Using an Actisys ACT-ir200L with NextPVR

[couch-pilot]

I've been a user of Beyond TV for years, but recently, I've been unable to make it work with my Hauppauge HD-PVRs. I tried GBPVR a while back ( 2003 ish ), and found it interresting, but it wasn't stable for me at the time. Now that BTV is not longer an option, I decided to give it a try again.

My setup is as follows:
an Asus P5K motherboard ( can't remember the exact model)
Intel core 2 quad q9540
4 MB memory
Windows XP SP3
3 HD-PVR
one IRBlaster and 2 ACT-IR200L RS232 ir blasters

NextPVR with one HDPVR works very well. I'm using the IRBlaster that comes with it to change channels on the cable box, and it works fine.

Now, when I setup a second HDPVR, I need to configure NPVR to use a channel changer script for the ACT-ir200L. I can't figure out for the life of me how to get that to work. GBPVR used to have drivers for the IR200L, but not NPRV.

I search the forums and the internet, and couldn't find a method to drive the IR200L. I'll admit that my programming skills are not remotely good enough to write my own.

Anybody knows how to do this?

Thanks!
Benoit.

[sub]

There is no built in support for any blasters. Instead it can use any command line blaster, so you need to track down a command line blaster for your IR200L.

[couch-pilot]

Understood.

GBPVR I think used to have some command line utilities for IR200L. Is it still downloadable? I've also been trying to find heremote with no luck.

Thanks for your reply!

[sub]

GBPVR used to have some built in code for the IR200L, but there is no equivalent in NextPVR.

About a year or two into the GBPVR project I stopped trying to write my own blaster software (but the IR200L support was in by then), and moved to instead pushing the use of 3rd party command line blasters. Writing my own blasters was too much effort, and there were other projects like HIP and EventGhost etc that had much more time to spend on this aspect, and making it work well. NextPVR followed that same approach.

[couch-pilot]

Thanks for the pointer. I borrowed a USBUIRT from a friend to replace my IR200L senders, and I used EventGhost to control the USBUIRT. It works well now... Built my own channel changer batch file to control EventGhost. With the USB UIRT and EventGhost, I saw that I can control 3 STBs, so I'm all set.

Thanks again!
-Benoit

PS: the HIP support page seems to be broken, so I couldn't compare it with eventghost...