Firefly Remote ">>| " button launches ATI Catalyst Media Center!

[DSperber]

Interesting! Background first, and then the symptom.

I have an ATI TV Wonder 650 PCI card, which is supported not by the long-existing ATI Multimedia Center 9.xx but rather by a brand new Catalyst Media Center 1.0. Supposed to be very PVR-like but it's got many bugs in its initial version (yet to be fixed by ATI, even though the product's been out for quite a while now).

Anyway, I got a "free" TV Wonder Plus remote from ATI with the card, just like I got a free Firefly PC Remote from Snapstream when I bought BTV. I thought I could install both and have no problem (using either remote when I had the appropriate TV product active), but that doesn't seem to have worked out too well.

First, the TV-related buttons on the ATI remote don't seem to work at all. The Windows-related buttons work fine, but ZERO of the TV-related buttons work. I attribute this to either of two reasons: (1) ATI screwed up and did not program the new Catalyst Media Center to respond to the TV Wonder Plus remote commands, meaning the remote is only usable with ATI Multimedia Center, or (2) there is some conflict with Firefly software installed on the same machine.

I did try this first ending Firefly before starting the ATI remote software, but that didn't make a difference. In fact, nothing I tried would make those TV buttons work. So I finally gave up, and opened a ticket on the ATI support site.


Now for the Firefly symptom. For some reason, the Firefly remote no longer worked at all. Batteries good, red LED flashing at the top when I press keys, but no effect. Yes... the Firefly was running, it just wasn't responding.

In desperation I decided to uninstall both ATI Remote Wonder Plus software as well as Firefly software, and then reinstall the Firefly software.

Magically, this brought things back to life! This also sort of reinforces my thought that there is some subtle conflict between the software for the two remotes.

Anyway, Firefly is now back to normal. Case closed.

But... I was playing around with the PAUSE button, thinking that I could use it as a "frame advance" for watching still-action frames (as I can do with my real Motorola DCH-3416 DVR from the cable company). Turns out you can't... BTV doesn't seem to support that functionality.

Well in my experimenting I had rewound a bit and then pressed PLAY, and PAUSE, and PAUSE, etc., and only accomlished a "toggle" between pause state and play state. Oh well.

But then I pushed the ">>|" button thinking it might put me back to "live TV" (i.e. forward-space to the end of the recorded buffer, returning to "live"). It may have done that, but I don't know. Not being sure, I pressed ">>|" a second time just to see what happened.

And what then happened? CATALYST MEDIA CENTER GOT LAUNCHED!!!

Bizarre. Maybe pressing ">>|" unnecessarily (since there was no more buffer to fast forward through, and I wasn't watching a recording but rather live TV) caused the software to fall into the "launch application" logic, and something about my environment caused it to pick Catalyst Media Center to launch.

Can't say what is really going on. Don't know if some other program would be launched from the same repeated use of the ">>|" button if I didn't have Catalyst Media Center installed, or if Catalyst Media Center in particular is for some reason THE program launched by repeated use of the ">>| button.

Interesting.

[soham]

Some of the weirdness that you're seeing is probably caused by the fact that the Firefly remote and the ATI remote share some common code in the driver. Unfortunately, that code does not seem to be handling multiple instances too well.

One thing, that may help you, is hitting F1 with a keyboard on any of the BTV screens. That should pull up a graphic that tells you what all of the Firefly buttons do.

Are you able to reproduce the Catalyst Media Center launch? I have no explanation for that one.