MCE Remote and blaster

[EricandLorrie]

After chasing a million differant threads concerning a MCE remote/blaster only to find they are real old or did not work after all, over my Christmas holliday, I have some questions.

Does anyone really control Sage with a MCE remote/blaster (I at this point really don't care if its XP or XPw/MCE or Vista) well enough that my wife could use?

I keep dropping the connection between the MCE remote and Sage. Then I need to manually go out of Sage and back in. I keep XP from loading Ehome. What am I doing wrong?

I also can't seam to keep the MCE services off. They keep comming back on.

I really want to use the MCE blaster. I have 2 cable boxes. Can I? How?

-Eric

[Bagal]

Yes you can use an MCE remote/blaster with sage, like you I've just spent Christmas getting this setup and once you know how it's fairly easy.

Firstly you need to deal with the Media Center services (this is for WinXP/mce, not sure on the exact details for vista):
1. Load up the services control panel: Start->run->services.msc
2. Find the 3 services for Media Center, they all start 'Media Center...'
3. Stop all 3 services.
4. Right click on each service, choose properties and set the 'startup type' to disabled.
5. Load up the registry editor: start->run->regedit
6. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
and find the Media Center entry, should be called 'ehome', 'etray' etc. and delete the key.

Then download the LM Remote KeyMap and SageTV Plugin from:
http://www.lmgestion.net/@en-us/4/22/60/81/article.asp
follow the instructions and away you go.
Don't forget that you will need to make sure the LM Remote KeyMap is loaded when windows starts or the blaster won't work! I forgot to do this and was wondering what was going on!

[Khristopher]

Exactly what I did last night (through trial and error mind you).

Simplified, here's what you need to do...

-Download the LM Remote Keymap software and install.
-Setup the Keymap software to use the MCE Remote
-Using the Keymap software, create a profile using the MCE Blaster, for your cable box. You'll have to go through each number and "learn" the remote codes twice for each number.
-Copy the blaster profile you just setup as well as the Keymap .dll file to the appropriate location (read the docs)
-Setup your source in Sage to use the LM Remote Keymap software to externally tune your box, and then go back into the source and select the blaster profile you created.

I had to do a lot of playing around to get the programming right for my box, but eventually got it and now it works great!

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by Khristopher

Exactly what I did last night (through trial and error mind you).

Simplified, here's what you need to do...

-Download the LM Remote Keymap software and install.
-Setup the Keymap software to use the MCE Remote
-Using the Keymap software, create a profile using the MCE Blaster, for your cable box. You'll have to go through each number and "learn" the remote codes twice for each number.
-Copy the blaster profile you just setup as well as the Keymap .dll file to the appropriate location (read the docs)
-Setup your source in Sage to use the LM Remote Keymap software to externally tune your box, and then go back into the source and select the blaster profile you created.

I had to do a lot of playing around to get the programming right for my box, but eventually got it and now it works great!

How do you map Sage commands to the MCE remote? I created my satellite receiver profile, and all of that loads and makes sense.
However, I'm missing how to make the MCE remote activate the appropriate commands in SageTV (Guide, mute, etc).

thanks

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

However, I'm missing how to make the MCE remote activate the appropriate commands in SageTV (Guide, mute, etc).

For this you need to create a remote profile. You'll then be able to customize each button for the application targeted by the remote profile (so SageTV in this case).

What is available for customization is detailed here.

You can also directly download a SageTV remote profile if you are a donator.

Regards,
Stéphane.