[roark]

The Revo 1600 is awesome, really happy with it.

So far I have it running HD 1080 flawless, killa looks great, sound pass through are great.

Figured out menu clicks.

Figured out local HD access.

Can't figure out remote.

I have the Phillips OVU412000, lsusb lists it.

If I run irw there is no response, EXCEPT if I play a move, pause and wait the 3 mins for the screen to dim, then I can press the remote, IRW will show the response, the screen comes back to full brightness and irw wont show any more commands.

The reciever shows solid red light the whole time, unless it's dimmed as mentioned above.

Any ideas?

[roark]

Did a bit more testing.

I stopped XBMC live and ran irw again.

All commands from the remote show up. Also receiver red light isn't steady on.

I'm a complete noob to linux but seems to me it's XBMC live and not Ubuntu?

[roark]

I stumbled into the answer after I was moving the IR receiver around the steady red light stopped.

Turns out something in my home theatre room is steady emitting an IR signal that I can only guess was keeping the receiver occupied.

[brownstein]

Just wanted to add that I picked up an HP MCE receiver to replace my XBOX dongle, and was having the problem where I would get the steady red light on it and it would become unresponsive to commands.

One of the things I noticed was if I switched inputs on the tv it would appear to break the steady signal and give me control again. It was driving me crazy because I would have to switch back and forth all the time.

The problem appears to be that if you have your screensaver in XBMC set to "Dim" it lowers the backlight of your tv to the point that something in the tv causes interference to the IR signal or, you have your backlight set too low in your tv and the same thing happens.

The solution is to either disable the screensaver or set it to something that will not dim the screen. Or, you can raise the backlight by one or two (in my case, raising the backlight from 6 to 7 was enough to do it) in your tv's settings.

I tested these solutions in my setup and I seemed to be able to reproduce both the problem and the fix multiple times. My tv is a samsung LN46A530 LCD.

I read on other forums that having the energy saving feature of your tv enabled can cause the same thing, I had this disabled in mine so it was not a factor.

edit: just more info, I am using a logitech harmony 520 remote. If you find that the xbmc screensaver kicked in (the Dim one) and you have the steady red light and your remote is unresponsive, try switching devices to the TV (if using a harmony) and bring up the TV's settings menu. On my setup, doing this caused the display to brighten a bit due to the settings menu popping up, this eliminated the interference also so that I could switch back to the XBMC activity and deactivate the screensaver.

[brownstein]

More on the issue, I havent had a chance to fully test it, but after changing the settings above I had no issue until the end credits of a movie, it seems that caused the screen to be dark enough to cause the interference again. I believe bumping the back light up to 10 (max) would be enough but I didnt want to do that so I messed with other settings, turns out that disabling the dynamic contrast got rid of the problem completely (although not fully tested yet as I said).

From my reading online, I believe the issue is that I have my remote set up as a KLS VDR as per the guide on the forums here. Every post I have read online has been a problem with someones PVR so I think it has to do with the frequencies that those components tend to operate on. That might explain the relatively small amount of posts on this subj here is that it takes a fairly specific setup to run into the problem. At least it is documented on here is I am fairly certain I won't be the last person to run into this issue.

before discovering the dynamic contrast trick, I also covered my IR Receiver in electrical tape leaving only a small uncovered area, this worked but only if I moved the receiver furhter away from the tv and even then I had to manipulate the angle that it was facing. This was not a very pretty solution and drastically reduced incidence angle for my remote.

Hope this helps someone.

[brownstein]

I created a HOW TO, should make this fix easier to find.

Link