Media Center 2005 and the DirecTV D11 Set-top-Box (getting IR to work)

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So today I got my a new D11 Set top box (STB) from DirecTV.  I put it in place and then started up Media Center 2005 box (with Rollup 2, aka Emerald). 

When I went through the wizard to setup my TV signal I was sad to see that MCE did not know the IR codes for the remote.  So then I had to go through number 0-9, Enter, Channel Up and Channel down to teach it each one.  After that was all done it then asks you to test the settings.  Well they did not work.  After about 30 min of messing with it I went over to Google and stared looking around.  Some people on www.thegreenbutton.com talked about the IR being to "strong" and to turn the blaster around and it might work.  Well it did not work for me.

So then after some more poking around I ended up going to my registry and editing my STBCode regfile. It is located under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\tuners\<guid>\UserSettings.  Or just search for STBCode.  I changed

  • KeyInterval = 100 (default 200)
  • KeyDuration = 300 (default xxx)
  • ChannelPause = 400 (default yyy)
  • NumDigits = 4 (default 3)

<keyinterval>1000</keyinterval> <keyduration>300</keyduration> <channelpause>400</channelpause>  <numdigits>4</numdigits>

Once those are changed restart the ehSched service and you should be good to go.

I set the number of digits to 4 because it seemed to reduce the number of random change errors that I would get.

Also I found that my IR settings are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\eHome\user.ird.  I know this is a password protected DB so I am not sure if it is portable.  But it is here https://www.mikepoulson.com/blog/downloads/user.ird.bin (remove the .bin part).

So now other useful data can be found at www.sbcatest.com/installers_help_d10.pdf. And to control your D11 STB via USB see https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Controlling_DirectTV_D11_via_USB