controlling vista media center from homeseer?

[bdee1]

right now i have an insteon keypadlinc in my living room. i also have a globalcache device and of course homeseer. i would like to set it up so that when i press a button on the keypadlinc, it dims the lights, turns on my av receiver and starts playing a specific playlist in media center.

now i know that I could just set up an event in homeseer to send out ir commands to the media center box via the globalcache. but that seems kinda unreliable. i can rely on it to turn on the av receiver. but in media center, sometimes it takes a few extra seconds (god knows why) to fire up the music library. so it might be hard to time the ir signals being sent.

also when you go into the music library it takes you to the last place you were, so its hard to know exactly how many keypresses it will take to get back to playlists and then choose the correct playlist.

so i was wondering if there was a better more reliable way to control my media center from homeseer. like some way to send actually keyboard keypresses or key combinations.

any ideas on how i can accomplish what i am looking to do?

[Malarcy]

I think a few folks have used a thing called girder (might have spelt it wrong) to do this - there are some media centre utilities that allow you to drive it over the network (check out www.thegreenbutton.com) - both of those might help.

The other thing to note with media centre is the the ir codes cycle (MS say it's to prevent ir bounce) so the 1st time you press a button it sends X, the second tim it sends Y, next time it sends X.

There is a registry key (can't remember it off hand) to prevent media centre from doing this, it tends to make learning remotes and I guess other IR solutions more reliable.

HTH

Malarcy

[Want2BACustomer]

I can't help you with this but I'm really curious on how you are using your Global Cache device.

Thanks!

[dcjohnston]

Good question...

The solution that worked for me was to use the Ocelot and a SECU-IR to learn and send the IR to Homeseer. This involved using the MCE remote and the IR emitter out of the Ocelot taped directly to the remote USB receiver. Then I just use an IR command when I setup the event. Works fine.

I am now looking into script commands but there is an issue when MCE is in full screen, sending keystrokes does not work well. THere are some api strings but nothing for Pause and Channel changing as far as I can tell.

More to come on this btw.