WMC Remote Doesn't Stop or Skip - keyboard does

[micahsd]

Hi Everyone,

Any clue on this...I've been using WMC now for several years dating back to when I bought an old Sony VGC-RC110G computer and dedicated it to WMC. Anyway, I'm still using the remote control IR to USB adapter from that Sony computer on the custom-built computer which I put together about 3-4 years ago and haven't had any issues with it until lately.

I've been using this custom-built computer non-stop for WMC on Windows 7 64bit. I've also got an NVidia graphics card and Soundblaster card that has optical output, and of course a Ceton 4-tuner PCI-e card that uses a CableCARD.

I'm having no issues with the computer or video playback, however after the last round of updates from MS, I cannot get the stupid thing to stop, jump ahead, or jump back, but yet I can pause, fast-forward, rewind and do pretty much everything else with the remote.

My remote is a Logitech Harmony One. When I use my Logitech wireless keyboard to send the actual stop, skip backward, and skip forward keyboard command (control+shift+s, control+b, and control+f), they function as the remote control should.

Has anyone ran into this?

I love WMC...I was a Tivo customer for a small bit, then got tired of paying for it and went back to WMC and haven't looked back. The problem of stopping a video from playing though is annoying. I've also got an Xbox 360 acting as an extender and the playback will stop on it as it should when hitting the stop button on that remote (also a Harmony One).

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me.

Micah

[crawfish]

Sounds like you might be running iTunes, which has a bad habit of eating certain multimedia keys even when it doesn't have the focus. If so, close it when running WMC, XBMC, etc. Those really are the exact symptoms, with the Ctrl/Shift combos working, but the "special" multimedia keys which are the default bindings for a bunch of remote control buttons being unreliable.

[rantanamo]

had this issue last week. Go into the device manager in the control panel and uninstall the eHome Infrared Receiver under Universal Serial Bus controllers and the Microsoft eHome Infrared Transceiver. Then restart the computer. This worked for me.

[micahsd]

Thanks for the replies. I'll give both of those ideas a try, because I do run iTunes in the background as well and I believe I did update it recently which was real close in timing to when the problem began.

I'll post back which idea worked. Thanks!

[micahsd]

crawfish - you're 100% correct. It was iTunes.

I just closed out of iTunes, started up WMC and it worked right away.

This issue has plagued me occasionally for the past several years and most of the time it would start working on its own...it gives me another reason to hate Apple. I only run iTunes to catalog my MP3's and download podcasts to watch in WMC.

Thanks again!

[micallen]

crawfish - you're 100% correct. It was iTunes.

I just closed out of iTunes, started up WMC and it worked right away.

This issue has plagued me occasionally for the past several years and most of the time it would start working on its own...it gives me another reason to hate Apple. I only run iTunes to catalog my MP3's and download podcasts to watch in WMC.

Thanks again!

Another strike against iEverything.

[jwindberg]

ok, I've uninstalled iTunes, and gone through the device uninstall, re-install loop a couple of times.
I'm still short my stop and skip buttons.
Any else have any ideas?

[micahsd]

Removing iTunes is all I did at that time and it worked awesome. Since that time, I've never reinstalled iTunes.

I wonder if the new versions of iTunes cause it to break it in a different way or something. I thought that I remebered seeing a way to manually uninstall iTunes...if you can find hat article from Apple, maybe give that a try.

My WMC computer runs great without installing any updates or 3rd party software and just runs excellent. Hope to keep using it until MS kills off the guide updates.

[mcewinter]

ok, I've uninstalled iTunes, and gone through the device uninstall, re-install loop a couple of times.
I'm still short my stop and skip buttons.
Any else have any ideas?

Chrome can cause issues as well. If you have chrome installed turn off the run add-ons in background setting. It is on by default.

[jwindberg]

Yea, me too.
I even bought the Roseill RHRC-11002 and it has the same problem.
No iTunes on the machine, what else is eating media center events?

[mcewinter]

Try rantanamo's advice in post #3 if you haven't already.

[saxmantex]

I had this same issue (no iTunes) but I did have PLEX and Chrome open in the background. I closed both apps & WMC7, re-launched WMC7 & functionality was restored! Hope this helps someone.
-saxmantex

[mcewinter]

Closing and relaunching media center will probably fix the issue anyways, at least temporarily.

[Slinkynose]

I thought I would just add to this list of "Media Center event eaters"

I found this one this weekend:

Unified Remote Server v 3.2.5

[nut4692000]

Thanks comment #9, turning off Chrome from working in the background worked for me