JP1 Remotes

johnsfine · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2004 2:57 pm Post subject: Mintek DVD

I recently bought a Mintek battery powered DVD player. I want to thank "gfmccourtie" for posting the upgrade for it, because my Mintek has a really rotten remote (difficult buttons and a weak signal) so less than a third of the signals were captured correctly by my 15-1994 on the first pass through (though I got the double blink every time and didn't know they were bad learns til later).

Every button except CLEAR that was on my remote was in that upgrade and every one of those that learned well matched the OBC, so I skipped the idea of learning the 2/3 of the signals that had failed and I just copied them all from that upgrade.

That upgrade also has a bunch of functions my remote doesn't have. My DVD has physical switches, not remote control, for power and volume, plus there are a few commands in that upgrade whose meaning I can hardly guess at (this is the first time I've tried to operate a DVD player).

The documentation is much lower quality than the remote, so I mostly have no clue what the buttons on the remote do. Most commands respond only in certain situations and then with a fairly long, fairly random delay, so you're left to guess whether you did something or whether what happened was going to anyway. So I'm not close to ready to trying the extra functions from that upgrade, much less the unused OBCs.

So if you have any Mintek specific advice, or know a good "DVD operation for dummies" site, please tell me.

For example, it has a "time search" button. I assume the intent is to jump to a specific point in the contents (which I'd like to do), but I can't figure out what you press after time search to actually control that. All I've managed to do so far is jump to the start of a "title", which can be done more easily with the title button and which is pretty useless because entered that way it goes through a long start up during which there is no control at all (no fast forward, no stop, etc.) and the DVDs I have only have one real title anyway. The other "titles" are bad back doors into the main menu picks.

The Robman · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2004 3:06 pm Post subject:

What's the model number of your player John? And try EFC 055 (OBC 010) for CLEAR.

As far as gaps are concerned, there aren't too many with this upgrade. The only one for OBCs 0 thru 31 is 16.

There's a huge gap before the next command which is OBC 66 and the highest OBC is 95, which leads me to believe that bit2 needs to always be 0. In which case the valid OBCs are 00 - 31 and 64 - 95 (unless there are also some commands with OBCs 128 and up, which I doubt).

I can't help you with the time search function as I've never used it. If I could find the manual online I might be able to interpret it for you.
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Rob
www.hifi-remote.com
Please don't PM me with remote questions, post them in the forums so all the experts can help!

johnsfine · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2004 3:29 pm Post subject:

I don't have the model number handy (I'll post later). I wasn't looking for the OBC for CLEAR. It was one of the few that learned right on first try. I think the OBC was 64 (I'll check later). What I wondered about CLEAR is what it does. I don't recall if the manual told anything about it. Certainly nothing I understood.

The Robman · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2004 3:32 pm Post subject:

I looked up the EFC I found in that upgrade and it's labelled "RETURN", so this is evidently the button that sends you back to the previous on-screen menu that you were looking at. When there's a seperate CLEAR button in cases like this, it usually just clears out any data that you might have entered on the screen (and is therefore not terribly useful). For example, if you were to figure out how to enter the time search numbers, before you press OK, you could press CLEAR to blank them out.
_________________
Rob
www.hifi-remote.com
Please don't PM me with remote questions, post them in the forums so all the experts can help!

johnsfine · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2004 7:19 pm Post subject:

The Robman · Posted: Tue Jul 06, 2004 8:56 pm Post subject:

Here's some extra info that may, or may not, be useful to you. Mintek have a web site at http://www.mintekdigital.com I didn't find a manual there for the MDP-1020 but there is one for the MDP-5860 which has the TIME SEARCH function explained somewhat clearly on page 38.

The Mintek web site is a little goofy. They have menu items across the top of the site that drop down to reveal more options as you pass your mouse over them, but the weird part is that the new optins go behind the main logo image in the center of the page, so you can't read them. The way to get around this is to select the "Partners" link on the right, which takes you to a page without the big logo image, from here you will be able to use the menu links.

There's also a forum for Mintek players over at nerd.out.com and at least one C/S rep from Mintek, a guy named James, seems to hang out there.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that the MDP-1020 can be made region free, but it doesn't sound like that's something that you will miss too much! Smile

_________________
Rob
www.hifi-remote.com
Please don't PM me with remote questions, post them in the forums so all the experts can help!