I recently purchased an ANTEC Fusion home theatre PC enclosure to replace my old noisey media center PC only to discover that the included IR functionality was complete rubbish (you can’t even use the PC on/off button on an MCE remote without connecting an additional cable). Initially this didn’t phase me as I already had a MCE IR reciever, however – after much searching I realised there was no way to disable the included IR functionality without also disabling the VFD (which works beautifully with Vista Media Center after a bit of configuration).

After a bit of googling it appeared there were 3 solutions:

  1. The easiest, use another application to utilize the VFD (e.g. LCD Smartie)
  2. ANTEC’s suggestion, Remove the front panel of the case, unscrew the VFD module and then cover up the IR receiver module.
  3. or, disable the VFD all together.

The first solution sounded ok, but I could not find a single application that would work with Vista Media Center. Either the applications didn’t work at all, or they just didnt support Media Center. Second solution, huh!? Sounds a bit ghetto – surely there’s got to be something better than that. Third solution, well yeah – defeats the purpose of the VFD in the enclosure.

Out comes PE Explorer and WinDbg, time to write a dummy SG_RC.dll to trick the ANTEC software into thinking the RC was working when infact the requests just get ignored. Before I did that I thought I’d check out the file structure of the ANTEC application and see if there was a hidden setting to disable the IR module.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ANTEC\VFD\RCPlugin

Set it to 0, the remote stopped working! But the VFD would then only display the time. No good.

Vista:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\ANTEC\VFD\Setup\MCE remote\

XP (can anybody confirm this is correct?):
%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\ANTEC\VFD\Setup\MCE remote\

This folder appears to contain configuration/key mapping data for the MCE remote. So the simple solution?

  1. Set all permissions to Deny for Everyone on the MCE remote folder.
  2. Restart the ANTEC software.
  3. Plug in your MCE IR Receiver.
  4. Problem Solved!

Stay tuned for a replacement for the ANTEC software, that fully supports Vista Media Center right out of the box :)

Update: Another solution of disabling the driver from device manager has been suggested. I found that this had the same result as setting the RCPlugin registry value to 0. The ANTEC VFD software says that the VFD H/W is not connected and will not display anything on the VFD. Doing this will however disable the IR functionality.

Update: You can now use the iMon software to control the VFD/IR Sensor in the Antec case. The latest version of the iMon software has an option to disable the IR Sensor all together.