MCE receiver with different remotes?

[farbox]

I am trying to achieve something which I thought would be easy, but for the life of me can not make it work! So throwing myself at the mercy of the gurus here!

I am using a generic philips MCE receiver. It works great with its supplied remote, I have it setup as i want to control winamp and zoomplayer etc...
However I want EG to recognise events from OTHER remotes as well, eg a tv or cd player remote, and use these events to perform actions. I can see the red led lighting up in the receiver, indicating that it can see the other remotes signal, but i cant get it to generate an event. Not even as generic HID events...

I have tried the original drivers, the replacemnet drivers (as shown in wiki), everything, but I cant get it to work. I want a setup where i use the original remote from the couch, and I have a thin credit card type remote taped near the HTPC, almost as "hard buttons".
SO the questions are:
Can the MCE IR RECEIVER recognise OTHER remote signals?
If yes how do I get this into EG?
Thanks for your help in advance!

EDIT:
PS I started playing with IR suite, at first I was totally baffled, but after awhile managed to get my head around it a little. Its nowhere near as flexible as EG, but it recognised signals from other remotes. SO the MCE receiver WILL recognise signals from non MCE remotes. However I cant seem to be able to run EG and IR suite at the same time. It seems IR Suite needs exclusive access to the reciever.

[Bitmonster]

Well, the MCE EG-plugin is able to receive codes from other remotes, but not from all. It only has some fixed protocols coded into, like RC5 for example. It will not react on protocols it doesn't know anything about. The developer of the IrServerSuite has enhanced this functionality much, so I guess he has implemented a decoding for your type of remote.

The replacement driver code used by the EG-plugin is not the best and it should be replaced with a more advanced handling of the MCE remotes sometime, that is written new from ground up. But this is a time-consuming task and it will unlikely happen from my side. But if some plugin developer is willing to take the task, I'll spend him $150 from the donations of the project, if he manages to get the basic reading and writing of IR streams done with the original MCE driver (decoding/encoding of IR streams can then be handled with EG's generic IR routines).

[farbox]

Thanks for your reply Bitmonster!
In IR suite, the inputs from other remotes are just recognised as numeric codes, and then any function can assgined to this input.
TO have this facility in EG would be a great great addition!
HOw about asking the IR suitte developer, to see if he is willing to sharer his code for this functionality?
Then in EG, we would just have the MCE remote plugin generate these codes as events which can be used the usual way. This could be incorporated into the MCE plugin, or as an additional plugin.

[Bitmonster]

The IR Server Suite is Open Source so it would be no problem to get the source and I actually was in contact with the author some time ago. The problem is, the code is written in C# under the .NET framework, so it cannot directly be used.

[farbox]

Shame! Wish I knew programming so I could do this!
I am so close yet so far (as usual) to achieving my perfect setup, however there is always something in the way!
At the moment, I was going to use EG and IRsuite together, however as mentioned perviously, IRsuite needs exclusive acces the MCE receiver, which knocks out EG and vice versa, so the search continues....

[farbox]

Just coming back to EG for a new HTPC, so saw the thread about teh new MCE receiver drivers etc.
So bumping this one up to see if now EG reciever drivers can now detect both the MCE remote signal, and other generic remote signals (as long as the red light blinks on the receiver, meaning the receiver can read the signal)?

[CiXel]

Doesn't seem like this has changed in the last year.

Has anyone else come up with an alternative way of using a MCE receiver with generic remote signals?

[stottle]

The Vista/Win7 MCE plugin can receive other IR signals.

Brett

[CiXel]

Good point, I was initially using 7 but then bumped back down to XP. The replacement service works brilliantly. Too bad there's not way to retrofit that into XP land.