Bizzare and weird ...

[Rich A]

While reading this, the theme from the twilight zone should be playing in your head.

Lately I've encountered a very strange phenomenon. I have a dedicated home theater (a real home theater room) All my electronic equipment is located on the back wall of the theater to the left of the seat riser. When sitting in one of the chairs, all I have to do is point the remote at the screen to control any of the electronics in the back of the room. The IR signal gets bounced off the screen and the equipment picks it up perfectly. This has been this way for some years now.

Recently I've been recording a new show (Fringe). AND at one point during playback of the show, all by itself, my receiver/amplifier will just turn off. So I just grabbed the remote and turned it back on. The first time I thought it was just a fluke. The next week (watching a new recording of that same show) it happened again. And last week it happened a third time. So I stopped the the playback, re-wound back a minute or two, turned on the amp and started watching again. And it did it again. Seems to be at one spot during the playback that the projected screen is somehow sending back an IR signal that happens to be the on/off signal for the amp.

I can't believe that myself. How could an image being projected to a screen have ANY kind of IR content at all ??? Unless I actually point the remote at it of course. I'm going to investigate this further with next week's showing of "Fringe". I'll try to locate the exact spot where my amp turns off by using the new BTV single frame advance. Some thoughts off the top of my head are: Maybe the color wheel of my DLP projector is rotating at a certain rpm that when just the right color sequence is called for, produces an IR component? Nah .. Maybe "Fringe" is sending a subliminal message meant for me to see (like 'You WILL record this show every week") and somehow the generation of this message is causing an IR hiccup. Nah .. too weird. Maybe it's my home made screen that is doing something? My screen is painted with a homemade mixture of paints that promotes a non-glare and high contrast ratio picture. If so then why has this just showed up after almost 5 years? (maybe I need to dust off the screen?) heh heh

Why (in five years of operation) does this only happen with the playback of "Fringe" .... which in itself is a "weird" show that I would put in a group with the "X-Files", "Outer Limits" or "Twilight Zone".

Ah well, my life has always been full of weirdness. And I DO enjoy those types of shows. Any thoughts ??

[cfaslave]

You wouldn't happen to have a cow in that room would you Rich??? Just curious.

[ccarlin]

Speaking of cows and strange happening: when I was growing up we had a tv that when you rang a cow bell the tv would change channel.

As to why I had a cow bell or rang it well thats another story.

[TomXP411]

The first remote control tv's used a remote control that made sounds; a hammer struck a metal bar in the remote, and the TV caught that frequency and used it to activate a control. The channel knob and volume knobs where all analog; small motors turned the knob to change the volume or channel.

I'm not surprised a cowbell would trigger one of the commands.

[ccarlin]

Originally Posted by TomXP411

The first remote control tv's used a remote control that made sounds; a hammer struck a metal bar in the remote, and the TV caught that frequency and used it to activate a control. The channel knob and volume knobs where all analog; small motors turned the knob to change the volume or channel.

I'm not surprised a cowbell would trigger one of the commands.

I do remember that. It was also neat that you didn't have to aim those anywhere, it could bounce of just about any wall.

[gsinpei]

Well one test you could do is to cover the eye for the infrared receiver and see if it still turns off.

[Zaap]

That is weird. I was thinking along the same lines- maybe it's not the infrared somehow.

Could there possibly be something in the sound that turns the receiver off internally, rather than via infrared??

[rothe]

I would propose that any projector puts out a limited amount of IR -- it's probably more like white noise in the IR spectrum. Hold your hand in front of the projector, and you should be able to feel the heat. Granted, it's not optimized for any particular IR frequency, but a 25/50/80/whatever watt bulb is undoubtedly going to put out more IR than any remote control does. And just like the cowbell, it might not be spot on, but it's close enough to the original signal that, given enough volume, the "message" is going to be received.

From there, it's just a question of replicating the timing of the signal that normally comes out of the remote. Apparently there's just the right sequence of [a] blinking pixel[s], line[s] or sections of the screen that Rich's amplifier is seeing that as a control message from the remote.

I think Rich already managed to replicate this well enough that we can call it a proof of concept. What would be really cool (and deviously fun!) would be to take it a step further and embed signals into a video clip to switch to another input, crank up the volume or activate test tones!