Posted on by Cody

Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 MCE remote

I recently purchased a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 MCE (media center edition) kit for my mythtv box. Everything was pretty smooth using Knoppmyth R5A30 except the damned remote which refused to work. The remote that comes with this kit is described online as an MCE 2005 remote. It has RC6 printed on the back (I think its made by phillips) and the IR receiver is labeled SMK on the bottom.

I saw that the receiver was picked up by the kernel (dmesg) but the remote wasn’t passing any characters to mythtv. I started lircd and ran ‘irw’ to see what (if any) data was comming in from the remote. Nothing. So then I did a ps aux|grep lirc and realized that lirc wasn’t running. After another restart and the lirc process going away I took a look at the lirc rc script under /etc/init.d/lirc .

To get my lircd working properly I changed the following line in /etc/init.d/lirc :

start-stop-daemon –start –quiet –exec /usr/sbin/lircd — $LIRCD_ARGS \

to:

start-stop-daemon –start –quiet –exec /usr/sbin/lircd \

A simple /etc/init.d/lirc restart did the trick. Now running irw confirmed that the remote was sending data to the system properly. Woopie! More MythTV updates as I continue to get this system working. A proper MAME setup is next.

EDIT: For those of you that have been asking for my lircd.conf file, here it is.

17 Replies to “Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 MCE remote”

  1. Hi Cody

    I have the same remote which came with my Hauppauge

  2. Hi Cody

    I have the same remote, that came with my WinTV-PVR150 MCE. I am running Fedora Core 4 and
    I am having no luck so far. I don’t have a correct /etc/lircd.conf and also my /etc/init.d/lircd file seems
    to be different from yours. Would it be possible for you to send me copies of both of your files so I could
    try them. I followed mostly the instructions in http://wilsonet.com/mythtv, which is based on Fedora.
    I can’t remember everything that I tried with my remote, but I get good TV with what I have and I
    just use my keyboard. It would be nice to be able to use my remote though. Your post is the first that
    I have seen so far on this new remote setup.

    Hoping to hear from you. John

  3. Thanks! This did the trick for the older version of the MCE USB remote as well. I’m running Knoppmyth R5A30.1

    –Chris

  4. I too have the same exact remote. I have had no luck with lircd. I cant even get the kernel to detect my IR receiver when I plug it into the USB port. Can anyone help me out with that? I am running gentoo 2.6.15 and myth works great, just no remote. Thanks for any reoplies

  5. I’ve got a grey remote with a hauppauge pvr 150. I’m not sure of the difference between the mce and other versions but I imagine they’re similar. My problem is when i go to watch recorded video I can’t move to the right (right arrow on keyboard) to select a category of shows. If you have a better lircd.conf I’d be grateful. I’ve tried messing with it and the only thing that works is setting up a daemon to listen for button presses an emulating keystrokes, which is a pretty shitty workaround for my issues. Thanks for reading this (if you did :P) And toodles!!!!

    Nate (aka mythtv over ati media center *woo* i’ve been converted!!!!)

  7. Using the MCE remote are you able to actually use the ir-blaster that comes with it to change channels? cause i have been running into a wall since early january.

    Thank you,

    Nick Sklav

  8. Nick,

    I haven’t tried to use the IR blaster since I’m using plain old cable. I did however read that many people are having the same problems you are. From what I understand you can build an IR blaster to go on your serial port fairly simply.

    http://losdos.dyndns.org:8080/public/mythtv-info/MythTV_DISH_IR_LED_TX_via_Modified_LIRC.html

    In the hardware section of that writeup there’s a simple schematic for building your own. A simple DB9 female connector, 1K ohm resister and the IR LED from your existing MCE ir blaster. I haven’t done it but it looks pretty straight forward.

    If hardware isn’t your thing, you can buy a pre-made IR blaster from http://www.irblaster.info/ that works with mythtv.

  9. I have the same remote that comes with the 150 MCE. I could not get it working until I got your lircd.conf. Thanks a lot!

    For anyone that might be searching for answers for how to get this done:

    I’m using FC5, followed pretty much the guide at wilsonnet.com, including how to get the lircd package
    My setup was missing the USB utils, which was easily fixed with a “yum install usbutils”. Some got placed in /usr/bin and others in /usr/sbin
    Checked that the receiver shows with lsusb, but this can be checked as well with “cat /proc/bus/usb/devices”. I didn’t have problems with this
    Then ran “/sbin/modprobe lirc_mceusb2”
    Then get the lircd.conf from this website with wget and put it in /etc
    Run /usr/bin/lircd -d /dev/lirc0
    This is important because lircd defaults to /dev/lircd and that wasn’t working until I changed to /dev/lirc0, which is also different from what the mythtv.org wiki says for someone that was using Gentoo (the page says /dev/lirc/0)
    then ran irw and it worked 🙂

  10. I have the MCE remote and irw shows it works and I have the .mythtv/lircrc file but I can not get the remote to work with Myth frontend.

    Trampas

  11. Yup, that’s the same as me. The remote is functional in irw and the comp is detecting the USB transceiver no problem, but in mythtv I have nothing. Any ideas?

  12. Steve and Trampas,
    When I first downloaded the lirc.conf file posted here I had to go through the lircrc.conf and rename the commands to match the actions.
    For example, for most of the lircrc.conf files I’ve found on the net it refers to ‘CH+’ where the lirc.conf file here names it ‘ChanUp’ As soon as I edited all those names the remote works great. Well enough for my wife to even use it.

    On a side note while I was setting my myth box up I came across lirc.conf and lircrc.conf files that were configured to use the IR Blaster that comes with the MCE but I can’t relocate it. Anyone know where some of these might be?

  13. Pingback: it all flows together » MythTV Adventures

  15. Hey I had np getting the remote to work under ubuntu but the irblaster part Ive pulled my hair out trying to get working….

  16. Godlike, could you please explain how you got the remote working on ubuntu. It would help me a lot!

    Thanks!
    Maarten

  17. I used this config http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/mceusb/lircd.conf.mceusb I downloaded it into /etc/lirc and included it from lircd,conf. Then I did ps aux | grep lirc and made sure everything related to lirc wasn’t running. Finally I did “sudo /usr/sbin/lircd -d /dev/lirc0” and it worked! irw showed all the buttons hit. This was on Ubuntu Hardy, with a windows media center remote that came with a Hauppauge HVR 1110 – all thats left now is sound.

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