Yet another MCE20005 remote question.

[bitbyte]

I'm planning on buying SageTV as I'm 7 days into my 15 day evaluation and my wife loves it.

As the person who supports it tho I have a question.

In some of the threads I read that v3 was supposed to support the MCE2005 remote natively. I know that v3 became v4 and I've seen nothing in v4 about the MCE remote, nor have i seen any postings regarding it since the release of v4.

Am I missing something, or didnt native support make it into the release? If not, then when is support slated to happen? (if at all). If it's in ther eplease link me to any info on it and I'd love to read up on it. I don't expect to be spoon-fed.

The whole girder and hip solution is a bit of a pain as I can't get girder to pass the commands to sage even though it sees the remote and it's keypresses fine, and hip passes the commands to sage fine but I get multiples of each keypress making it unusable.

Replacing the irbus.sys file and manually programming each and every keypress is hardly ideal, although not impossible. Some of the open source pvr apps support it natively without replacing files etc, so it seems odd that a commercial one liek Sage doesn't appear to do it. (Although I was VERY glad to see native serial control for STB's)

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

BTW I emailed info@sagetv.com asking this and got no response at all. Today I forwarded the same email to support and have yet to receive an answer, not sure what's up with that.


TIA

[Opus4]

Most of the buttons from the MCE remote should work -- all the buttons listed on this MS page should work except for those that use WM_INPUT commands. The others either use simple keystrokes or WM_APPCOMMAND messages, which are recognized by SageTV as listed on p. 190 in the v4 PDF manual.

To use all of the buttons, you would have to use something like Girder.

- Andy

[bitbyte]

Many do work, yes. But none of the specialty buttons like "DVD Menu", "Info" and "Guide" work.

I'm game for trying to get girder or hip to go, but I've not seen any threads describing the issues i'm havign with them.

Although I wonder how much of it's because I'm actually runnign XP MCE and perhaps MCE is intercepting the keypresses before they get to sage. (MCE services are disabled).

Your thoughts?

[blade]

I know people are using Girder or HIP with the remote, but I never could get my remote to work going that route.

The easiest way to get the MCE remote working with Sage IMO is to use a USB-UIRT.

[bitbyte]

I've considered that route, I just find it a bit ludicrous to spend 10 dollars more on just the USB-UIRT than I did for the remote with a receiver.

[blade]

I guess I just don't see much difference in paying $47 for a USB-UIRT and $37 for Girder. Either way you're paying more $$ to get the MCE remote to work. I felt the same way you did, but now that I've used the USB-UIRT I think it's been well worth the money. I spent countless hours reading threads and messing with Girder to no avail. It took less than 5 minutes to install and setup my remote with the USB-Uirt and every button on the remote works with Sage.

Anyway, good luck getting the remote going. I hope you have better luck than I did.

[bitbyte]

Good point, I hadn't really considered that.

Thanks for the input.

[SHS]

Personal I think the Hauppauge Remote Controls is the best option unless you need it work with more then 7ft then FireFly is next best option.

[byremote]

Multiple key presses with the MCE remote occur because the default eHome Driver generates keyboard commands (see http://www.byremote.com.au/Hip/mce_remote_faq.htm for more information)

So you have 2 choices:

1) Use the replacement driver for the MCE Remote which will give you FULL access to all of the buttons, but you MUST use Hip or Girder to translate teh key presses into something useful

2) Use the default eHome driver, and use the keyboard as the interface for Hip or Girder ( and not the MCEIR.DLL). You may not have all of the buttons, but you can at least change the configuration on the fly.

IMOH the first option is best.