Slow IR Blasters

[mayamaniac]

This issue happened recently, last 3 weeks or so. I'm getting incorrect recordings of shows due to wrong channels being recorded. The culprit is the IR blaster, ACTISYS IR-200L (serial), was sending commands too slow. It pauses too long between numbers causing the wrong channel to be tuned on my STB. The pauses are sometime very long, up to 5 seconds inbetween commands, I can tell because I see the flashing red light on the IR blaster. So my guess is faulty hardware.

Fortunately, I have a spare USB-UIRT. So I replaced the IR-200L with the USB-UIRT. On initial tests, it seems the problem has been fixed. There were no pauses between commands. But over the next few days, I noticed a few more shows were recorded on the wrong channel again. So I went back to test the USB-UIRT. I just channel surfed for a while, just changing to various channels. I noticed that it misses a channel about once out of 10 times. And it seems to be the same problem where it pauses between commands too long. So I try to change to channel 123, it would send the 1, then pauses for a couple of seconds, then sends 2 and 3 without pauses. The STB disregards the 1 due to the long pause, and then changes to channel 23 instead.

Any ideas what could be causing the pauses? The SageTV Server is running in service mode and using v5.04. The only thing I changed recently was switching to UNC paths and installing the MS loopback adapter. I dont see how these things can affect the IR blasters though. Java has always been the same, v1.50.06, so I'm not sure whats going on.

[mayamaniac]

Nevermind, I finally switched to serial cable using the MultiDCTTuner for the DCT2000 and now it works even better than the IR blasters. Channel changing is a lot faster and it hasn't missed any channels.

Its still bizarre that for some unknown reason the IR Blasters started having problems though.