid DRM-2100 DVR and it's remote was pitiful. Someone on the AVS forums suggested replacing the ir led with a high output one from Radio Shack and danged if it didn't work - it really helped!

One of the best remotes I've had as far as distance is an old US Electronics Millenium 4 (lots of cable companies use these with their cable boxes so they are cheap and plentiful and they are reprogrammable via a JP1 cable/port). That one has two ir leds in it - I wonder if we couldn't get creative and parallel a couple high output ir leds into a remote?

I'll have to wait to play . . . I'll be ordering an Egreat for my son shortly and I'll have to make him wait for his birthday present until I'm done playing with it! (I'll let ya know how that works out! )

Take care,

Steve

[mvallevand]

Trying to keep the EGreat questions together from a PM

Hi,
Will the EG-M34A work with GBPVR?

From reading your posts you mention something about their remote being a problem but i am unsure what you mean by this and if it stops the EG-M34A from being used as an MVP replacement.

thanks for your time

The issue is that the remote http://forums.gbpvr.com/attachment.php?a...1242409120 doesn't have the colour buttons that are used because of the MVP heritiage. My next mvpmcx2 will map the Info button to the Blue button which is very important, but I haven't figured out what to do with the other colours. Unfortunately EGreat couldn't be bother to even send me a remote, and I leave it to Jaggy and other EGreat users to offer alternative suggestions for the colour keys.

Martin

[Jaggy]

Unfortunately EGreat couldn't be bother to even send me a remote, and I leave it to Jaggy and other EGreat users to offer alternative suggestions for the colour keys.

Unfortunately I don't use the remote that comes with it (apart from to turn it off & on & navigate to load mvpmcx2 the first time after turning on) as apart from missing the coloured buttons the skip forward & prev rev buttons are along way apart, this may not worry others but the only way I could see me using it (after using a convenient remote for years) is if there was something like Hip that I could use to define my own buttons the way that suits me......I would change the vol buttons to act as the fwd/rev buttons.....but I don't know what I would use as vol buttons as I would want rev,audio,mute,fwd to be the coloured buttons.

[Jaggy]

Sorry for this big long ramble I tried to keep it short but just couldn't do it

After over a week of using my EGreat M34a I thought I would give a quick summery of my experiences with it so far.

Ordering online from http://www.egreatusa.com/ was a breeze & they are totally setup when ordering for overseas orders & to combine freight within their order system. Shipping was very slow even though their web site said "Availability: Usually ships the next business day" ours didn't get shipped for over two weeks & then by the time they went through customs & waited for us to pay GST (tax) (we paid the same day as we were informed of the amount) on them it was about three weeks from time of order before they arrived at the total cost of NZ$350.00 each.

Hooking up up the NMT to my 33" 4:3 CRT was a breeze as the size of the M34a is only a fraction bigger than the MVP all that was required was to unhook the MVP & put the leads into the NMT find a NZ power lead for it with our plug style the power supply is both 110 & 240v so no problem there. Testing using the built in software was also a breeze as I already had my recording/music shared on the network, the only thing I had to do was select pal under the video setup before it would display on my TV (this has to be changed from "auto" for using with GB anyway) I also wrote down the MAC address while I was at it.

Installing it for use with GB-PVR was also a breeze (after a slight panic Re: first post in this thread totally my own fault) using the Dummies guide http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=38896 & missing selecting PCH2 mode for the first install (an interesting mistake as I got to see what it was like in the old PCH mode, running the installer again & just selecting to install "mvpmcx2" & "PCH2" fixed that mistake). The only other "fun" we had with the install was I installed mvpmcx2 on my development machine but when I restarted the NMT & selected "GB-PVR via Network Browser" to test the share it displayed GB from my main server machine, for the other NMT I helped setup over the phone it displayed the Hauppauge server stuff that was running on a totally different machine on his network. After a quick install on my server machine to cure this I then set my display area using the "MVP Position" tool as a guide http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Plugi...enPosition & using Notepad to edit config.xml as the menus were displaying WAY WAY to BIG for my TV. I then added lircd1 http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=42269 to the gbpvr.cgi using Editpad Lite so I could use my other remotes with the coloured buttons.

Total install time from start to finish on my server including reading the Dummies guide like 20 times, four hours, total install time for my friends setup with me advising over the phone one hour (not including installing GB-PVR as we were both already using it).

Using GB-PVR on the NMT compared to the built in software for music & SD recordings (I can't comment on HD as we don't get any HD broadcast here) is like night & day, the time to start playing is almost instant using PCH2 & about 10 seconds using the built in players & I find skip etc. much better than 8x FF not to mention being able to use comskip & GB-PVR with all it's advantages.

Compared to using the MVP is more like comparing apples & oranges, menu response is instant (like on the PC), I can't think of anything I have tried so far apart from playing .ogg that use the built in NMT music player that doesn't work as well if not better than the MVP & it plays SD .ts files brilliantly with full skip functionality (we have only had one that wouldn't skip properly so far & that had a glitch in the recording, but it did skip properly when played directly on the PC).

Remotes:

The EGreat remote works very well with PCH2 apart from the missing couloured buttons & the "next/skip" "prev/replay" being a long way away from the "fwd" "rev/rew" buttons & the "power" button turning the NMT off rather than going back to the built in NMT screen.

The Hauppauge MVP remote takes a bit of getting used to after using it with the MVP for years as it is inclined to double send key strokes, so far I have not been successful trying to skip a set amount of time (press the number buttons & then skip).

The MCE remote works very well but I personally don't really like the button layout on them & find the lack of the "guide" button a pain when setting/checking the days recording in the TVGuide.

The Hauppauge (MCE like) black remote also works very well & I am about to try using it for a night & see how I get on with it.

My conclusion is for me playing SD .ts & .mpg recordings, lots of music, using the MLPanel & Moviewiz plugins & Blue-Retro-HV (soon to be released on the wiki) skin (as B-R-SHV displayed the fonts WAY to big on the NMT & my TV) it is brilliant & very good value for the money spent, it is only a fraction more expensive than what I payed for a new MVP over three years ago & way less than a "quite" WAF PC would cost me even with dealer prices.

EDIT: I have updated my comments on the remotes in this post http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=3...stcount=29 after mvallevand's recent updates.

[mvallevand]

Thanks for taking the time to post these comments Jaggy. I think that addresses most of the concerns I've got given so many PCH users here. For any users with Hauppague MCE remote, silver "My key" version "My TV" is the guide.

Martin