Best practices reduce difficulties. Giving all the model numbers is a "best practice" approach to troubleshooting. If he had given all model numbers, then we would have had the IR part numbers and we would have been right here with your excellent and helpful answer... two days sooner. Yes, the cable box model number is a throwaway, but when you're stashing hundred dollar bills in your wallet, you don't toss out the ones. You include all the money. (And if you take the stance that the cable box number is never to be mentioned because it's unimportant, you'll go through a period of confusion when they change something about the cable box.)

I was telling him to give ALL model numbers so he'd tell us about the IR equipment, but you totally missed that I only wrote about the IR stuff. Oddly, you then DID share my focus and you wrote about the IR equipment, even putting 'IR emitters' in quotes as I had done:


Et cetera, et cetera, all very good advice to be followed to the letter.

One additional thing: when IR stuff works, it doesn't matter what brand it is. When, for whatever random reason, something* doesn't work, it's best to be sure all IR parts are the same brand. For this reason I stick with Xantech. It's never given me any problems.



*this 'something' is only meant to include IR equipment in this post.