Best Infrared Receiver for Harmony Remote (1 Viewer)

armyofme

Portal Pro
January 21, 2006
121
3
York
Home Country
United Kingdom United Kingdom
I've recently upgraded my pc and I'm looking for a solution to my remote control problem. My previous pc had an inbuilt Imon receiver and I programmed my Harmony 515 to work with this fairly well - needed a bit of tweaking in terms of key delays and never got it perfect, partcularly bad when trying to fast forward etc.

Anyhow with my new pc I need an infrared receiver to go with my Harmony remote. I bought a cheap HID remote and receiver from Ebay from Hong Kong which to be fair works really quite well. My plan was that I could use my Harmony to copy the remote's signals. Unfortunatley despite lots of experimenting with key delays in the Harmony software I cannot get it to behave well - that is, if I want to fast forward a program, the remote sends the signals either too fast or too slow.

Anyway getting to the point of this post...what infrared receivers do other people use with Harmony remotes? How do you find the key delays? Is fast forwarding work well?

Thanks in advance for any advice.
 

Reg

Portal Pro
November 22, 2008
167
26
Christchurch
Home Country
New Zealand New Zealand
I've recently upgraded my pc and I'm looking for a solution to my remote control problem. My previous pc had an inbuilt Imon receiver and I programmed my Harmony 515 to work with this fairly well - needed a bit of tweaking in terms of key delays and never got it perfect, partcularly bad when trying to fast forward etc.

Anyhow with my new pc I need an infrared receiver to go with my Harmony remote. I bought a cheap HID remote and receiver from Ebay from Hong Kong which to be fair works really quite well. My plan was that I could use my Harmony to copy the remote's signals. Unfortunatley despite lots of experimenting with key delays in the Harmony software I cannot get it to behave well - that is, if I want to fast forward a program, the remote sends the signals either too fast or too slow.

Anyway getting to the point of this post...what infrared receivers do other people use with Harmony remotes? How do you find the key delays? Is fast forwarding work well?

Thanks in advance for any advice.


I have just got a Harmony 515 and it seems to be working ok with the IR that came with the standard MCE remote. Getting the 515 remote programmed exactly the way I want is however proving something of a challenge. Did you eventually get yours all sorted ?:D
 

nfox

Portal Pro
August 22, 2006
163
24
London
Home Country
United Kingdom United Kingdom
I have a Harmony 555 which I use with an MCE receiver (I also have the MCE keyboard). I set up the remote to emulate an MCE remote, and tweaked a few key mappings in MP. It all works fine - although I rarely use FF or RW, I usually use the skip steps.
 

Reg

Portal Pro
November 22, 2008
167
26
Christchurch
Home Country
New Zealand New Zealand
I have a Harmony 555 which I use with an MCE receiver (I also have the MCE keyboard). I set up the remote to emulate an MCE remote, and tweaked a few key mappings in MP. It all works fine - although I rarely use FF or RW, I usually use the skip steps.

Ok so what steps do you take to make it emulate and MCE remote?:D
 

nfox

Portal Pro
August 22, 2006
163
24
London
Home Country
United Kingdom United Kingdom
I have a Harmony 555 which I use with an MCE receiver (I also have the MCE keyboard). I set up the remote to emulate an MCE remote, and tweaked a few key mappings in MP. It all works fine - although I rarely use FF or RW, I usually use the skip steps.

Ok so what steps do you take to make it emulate and MCE remote?:D


A good question - it's a couple of years since I first set this I set it up, and I honestly can't remember what tweaks I made. All I can remember is that there were very few.

Looking at my current Harmony configuration, I have set up a device called "Media Center PC" which is controlled by a "Microsoft Remote Control 1039".
The button assignments are pretty close to the default. The delays (speed settings) I have are:
Power On Delay = 5000 (this is to take account of the resume from standby time, but doesn't really work)
Inter-key Delay = 0
Input Delay = 0
Inter-Device Delay = 500
I think these are mostly the default settings.

In MP Configuration -> Remote, I have checked the option to "Use Microsoft MCE remote or keyboad" and made a couple of changes to make sure the "Skip" and "Replay" commands are mapped to the "Skip Back" and "Skip Forward" (|<< and >>|) buttons on the remote, rather than using the "Left" and "Right" buttons. I have attched the modified input device mappings file, just in case that helps (on an XP machine this should go into C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\InputDeviceMappings - not sure about Vista/7).

As I mentioned I've never had a problem with FF or RW, but rarely use them. If I do use them there is no need to hold down the buttons, so repeat delays etc don't come into it. For Skip and Replay I added a couple of extra Skip Steps in MP configuration (at 120 and 240 seconds), which allows me to very quickly jump over ad breaks etc (in the UK I have found that a lot of ad breaks are 4 minutes in total, so it has been particularly useful to have a 240 second skip step).

Hope this helps - if you want any more info just ask.
 

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