HD-PVR and IR Blasting on CentOS 6.3

[dougbrose]

Hi Sage Linux Community,

I just reinstalled my Linux 7.19 OEM version (on the same motherboard so I can use my key ), but I upgraded to CentOS 6.3. Now I can access my hdpvr and I see /dev/video0 and i2c-0, plus I use the udev to create a i2c0... but when I test my ir blasting nothing happens on my satellite box.

I have always been a little fuzzy with ir blasting on Linux and the HD-PVR. Doesn't sage just support blasting without too much fiddling with Lirc? Do I need zilog to work? How much of my ir blasting is baked into sage and how much is in the kernel/modules? The fact that I see port 0 and sage recognizes that is working, but nothing comes out the blaster is very confusing to me?

Thanks for any help,

Doug

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by dougbrose

Hi Sage Linux Community,

I just reinstalled my Linux 7.19 OEM version (on the same motherboard so I can use my key ), but I upgraded to CentOS 6.3. Now I can access my hdpvr and I see /dev/video0 and i2c-0, plus I use the udev to create a i2c0... but when I test my ir blasting nothing happens on my satellite box.

I have always been a little fuzzy with ir blasting on Linux and the HD-PVR. Doesn't sage just support blasting without too much fiddling with Lirc? Do I need zilog to work? How much of my ir blasting is baked into sage and how much is in the kernel/modules? The fact that I see port 0 and sage recognizes that is working, but nothing comes out the blaster is very confusing to me?

Thanks for any help,

Doug

When I first started out a few years back now, I fiddled with lirc and even the ir blasting on the hdpvr, and both solutions were crap. Lirc resulted in about 1 in 5 shows beings recorded incorrectly. Eventually bjenkins pointed me to the commandir product and it's been great. I have yet to record the wrong channel in over 2 years and 1000s of recordings.

http://www.commandir.com/content/view/71/86/

CommandIR has a native channel changer binary/source and I used the external channel changer plugin in sagetv to do the channel changes. The main downside was that I needed to teach the command ir channel changer what the ir codes were, ie, run a command on the computer then point the remote and press a button so that it could learn it.

I've talked with the author of commandir a couple times and i asked why he wrote a native, non lirc, channel changer, and he said that the lirc code was too flaky and resulted in too many missed "keys", so he wrote a native binary that doesn't use lirc to be more reliable.

[dougbrose]

I had to downgrade to the 1.5.7 hd-pvr firmware for the blaster to activate.