Anyone played with Eventghost?

[Webbo]

I am looking at replacing my red-eye serial with a USBUIRT due to reliability issues with my Pace 4001 cable box.

I am also looking at using the USBUIRT as a receiver for an infra-red remote. The traditional response seems to be Girder which looks like it is total overkill for what is required.

I've had a brief look at EventGhost (http://www.eventghost.org) which would seem to do everything that is required and supports the USBUIRT natively.

Has anyone had a play with this and if so, what is stability and responsivness like?

[StephaneM]

I don't know anything about eventghost, but as you will spend money on a USB UIRT, I thought you would hear my advice anyway.

IF you need only to drive ONE set top box, you could maybe bought a PVR 150 (retail), I think it will cost you the same amount of money. By replacing one of your 250 by a 150, you'll have the benefits of having the IR Blaster and receiver.

In my case, the IR blaster of the 150 is really great: good length of the cable (but it is very thing so do take great care of it) and it never missed a channel change (when there is one it is always the set top box that is gone mad not the blaster). Maybe someone else can confirm that this IR blaster can handle a Pace 4001 cable box (I cannot see Pace for supported European Cable box, but many Pace for Satellite box)?

And the IR receiver for the Hauppauge remote works also very well and when you know how to edit the irremote.ini the possibility are endless (and it is much much easy to set up than Girder).

If you have specific requirements about how the Hauppauge remote has to be handled, I'll be glad to give you some tricks about the Irremote.ini / general mapping of the Hauppauge remote buttons.

Regards,
Stéphane.

[Webbo]

Many thanks for your reply Stephane. I'm going for the USBUIRT rather than the PVR-150 route as I am looking at adding an external DVB-T box in addition to my cabale box so I can also recive OTA digital (until BTV supports it natively) and using the dual zone feature of the USBUIRT to control both.

I've had a play with EventGhost and have so far got it working with my Firefly on my link machine to control BTV. It's very easy to set up and very configurable. Theoretically it will also support IR sending so I could also use the FF to turn the TV on, off and tune to the correct channel too or integrate my Harmony remote to control BTV too.

I'm not keen on the Hauppauge remote as the repeat rate seems too slow and for some reason I have great trouble learing it's commands on the harmony.

Basically, lots of toys for me to play with and it's just a case of finding the best configuration.

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by Webbo

I am looking at adding an external DVB-T box in addition to my cabale box so I can also recive OTA digital (until BTV supports it natively) and using the dual zone feature of the USBUIRT to control both.

I personnaly decided to add a DVICO Fusion HDTV USB tuner (because I can't beleive that BTV will not support DVB) rather than using another set top box (it is so more robust to not have two device to assume a task). So this little USB device is fantastic (it even comes with a tiny remote) and I use it with DVB Web Scheduler: this is a web guide, you schedule your recordings and you put them in a BTV folder and voilà (ok you don't have Live TV but for this you can always use another software).

I'm not keen on the Hauppauge remote as the repeat rate seems too slow and for some reason I have great trouble learing it's commands on the harmony.

I'm surprized, my Hauppauge remote works very well with my Harmony remote and don't find the repeat rate horrible (it is slower than Firefly of course because Firefly is not an IR remote, but it is much better than a StreamZap, also the Harmony does change the repeat rate due to how it sends remote command so you couldn't blame only the Hauppauge remote).

Maybe the IR receiver / remote of the 150 is a little better than the one of the 250...

All I can say is that with my setup today, I'm in heaven It is 100% reliable to do what it is supposed to: I choose "Watch TV" on the Harmony, and it powers on the TV, the stereo receiver, change the volume on the PC and BTV, wait for the TV to be warm (a DLP) and change TV inputs, then launch BTV, just 15sec and you're done (of course we do have to take of our dog so as it doesn't cross the IR beam and that is the difficult part !)

Regards,
Stéphane.

[Webbo]

Thanks for all the hints and tips - sounds like you have a dream system!

The main reason I want the DVB-T as an external box with an IR tuner is purely for WAF - I need everything to be in the BTV programme guide / scheduler. Personally, I cannot wait until BTV supports DVB (and for preference channel bonding too).

The USBUIRT is on order from earlier this evening and I've just soldered up a couple of remote emitters (hopefully with compatible IR LEDs!) - I'll let you know how it all pans out!

[StephaneM]

Originally Posted by Webbo

The main reason I want the DVB-T as an external box with an IR tuner is purely for WAF

I managed the WAF with a "DVB activity" on the remote and mapped that to Media Portal for watching DVB and to my surprize it worked ! One day I was out and something was recorded in BTV, and all alone my sweet half managed to watch DVB instead of BTV (and Media Portal is way not intuitive).

That said, I'm the only one scheduling recordings so...

[Webbo]

Very happy with this setup - EventGhost does seem to be a viable alternative to Girder for basic mapping of IR events to keyboard commands - interfaces nativly with the USB-UIRT and very easy to configure and the USB-UIRT is behaving perfectly.

[CollinR]

Event Ghost Rocks!!!

[LanceDrolet]

Originally Posted by CollinR

Event Ghost Rocks!!!

+1 to that.

I've been playing with it for a short time but I'm very impressed so far. I removed the firefly software from my system and started using Event Ghost. It's awesome! Catches all the events from Firefly as an X10 event. From there you can assign them to actions. You can organize, enable and disable event handlers from fired events. (I know, not well explained but it's cool). So, it'll do everything the Firefly software will do plus much more (and no messing with xml files). WOW!

[fmharr]

EventGhost is a great product and it's FREE!

I use it with my ATI Remote Wonder and I have all the buttons reprogrammed (including the TV, DVD, WEB, Hand etc).

It has replaced the ATI software completely.

I have a button assigned to my Opera browser, one to the windows explorer and one assigned to my ABIT mobo monitor software.

Event Ghost ROCKS

It uses Plug-Ins with complete source code written in Python (it has a Python Interpreter engine built in).

http://www.eventghost.org/wiki/Main_Page

Mike

[swanie2000]

Another vote for Event Ghost!

Super easy learning curve, had it doing what I needed in about an hour, as compared to Girder, and HIP, that I never figured out how to use!

Oh Yea, it's FREEEEEEE!

Swanie

[queonda]

I'm going to give it a try tonight (I'm a late adopter). Does anyone have any settings to share? Can you share settings with the program? I have a usb-irt and a harmony remote.

[SmokerMI]

I too think that EG is great however I can't use the alt mce driver. It seems to be the cause of my system locking up very frequently
Since I've gone back to the eHome driver my system hasn't locked up.
I sure wish I could use the alt mce driver