Control of Cable box by Sage

[ben_gb]

Hi,

I have ordered a couple of Hauppauge 350 cards for my planned PVR system and I understand this comes with a remote control.

Does anyone know if it also comes with whatever I need to make SageTV control my cable box, or do I need to get some extra hardware and software?

If so, what is recommended?

I currently have a Scientific Atlanta cable box. In the future I'm thinking of switching to a DirecTV system, so it would be good if whatever I get will be compatible with both.

I've seen mention of "Girder", but I'm not sure if it's relevant for me.

A rundown of the options I should be considering for this would be much appreciated!

As an aside, I think it might be a good idea on the sage.tv website to have some example configurations of EVERYTHING you need to get a system setup (hardware and software), as it's taken me a few days to pick through this forum to work out what I need, and I'm still not sure I've got everything.

Regards,
Ben

[justme]

You would need either a serial cable control solution such as DTVCon or an IR transmitter for SageTV to control an external tuner like your cable box.

OK If you want a solution that is native to SageTV and easily modified to accomodate new hardware. The Actisys IR-200L is currently the only IR transmiter officially supported by SageTV. You can buy it at the online Frey store. However, having said this, there is another option that has just started being developed in this current round of betas. The USBUIRT you can get it here. I have one and the IR recieve works great in the 1.4.3 beta. With native IR transimt on the way it's a good choice. This way one device does your IR recieve/transmit. It's cheaper than buying two devices, it's small, and it's USB. Another advantage to having a universal IR reciever(as opposed to the one built into the PVR250/350) is that you can teach SageTV to be controlled(mapping IR signals to SageTV commands) by other remotes. I use my Tivo remote since I have a PVR250(old black remote) that has too few buttons for my taste. Also this makes it very easy for my wife to control SageTV, since she knows how to use the Tivo.

OK, everything I mentioned in the previous paragraph can be done inside of SageTV. You don't need Girder to do it. Except IR transmit using the USBUIRT, but as I said Narflex is working on IR transmit intergration for the USBUIRT. If you decide to go with the actisys you won't even need Girder at all rigth now.

Don't get me wrong I'm not knocking Girder, but for what you describe you don't need it. If later on you want more fine tuned control of Sage and your whole PC, you can then use Girder. Just keep in mind that Girder does not support the IR reciever built in to the PVR250/350. This is why I suggested the USBUIRT, since Girder supports it for both IR transmit and recieve.

So to summarize my ramble.
1)Yes you need additional hardware to control your cable box.
2)Go for the Actisys if you want to be able go right now. Go for the USBUIRT if you can wait and have faith in Narflex(Jeff) to add native IR transmit support for it.
3)You don't need girder if you use the Actisys.

I hope this helps some. Let us know how it all goes once you get it all together. I hope you'll be as happy a user of SageTV as I am.

[ben_gb]

Thanks for your very full reply!

Looking at how my equipment will be set up, I think I will need to use some extra IR emitters (like these: http://www.smarthome.com/8170.html), so it seems that the USBUIRT thing might be the best choice as it has a mini-jack for these, whereas it doesn't appear the the Actisys does.

The downside is, if I understand correctly, I'll need to program Girder to deal with the transmission of signals to the cable box, at least until Sage supports USBUIRT natively.

From what you said, I think it means that I can use SageTV's built-in support for the Hauppauge remote control for receiving commands, even if I'm using USBUIRT for transmitting the commands to the cable box.

Thanks for your help!

Regards,
Ben

[justme]

Yep you can still use the Hauppauge remote. I belive SageTV modifies some settings that the WinTV Ir software uses. This allows your Hauppauge remote to work with both WinTV and SageTV. The downside is you have to have the Hauppauge IR software running.

Or you could just use SageTV's ability to map recieced IR signals to SageTV commands. This is how I have my Tivo remote controlling SageTV. It took me about 5 minutes to do in Sage. Note that you need the SageTV 1.4.3 beta for the USBUIRT's IR recieve to be natively supported by SageTV. The upside to this solution is that if you don't want to run anymore software than neccessary you don't need hauppauge's IR software running. This is particularly useful if you are going to be using Girder in your solution. Why have two IR software programs running.