[Balthazar]

I have a 46" Phillips HDTV connected to my Acer Aspire Revo running XBMC Live. I had been controlling XBMC with both a wireless mouse/keyboard combo and a cheap MCE remote. The setup works great, except the remote will occasionally make the TV turn off and right back on. I have experimented and can reproduce this regularly. I won't use the remote for days and the TV won't power cycle. As soon as I break out the remote the power cycle issue comes back instantly.

I recently bought a Harmony 620 to replace the remotes for the TV, Receiver and MCE Remote. I thought the problem had resolved itself because the first two days I used the Harmony I didn't have any issues. Suddenly it started doing the power cycle thing today. It seems that short bursts from the remote (quickly pushing the button) will not power cycle the TV, but holding down the button (like when scrolling down long lists) will do it consistently.

Has anyone experienced something similar and if so how did you resolve it?

[Balthazar]

I have a 46" Phillips HDTV connected to my Acer Aspire Revo running XBMC Live. I had been controlling XBMC with both a wireless mouse/keyboard combo and a cheap MCE remote. The setup works great, except the remote will occasionally make the TV turn off and right back on. I have experimented and can reproduce this regularly. I won't use the remote for days and the TV won't power cycle. As soon as I break out the remote the power cycle issue comes back instantly.

I recently bought a Harmony 620 to replace the remotes for the TV, Receiver and MCE Remote. I thought the problem had resolved itself because the first two days I used the Harmony I didn't have any issues. Suddenly it started doing the power cycle thing today. It seems that short bursts from the remote (quickly pushing the button) will not power cycle the TV, but holding down the button (like when scrolling down long lists) will do it consistently.

Has anyone experienced something similar and if so how did you resolve it?

I may have solved this. It seems my wife was having some trouble with the TV earlier in the day and started pushing buttons at random to fix it. Surprisingly that didn't work. The Harmony remote was set to Device=TV, so every time we pushed a button I think it was sending a signal to the TV instead of the HTPC. Powered everything down and reset the remote, everything seems to be working fine.

I still don't know what was causing the initial problem, but I guess the IR signals for the TV and HTPC are close enough to cause interference. Hope this helps someone down the road.

[Balthazar]

So this problem wasn't solved after all. It still crops up occasionally. It will go for a couple of weeks before starting up again. I am willing to buy a different IR dongle and program the Harmony a a non-mce remote to see if that helps, but almost all of the IR dongles recommended on here are some form of RC16 remote dongles. I am curious if anyone has any experience with using non mce IR dongles. Any suggestions would be welcomed.

[coolasice]

So this problem wasn't solved after all. It still crops up occasionally. It will go for a couple of weeks before starting up again. I am willing to buy a different IR dongle and program the Harmony a a non-mce remote to see if that helps, but almost all of the IR dongles recommended on here are some form of RC16 remote dongles. I am curious if anyone has any experience with using non mce IR dongles. Any suggestions would be welcomed.

ever solve the problem? I have the same issues....

[Balthazar]

I actually did, thanks to a dude on here called eskro and a great little device called Flirc.

Flirc is a little USB dongle that plugs into your HTPC. It allows you to map any keypress from any remote to the device. Then it just sends the signal to the HTPC. It really sounds too good to be true, but it works!

So what I had to do was set up my Harmony as a Plex remote, assign all of the buttons to a keyboard command through the Flirc GUI, and now I have more functionality than ever before on the remote, AND the fricking TV hasn't powercycled once since I started using it. The key is to use a non MCE remote. I finally got to take the electrical tape off of my TV IR sensors!

The little dongle costs about $25, and you don't even have to use any fancy remote. If you have some old remote laying around you can program it to work, as long as it doesn't interfere with your TV. If you go this route I will be more than happy to help you get it set-up if you have any issues, although it is pretty self explainatory. It seriously saved may sanity, as I'm sure you can relate to.

[eskro]

FTW Balthazar!!

[Balthazar]

FTW Balthazar!!

My Man!

[eskro]

just glad you sorted it out!