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INFO Button in the Ortek MCE Protocol

 
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CyberSimian



Joined: 24 Oct 2013
Posts: 75
Location: Southampton, UK
                    
PostPosted: Sun Nov 24, 2013 8:42 am    Post subject: INFO Button in the Ortek MCE Protocol Reply with quote
I have had a long-standing problem with the Microsoft RC6 MCE protocol used by my Dell HTPC, so I thought that I would try a remote that used the Ortek MCE protocol. I purchased the Hama version of the Ortek:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hama-00052451-MCE-Remote-Control/dp/B000X1EL4W/

After stumbling around in the dark for several days, I eventually managed to create an RMDU file for my Xsight Colour remote, based on the file for the Ortek remote from eferz:

http://ww.hifi-remote.com/forums/dload.php?action=file&file_id=10469

Although it does work as intended, there are several differences from the RC6 MCE protocol. For me, the show-stopper is the action of the INFO button, which in the Ortek MCE protocol becomes a right mouse click (both the Hama remote and the Xsight Colour do this).

This has been discussed several times in the XBMC forums, but the solution there seems to be XBMC specific (I think that XBMC must have a mapping layer to map RC codes to actions).

Has anyone found a solution or work-around that works with Windows Media Center? I want the INFO button to produce the same result as an RC6 MCE remote. Thanks.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK
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mdavej
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Joined: 08 Oct 2003
Posts: 4501

                    
PostPosted: Sat Apr 12, 2014 9:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Just wanted to update with my little MCE vs. Ortek adventure. While MCE does indeed have the correct Info and Play button behavior, I simply can't find an MCE dongle that works reliably. I bought a couple in the past month or so, and both (Rosewill and Lenovo) fail to wake my PC about 20% of the time, and fail to work at all after resuming from sleep about 10% of the time. My Ortek was alway 100% reliable on that front. So, sadly, I had to go back to Ortek. MCE dongles (at least the one's I tried) simply don't work well with sleep/resume on my PC on any USB port.

I did do something interesting on the Ortek though. I made my own Discrete On function. Turns out any command on the Ortek will wake, but those commands also do something else you may not want to do. Power is a toggle, so that could make it sleep when you don't intend to. So what I did was pick an unused OBC, (1 in my case), which the dongle responds to and wakes the PC, but doesn't perform any other function. Works very well.
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CyberSimian



Joined: 24 Oct 2013
Posts: 75
Location: Southampton, UK
                    
PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 5:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
mdavej wrote:
I simply can't find an MCE dongle that works reliably. I bought a couple in the past month or so, and both (Rosewill and Lenovo) fail to wake my PC about 20% of the time, and fail to work at all after resuming from sleep about 10% of the time.

My HTPC is a Dell XPS420 that was sold as an HTPC, complete with Dell-branded remote control and IR receiver. Slight variants of the remote control have been sold under the Philips and Origenae brand names, and the IR receiver is still advertised on a German web site as a Philips unit.

You might have expected that these units would all work reliably, but this is not the case. In the five years that I have been using it, I also have suffered from the IR receiver becoming an "unrecognised USB device" on wake from sleep or hibernation. I am currently using hibernation, and although this problem still occurs, it seems to be less frequent than with sleep. In my case, unplugging and replugging allows the IR receiver to be recognised (so no reboot necessary).

I did purchase an HP IR receiver from an Ebay seller, but "sethjvm" in the thread below states that there are variants of this receiver, and some also suffer from the "unrecognised USB device" problem:

http://www.hifi-remote.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15192

The one that I purchased seems to be one of the worst! (Sigh). I bought it as a spare, so have not actually used it (other than verifying that it does work).

mdavej wrote:
I did do something interesting on the Ortek though. I made my own Discrete On function.

The problem with the INFO button is still the show-stopper for me, but it did occur to me that the Ortek might support the INFO function in its driver, but simply not assign that function to any button on the remote. In your experiments did you by any chance try every possible button code to see if there are any functions that are supported but which don't have buttons on the the Ortek remote control?

-- from CyberSimian in the UK
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mdavej
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 13, 2014 11:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Thanks for the info. It's puzzling that Ortek has no problem working with sleep/wake, yet nobody making an MCE dongle can get it right.
CyberSimian wrote:
The problem with the INFO button is still the show-stopper for me, but it did occur to me that the Ortek might support the INFO function in its driver, but simply not assign that function to any button on the remote. In your experiments did you by any chance try every possible button code to see if there are any functions that are supported but which don't have buttons on the the Ortek remote control?
Yes, I did try every possible code (there are only 64, 50 of which already do something). But none of those additional codes did anything at all. I was hoping to find some alpha commands, but no such luck.

For a while I ran both the Ortek (solely for the wake function) and MCE for everything else. But I couldn't work around the unrecognized device problem, so ended up unplugging it for good.
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CyberSimian



Joined: 24 Oct 2013
Posts: 75
Location: Southampton, UK
                    
PostPosted: Mon Apr 14, 2014 4:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
mdavej wrote:
Yes, I did try every possible code (there are only 64, 50 of which already do something). But none of those additional codes did anything at all. I was hoping to find some alpha commands, but no such luck.

Sad Sad Sad

-- from CyberSimian in the UK
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