I’ve had the Philips SRU-8010 Universal Remote for quite some time now, but never really got it working quite well with my Windows Media Center Edition USB Infrared receiver (or cheap knockoff). I got the receiver working very well on my Gentoo Linux HTPC with LIRC’s mceusb2 driver but wasn’t able to get my remote to play perfectly with the whole setup. I was able to overcome the issue with a roundabout strategy and am pleased to report that I now have my whole media center, including my HTPC, TV, and sound receiver working together via universal remote. Read on for the details.
Initial Setup
To get things started, pretty much everything worked out of the box in so far as what was advertised — the Philips universal remote never advertised explicit compatibility with my IR receiver. On the other hand, I had it controlling both my TV and sound receiver in under five minutes. Likewise, once I found out which driver to use with my USB IR receiver, LIRC was very straightforward to configure.
The Problems
As it turns out, there was no device code in the Philips documentation for Microsoft Media Center Edition remote compatibility, so I was on my own. I tried using the learning feature of the remote with mediocre results. Sure, it would eventually learn and reproduce given IR codes but the lag time associated with learned codes on the remote was astonishingly bad. Not to mention that pressing and holding a button was out of the question with learned codes. Try scrolling through hundreds of movies that way.
The Solution
I was able to find a preprogrammed mode for the universal remote that actually made independent use of [almost] all of the buttons on there, and put the remote into that mode. As it turns out, such a mode for the Philips universal remote is the for the ReplayTV DVR. Then I taught LIRC to understand the codes out of that mode using irrecord.
The Outcome
Perfection.
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