Media Center Remote IR Blaster speed

If you want to slow down or alter how quickly the Windows Media Center Remote Control and IR Blaster solution sends IR commands to your set top box, you only get three options during the Media Center (sic) setup procedure; Fast, Medium and Slow.

Sometimes your set-top-box is too slow to pick up even the slowest setting provided out of the box during the setup process but don’t despair, there’s a reg key for that (as opposed to there being an app for that.)

Open Registry Editor and find the following key: please bear in mind that the hardware ID I’ve highlighted below will be entirely different on your computer. Open up the IDs until you find the one that contains a UserSettings sub-key.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\{A799A800-A46D-11D0-A18C-00A02401DCD4}\{E06733DE-0FFB-4615-B18B-C6F43A13161E}\UserSettings]

Edit the STBCode string value and edit the value in milliseconds shown between the <keyinterval> tag. By default, this will be 250 if you selected the “Slow” option during Media Center setup.

Once you have edited the value, you must reboot your PC for the setting to take effect. In order to get my Sky Digibox as shown in the image above to work every time, I had to adjust the keyinterval value to 500ms.

-Lewis