Holding a button doesn't work good (1 Viewer)

[Stepko]

Hi,

first of all I want to thank you for the IRSS, keep up the good work! I use it for a year now, and it almost works perfektly in my setup. I use IRSS with the MCE remote and MCE receiver to control MP and my yamaha av-receiver.

But the control of the volume on the av-receiver doesn't work good. When I press a vol button on the mce remote, IRSS sends the correct command to the receiver. But when I hold the button the repeated commands seem to be wrong/corrupted. The receiver ignors the repeated commands or changes the volume very irregular. An example: When I press the "vol-" button and hold it, in the first 5 seconds the volume is reduced by 2 db and in the next 5 seconds by 20 db. When I just tab the button everything works fine.

I think the original yamaha remote uses different ir codes for the first key press and when a button is held - contrary to IRSS. IRSS seems to repeat the whole command (the code for the first keypress and the code for holding the button) and because of this, the receiver react in a strange way to the ir commands.

• Am I right with my guess, that IRSS repeats the whole command when a button is pressed and held?
• Are there any options that I can play with to adjust the behavior of the blaster (with the MCE transreceiver)?
• I there any change that IRSS can send a different ir code when a button is held?
• Is there anything else I can do to get a better result?

Thanks for your answers and a happy new year!
Stepko

 

[MJGraf]

This is funny!

31st of December seems to be the day when people reconfigure their MediaPortal installations. I did exactly what you did today and ran into exactly the same problem: MCE Remote, MCE Receiver, latest IRSS, Yamaha av-receiver and the volume-up, volume-down-keys being much to slow. After having done some research on it today, I think you described the problem (different and probably shorter repeat code) absolutely correct.

If anyone has a solution for this, please let us know!

Happy New Year (in a couple of hours)!
Michael

 

[DreadFury]

try setting the repeat rate to match your keyboard. (in the IR server settings)

 

[Stepko]

AW: Re: Holding a button doesn't work good

Hope you all have a good year 2010!!

try setting the repeat rate to match your keyboard. (in the IR server settings)

Tried to use the systems keyboard rate settings (Keyboard input in irss is disabled). The result is even worse than before, the av receiver still reatcs very slow and irregular, but irss keeps sending the ir commands for a few seconds after I released the button on the mce remote.

I tried different values for "Button held delay". I get the best results when I set the value to something between 280 and 300 ms (with my yamaha rx-v363). But it is still far away from being a good result and very bad comapred to the original remote.

Anything else we can do?


Stepko

 

[GazpachoKing]

I was having this problem with my receiver (philips hts3450) as well. Through many attempts to properly learn the volume up and down codes, it seems the original remote alternates between 2 codes when you press a volume button repeatedly. I'm not exactly sure how a held button is transmitted. I played with the settings for a long time, but couldn't find any settings that worked reliably enough to stop using the original remote. My IR blaster cable broke a while ago, so I stopped worrying about it, but recently I got a couple new ones, so I suspect I'm going to be running in to this problem again. I'll post my results if I get anything working better this time. I'm also annoyed by the lack of discrete codes for this receiver, (at least I haven't found any,) and I've been thinking of upgrading my surround sound system anyway, so I might end up doing that sooner, so I can have complete control from my computer.

EDIT: After reading an article on how remote codes work, I recognized what was happening and found an OK solution to my problem. Each press on the remote also sends out a parity bit, which alternates on successive presses. What I did was learn all my codes from even presses on the remote, and learn 1 code (that doesn't actually do anything) with an odd press. Then I run a macro with the button press I want, followed by a blank press. This keeps the parity alternating and the reciever responding as it should. Now I seem to be running into a different problem, when translator is set to blast an IR command for any given button press, IR server no longer reliably receives that button press. I have verified this in the debug client. When I press vol+ on my mce remote, and no actions are mapped to it in translator, all presses show up as expected in debug client. But when vol+ is set to blast to my HTS, I get unreliable results, i.e. First vol+ press, nothing happens, 2nd press, 2 vol+ blasts sent to my HTS. This also happens on mixed buttons i.e. vol+ pressed, nothing blasted, vol- pressed, vol+ then vol- sent to HTS. Is there somewhere I can get the source in order to debug this problem?
EDIT: I alleviated the above problem by having translator run a program (irblast.exe) instead of sending the signals itself, now there are no more repeats and stuck buttons.

 

[Stepko]

AW: Holding a button doesn't work good

I downloaded the irss source code and played around with it for a while
The problem is that irss just repeats the whole command while the original remotes uses another code when a button is held. I tested all remotes I have (thoshiba, kenwood, yamaha and loewe) and all except the loewe remote uses another code when a button is held - and all of them have exactly the same held-code!

This brings me to a question for the devs of irss (simone?): Is there a chance to edit irss that it uses a different code when a button is held? I think I could do the changes for the mce receiver. But there are some huge changes needed, e.g. the mce plugin must send continous messages to the server while a button is held, and not only every 250ms. And of course it's possible that these changes breaks other plugins, I don't know how other plugins handle this...

Stepko

 

[Clinton]

Unless you come up with a solution that does not involve Translator, you will have another issue to contend with. The round-trip interprocess communication from IrServer to Translator and back is subject to variable delay, which would play havoc with the 'user experience'. (This is less of an issue with single button presses or slow repeats.)