Sony Tv Remote Control

Home theatre PCs are a cool way to sneak a PC into the living room. And with the right case, an HTPC can blend right in with the rest of your A/V gear. Wireless keyboards and mice make it possible to drive a PC using traditional methods, but once a PC has made a move into your entertainment center, it's handy to be able to drive it using the same tool you use for the rest of your gear: a universal remote.

Many PC motherboards have pinouts for an IR transceiver, but few if any cases have a front panel IR accommodation, and IRda was never really intended for use as a remote IR receiver. A Canadian outfit called Homelectronics has a $20 answer to this problem called the Ira, an IR receiver on a four-foot cable that connects via a standard nine-pin serial port and allows you to drive your PC with just about any IR remote you wish (and so much for legacy serial port removal).

We took Ira for a spin, and while we liked what we found, getting your remote to work with it requires a fair amount of hand tuning. A number of apps can make the programming process pretty painless, and if you're willing to put in the time, you can use any of your living room remotes to make your PC do your bidding.

Before we get any further, you may be wondering, "Why not just get an ATI Remote Wonder or a remote/IR receiver package like StreamZap?" While both of these options will accomplish the same thing as Ira, the ATI Remote Wonder uses RF signaling, so it can't drive any other A/V components. In the case of the StreamZap, you get an integrated hardware/software package, but it's yet another remote to add to the pile of remotes already littering your entertainment center, and it can't drive anything other than your PC. With Ira and your existing remotes, you can add a PC to the components you drive with your existing remote hardware, and it's cheaper than either of those other two options.

Installing Ira couldn't be any easier: just connect to a serial port and you're done. Homelectronics has a diagnostic app that can verify if Windows can receive IR messages from Ira. Once you've confirmed that you're getting IR commands from any of your remotes, you're ready to install an IR app to be able to drive Windows. Ira doesn't arrive with any software, but several apps exist, some of which are freeware to complete your IR package.

Here are the apps that Homelectronics lists on its site that work with Ira:

App Price Girder Freeware (for personal use) IRAssistant Freeware (for personal use) LIRC (Linux only) Freeware IR PC Freeware PC Remote Control Shareware (USD $19.00) PC Remote Selector Shareware (20 Euros) uICE Shareware (USD $20.00)

We tested using Girder, because it's free (it's actually "PBS-ware," since they ask for donations if you find the software useful) and because it's the most feature-complete of the apps we briefly tested.. Ira has two small LEDs on it, one red, the other green. The red LED indicates that an app tried to initialize the device but failed, whereas the green LED indicates that Ira is up and running, and ready to go to work.

Girder's initial setup is not quite as straightforward as it could be. You first have to choose a plugin based on which IR interface/device you're going to use. Girder includes a built-in plugin for Ira, and you must select the COM port with Ira attached (that will receive IR commands). Once that's completed, you need to enable Girder's overall operations, and you're pretty much ready to start programming. Quite a community has been built up around Girder, and there's a programming API as well as Web pages to download pre-built profiles for driving specific apps like PowerDVD, MusicMatch, and Windows Media Player among others.

Using several different remotes including a basic Sony universal remote, a Toshiba remote for an SD-1200 DVD player, and a Creative Extigy remote, we programmed several different Girder configurations for driving Media Player and PowerDVD. Girder basically emulates keyboard input and we generally found it easy to program. You can program it to emulate the mouse as well, which works, but we stuck mainly to keyboard and app-launch commands. Girder can also "capture" keyboard actions and resulting Windows messages, and then saves them to be invoked later when a remote button is pushed.

At its basic level, Girder allowed us to have nearly all of PowerDVD's main functions mapped onto the Toshiba remote within about fifteen minutes. And the Ira device worked flawlessly with Girder. The only tweaking we had to do for Girder setup was to use its "anti-repeat" function, which ignores repeated commands that occur when a button is held and pushed. For volume controls, you want the have the signal repeat, but for transport controls (play/pause/stop/etc.) you only want to issue the command once. The anti-repeat feature allows you to set a time value in milliseconds as to how long to ignore subsequent repeated commands after the first command is received. Using a value of 250ms worked fine to alleviate the problem.

For a DIY home theatre project, Ira is a useful, inexpensive add-on component that helps further integrate a home theatre PC in your component rack. You'll probably still want a wireless keyboard and mouse to completely control Windows, but Ira can get a lot of functionality into your hands using your existing remotes, and it's cheaper than any other solution out there. Just be prepared to fine-tune the combination of Ira and an IR programming app to dial in your settings.

Product Fact File

Ira IR Remote Receiver Rating: 8/10 stars Price: $20 Homelectronics

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in ExtremeTech.

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