[mythtv-users] MythTV finally functional except IR blaster

[Shawn Asmussen]

Well, my MythTV box is almost completely 100% working. I had a few issues,
but most of them are now either fixed or worked around.

My first major problem was the PVR-350 TV-out. Getting it to work wasn't
too difficult, but when I went to use it, it would always lock up when I
brought up the OSD. I fought it for a long time, up until the time when
the 0.1.9 driver came out. Then I upgraded to the current CVS, and tried
it with the new driver. It still worked when first brought up, but locked
after bringing up the on screen menu, or after exiting live TV, and trying
to go back to it. At that point I gave up on the TV-out on the PVR-350 and
moved my GForce 4200 from my gaming rig into my MythTV box. Needed an
excuse to upgrade the video card in my gaming box anyway...

Getting the TV-out to work with NVidia's driver wasn't too bad, and the
TV-out looks good on it also. After reading through the mailing list, I've
gotten the impression that some of the add ons don't integrate that
smoothly with the 350 TV-out anyway, so since the video quality is good on
my card anyway, I'm not going to worry about trying to get the TV-out on
the 350 working at this point.

I installed all of the plugin modules except for MythGallery, and that
went pretty smoothly, although I spent a long time compiling all of the
pre-requisites. (I didn't install anything from RPMs unless there was an
RPM included for it with Fedora)

My biggest problem at this point is that I can't get MythTV to control my
Explorer 2000 cable box. When I first setup my MythTV box, the Yahoo store
was out of stock of the Actisys IR Blasters, so I was going to build my
own using the simple circuit diagram on the lirc site. However, a few days
later they showed up as available again, so I ended up buying the IR200L.
I found the lirc2remote script, and I have a second instance of lirc
running to control the IR Blaster, so that it will work at the same time
as my Hauppauge remote (Which BTW is a horrible remote in my opinion. I'm
planning on replacing it with a generic remote after I get the rest of the
kinks worked out of the system.)

I didn't have any trouble getting the second instance of lirc configured
thanks to the handy script and HOWTO by Robert Wamble. However, my cable
box will not acknowledge any signals from the IR Blaster. I have an
Explorer 2000 cable box, and everything seems to work OK right up until I
try to actually drive the cable box with the IR Blaster.

At first I didn't know if I had it setup correctly. I think that I have
more or less eliminated that possibility at this point, however. Using the
config file for my Phillips television (from the remotes.tar.bz2 file), I
can use remote_irsend to send commands to the television, and I can easily
turn the TV off and on, adjust the volume, and change channels from about
5 feet away using the IR Blaster. Switching back to the config file for
the Explorer 2000 box (And restarting remoted of course), I can use
remote_irw and if I point the remote control for my cable box at the IR
Blaster and press buttons, remote_irw correctly reports which buttons I am
pressing. From these two tests I think that I can correctly conclude that
I have the second instance of lirc installed and configured correctly.
However, no matter what distance I put the IR Blaster at from the cable
box, I can't get it to register anything at all no matter what codes I
send using remote_irsend.

Even though using the config file for the Explorer 2000 results in correct
recognition of the remote using remote_irw, just for the heck of it I
tried recording my own config file using remote_irrecord, and although it
successfully generated a config file, using that file instead of the
supplied Explorer 2000 config file made no difference at all.

Does anybody have any suggestions on what I might need to do to get the
cable box to respond to my IR Blaster?

Shawn Asmussen