Originally posted by: cbrsurfr
Yes its a serial connection. I had one and ended up throwing it out, too much of a PITA to get it to work.
I agree. I had both the Packard Bell one, and the AST/Logitech OEM one. The Logitech one is *much* superior, and some of it's features are even natively supported by ATI's MMC DVD-Player (or were, in the DVD 3.1/4.x/5.x days, haven't used any of their recent versions).
What's really a crying shame, is how Windows XP is dropping support for a lot of these older serial-port devices. Good luck getting any of these serial IR remotes to work in a modern machine.
I did find my AST remote very useful though, I could pop in a DVD movie, and adjust the volume from across the room, without having to get up out of my chair.
As I understand it, the problem with the Packard Bell remote is, that it requires some sort of CPU-heavy polling to properly read the IR reciever inputs (CPU driven "bit-banger" serial port), whereas the Logitech IR reciever is more full-featured, and simply buffers and presents serial data to the port like a mouse, etc.
A remote is good, but IMHO, hold out for the AST/Logitech model, for a few bucks more, you will be much happier. The alternative, is to pick up an ATI AIW card, or one of those high-end TV-in/MPEG-capture PCI cards, that come with an RF remote control.