PVR 500: How Does the IR Blaster Work With It and Which Should I Buy?

[nicolasqueen]

Hello,

I have finally figured out exactly what I need to get my system to work. I will be using a PVR 500 to receive from two STBs and I am assured by Hauppauge and others that it will work. I have been trying to decide if I need to but the Hauppauge PVR 500 MCE kit or the Hauppauge PVR 500 and the Microsoft Remote and IR Blaster. What I have become confused over is how this blaster works with the tuner and my PC. The Hauppauge one looks as though it has one remote receiver cable. The Microsoft one has two, as far as I can see. My issue is that I am not sure how this all goes together. All I see either of these having is a USB cord that hooks into the back of the PC and then the receiver cables on both appear to have sensors on them. Take a look:



and



I know on the back of STBs there is an IR port and I always figured this is where I plug in the cord from the USB receiver. I am wrong? I also always figured I had to plug the blaster into the back of the tuner, but I figure this is controlled on this via USB. SO, am I making any sense in my question? Also, should I just buy the MS remote and the card by itself?

Thanks,
Nick

[gplasky]

Nothing from either IR receiver "plugs in" the STB. The MCE solution - SageTV does not natively work with the blaser portion of it. So you would need a 3rd party piece of software. SageTV DOES work natively with the Hauppague receiver (lower picture) but only supports a single STB. Both solutions work by sending an IR signal to your STB just like the STB remote would. The MCE is USB and the Hauppague plugs directly into the tuner card.

A third solution would get a PVR 500 with neither of the above and purchase a USB-UIRT. This can have any existing remote learned so that it works with it and SageTV supports the blasting feature. This will also support blasting up to 3 STB with purchasing 2 extra emitters.

Gerry

EDIT:Correction from the post below-PVR500 doesn't support the Hauppague remote.

[ke6guj]

To add to the above post, the 500 does not have the capability of using the Hauppuage receiver at all. So, you'd either need to use the MCE solution or the USB-UIRT.

[TechBill]

I am currently using PVR-500 with 2 DirectTV recievers and for my blaster I use the UIRT-USB zoned seperately for each units.

I would go with the UIRT-USB or any blasters that can be zoned seperately for each units.

Bill

[mlapaglia]

uirt is now natively supported in sagetv as well. the windows mce one requires addition setup (what i am trying to do now in vista x64)

[myoung84]

Here is my use of the USBUIRT. I would recommend using this.

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...&postcount=318

FYI: If you have not purchased the PVR-500, go to PCAlchemy.com and you can get the sageTV bundle with Sage, PVR-500, and a dvd decoder (which is basically free) then you can add the USBUIRT IR Blaster to the bundle for like $45. Best deal I have found.