Usb Uirt

[TunaBoo]

Does the USB UIRT both reveive the signals from a remote AND send signals out to a cable box, or does it only send to a cable box?

The reason I ask is I have a PVR250, with no remote. So I either
a) Buy a 350 so I have 2 tuners and a remote, and buy a USB-UIRT so I can send to my cable box
or
b) Buy a 250, and a USB-UIRT, and just buy my own remote.

I don't really care about the hardware decoding as the cards are in a 1 GHz P3 that does nothing else, it can deal with software decoding.

[stanger89]

The UIRT does both. 'b' is definitely the better choice, the 350 would open you up to the infamous compatibility problems.

[TunaBoo]

Originally posted by stanger89
The UIRT does both. 'b' is definitely the better choice, the 350 would open you up to the infamous compatibility problems.

Well I have a "15" 250, so I should be OK with A.

What is the radius on the UIRTS? The direction my remote will face and the direction of my cable box will most likely be totally opposite (or I can rearrange my box if totally necessary).

[ToxMox]

I thought the 250s came with remotes as well as the 350s.
I have two 250s and they both came with remotes and my 350 had one too. Unless you are buying these used off of ebay or something.

[salsbst]

The USB-UIRT is very powerful. But what I do is plug in an IR emitter to its 1/8" jack in the back and tape it directly to the cable box for 100% success rate (it never, ever misses in this configuration).

[eggs]

Along these same lines, I wanted to know if Sage communicates both ways on a serial connection to an RCA (or other) DirecTV box. If so, does Sage 'know' what channel the DirecTV box is tuned to, or does it simply assume that it is where the last channel command told it to go. It would be nice if Sage polled the box so that if a channel command were sent outside of Sage (like from the RCA remote) it would know what channel you were viewing.

Just wondering...

[TunaBoo]

Where do you get an " IR emitter"? I would need 2 as I am going to have 2 cable boxes so I can dual tune. I might HAVE to go this way, or the USB-UIRT would trip both boxes at the same time?

Can a single USB-UIRT deal with 2 IR emitters?



The reason my PVR250 has no remote is I got it over ebay pulled from a gateway. Came to like $80. Since I didn't need a remote at the time, it was worth it to me.

[salsbst]

I received a couple of emitters bundled with the IR remote that I bought (Philips MCE Remote). They each have a little red IR emitter on one end and a stereo miniplug on the other. I think you can buy something like them as a standalone product from Xantech.

To use more than one such emitter with the USB-UIRT you need a splitter or splitter/amplifier. With only two devices a splitter sufficed for me.

Bad news is that the USB-UIRT has no means of distinguishing between the two and would thus send the same signal to both of your cable boxes.

To make matters worse, I don't believe the USB-UIRT drivers support two USB-UIRTs... at least not in the way that would allow each to be targetted individually by Girder or SageTV.


eggs.... SageTV doesn't have any mechanism to poll a STB for its current channel.

[TunaBoo]

So how do I control 2 cable or sat. boxes?

Any ideas? Or am I stuck at 1 tuner forever?

[glbrown]

On stbs that you can change the remote address or mixed types of stbs, the uirt will send the signals and the appropriate box will receive and use them. The other box will ignore signals not meant for it.

I run 2 dish receivers with one uirt and have no problems.