TV Woes, Part 2

An additional issue we were having with our entertainment center was that our Series 2 Dual-Tuner TiVo was not receiving the remote signal consistently. Sometimes it would work okay, but most of the time it was taking multiple presses to get the signal to the TiVo and, sometimes, it would go through long stretches where it wouldn't accept the signal at all.

This came to a head recently as well. It got to the point where we could barely control our TiVo at all. Once again, I turned to the Interwebs for information to see if others were having this issue.

It turns out that modern LCD/LED TVs have a function called "backlighting." This feature can send out a strong enough signal that it can override your remote's IR signal, effectively blocking it from reaching the IR sensor on the TiVo (or, perhaps, other devices). The backlighting feature is used to make the screen brighter and the colors sharper. It has different settings depending on the way you are using it (for example, on our TV, the "Sports" selection has high backlighting, the "Movie" one has low backlighting, and the "Standard" is a medium amount of backlighting).

I played around with this feature and discovered if we turned it all the way off, our TiVo remote started functioning again. But even one tick up on the scale for backlighting and the TiVo remote stopped working reliably.

I then starting thinking about when this trouble started, because we have owned that TV for a few years and the issue only cropped up in the last few months. I then realized that when we had some work done in the front room, we had changed the setup of the devices within the cabinet, placing the TiVo closer to the TV than it had been before, and I suspected that the problems started about that same time.

After dealing with the issues in TV Woes, Part 1, my wife and I decided to act on my hunch and move the TiVo down in the cabinet, farther away from the TV. This only shifted its position by about 3.5", but I recalled not having the remote issues prior to moving it up and we were definitely having them after moving it up. So, it was worth a shot and didn't cost us anything.

Low and behold, since moving the TiVo down under the other (used much less often) device, the TiVo is working like a champ again.

The moral of the story is, if you find your remotes are not working as well or consistently as they were or you think they should, try finding and turning off the "Backlight" feature on your LCD/LED TV (the feature is also on some plasma TVs). If your remote suddenly seems to work much better and more consistently, then you need to get your device farther away from your TV so the backlight feature doesn't cause interference with the IR reception from the remote. Or, of course, if you don't mind the much duller look of your picture, you can simply turn off the Backlight feature and leave it off.