External Cable Box + External Tuner not working

[Jonc]

Hi All,

I'm having some trouble configuring BeyondTV to allow it to change channels on my set-top cable box (Shaw - Motorola DCT-2500 Series). I'm at the point of configuring the external tuner and the BeyondTV wizard basically says "Point your external tuning device at your cable box and press enter", I'm not quite fully understanding what I need to actually do here. I've got a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250 with an IR sensor that is plugged into the back of the computer on the PCI card itself. I've tried pointing the actual sensor at the cable box and also separately the remote control and then I click "Run Test" but nothing happens. Previous to this step I've tried selecting all the Motorola's listed from the drop-down box in the "Select Set-top Box Model" screen and also tried selecting 'Unlisted Device" but then it comes up with "There was a problem communicating with the IR device, try disconnecting and reconnecting it", done that too and nothing helps.

So I'm not quite sure how to proceed from here? Am I missing a piece of hardware, is "IR Blaster" the IR sensor that is bundled with the WinTV PVR-250?

I have everything else working and if I bypass the cablebox I can change channels in BeyondTV without a problem.

Any guidance would be appreciated. Thanks.

My Setup:
AMD Sempron 2500
768MB Ram
120GB HD
GeforceMX-4000
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 250
Shaw Cable Box / Motorola DCT-2500 Series.

[myktek]

the IR blaster might have came with your TV tuner card, it should have two sides, one for the remote and one side to send the signal to the set top box. You will have to program the IR blaster through Hauppauge's software and then during the Beyond TV setup wizard, you choose the option for Hauppauge as your external tuning device.

[ijourneaux]

If I remember correctly, the PVR-250 doesn't include a blaster (ir emitter not the receiver included with the PVR-250) required to change the channel on a cable box. There are options for changing the channel. I used a USB based IR blaster system (I can't remeber the name) but there are several.

The other option would be to add a PVR-150 that includes the IR blaster. Then you can use both the PVR-150 and PVR-250 to tune channels and the IR Blaster on the PVR-150 to change the channel on the cabel box.