Hello-

I have just installed mythtv with a PVR250. Everything has worked well so far with just a few tweaks as advised in this forum. I have a Dish Network receiver, so I followed the instructions at this site to create an IR blaster:

http://losdos.dyndns.org:8080/public/my ... _LIRC.html

This worked great except for one problem - the latency in changing channels may be too long for the users of this system to bear (my wife). Also, when sending channel up - channel down, mythtv sends the entire channel change rather than just the one signal (i know why this happens, it's just the way it is with this particular setup).

Anyway, a few solutions I have been pondering:
1. buy a universal remote, program it for the receiver and for myth tv, and not use the ir blaster at all
2. set up my second instance of lirc to basically proxy all remote commands, capturing input and sending back output to the receiver. this would elimate mythtv from having to run the change channel script.

The problem with both of these solutions is that mythtv will not change the channel when a timer for a recording is fired. So basically what I want to do is only run the script for changing a channel when a recording is started.

Is this possible?

Thanks!

Noty sure if it is all or just part of your problem, but I think you get ~ 2 sec delay in changing channels no matter what you do as that is the lag in the MythTV buffer.

In other words, if you are watching live TV on your MythTV box, and you change channel on your DishTV box with it's own remote, do you get a delay before the new channel comes onto your MythTV display? That delay is unavoidable no matter what you do with your blaster.

Cheers,
JohnO

The short delay to fill the MythTV buffer would be fine.

If I had cable, the delay would be fine. But what happens is that it takes a few seconds for myth to change channels, and then it runs the channel change script sending the IR to the satellite box. Then this takes an additional 2 seconds.

I was hoping that I could control the satellite and the mythtv simultaneously, meaning I would not have mythtv send IR to the satellite. I can do that with a universal remote, but I still want myth to change channels when recordings are set up.

It looks like this will not be possible, unless the source is modified. I actually tried it, but had some undefined symbol errors after compiling, so I'm not quite there yet.

Kevin

As a Dish customer with MythTV myself, I know what you're talking about. What I found interesting was the comment in the documentation about some DirecTV receivers having a serial port on the back of them, so the computer could control them directly.

I'd imagine this type of channel change command (via serial cable) would be nearly instantaneous?

I took apart my Dish 301 receiver the other day, and noticed that on the top of the circuit board, there are a group of solder points marked "serial". Has anyone ever tried soldering wires to these points and connecting them to a 9-pin serial port to see if it would actually be functional?

well if the sat boxes are like cable boxes just having the serial port there doesn't guarantee anything, as it still has to be enabled in the software which many cable companies won't do.

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