Is the remote broken? Or is the Blu-ray broken? Or WTF?

[stethacantus]

I have an LG Blu-ray player I bought a year or two ago. The only exterior controls are Power and Eject/Load. Everything else is controlled via remote. So basically after the player reads the disc you need the remote to navigate the disc menus. Especially if the disc ask if you want the text to be in English before you even get to the menu. You need to press the select button on the remote.

About a week ago the remote started acting unresponsive. At first I thought I wasn't pointing it directly at the player. Then I suspected the batteries. But changing the battery didn't help. I began to realize that the Blu-ray player was taking longer and longer to respond to the remote. At this moment I have to hold any button down for 16 seconds before the remote light on the player responds, and the selection goes through. It doesn't matter which button I press. If I press the directional button to navigate the menu, I have to hold the directional button down for 16 seconds before the icon moves from Play Movie to Chapter Select, and then release it and press it again for 16 seconds before the icon moves to Special Features.

The only advice I could find was for a different style of remote. To take out the battery and hold down the power button for 40 seconds before reinsts. This didn't work. I tried the same thing on the player, unplugging it and holding the power button for 40 seconds. Still no results. BTW, the exterior buttons work. While it would take me 16 seconds holding eject on the remote for it to eject, pressing the eject button works the moment I press it. Same with the exterior power button.

Has this happened to anyone else, and if so, is it a problem with the remote, or something wrong with the Blu-ray software?

[MartyS (Gromit)]

 Do you have any universal remotes around?  Maybe a cable box remote that you can also set up to control a TV or other device?  If so try programing that with codes for LG and see if you can get any buttons to respond more quickly than the LG remote.

Look over all the buttons to see if the corner of one is stuck down, that can cause lockups.

I've had remotes require lots of pressure to get the buttons to work, from dirt getting between the conductive rubber disks and the metal pads they press against.  Taking apart the remote and cleaning the disks and pads with rubbing alcohol fixed it.

Without trying another remote it's hard to say if it's the remote or the player, the buttons on the front go through a different path than the remote so the quick response for them doesn't tell anything other than some of the player is working normally.  Assuming it's an IR remote there's a photo diode somewhere behind some clear or red plastic on the front of the player that looks for pulses of light from the remote and decodes them.  If it's an RF remote it's got Bluetooth type signals being received from an antenna under some plastic in the front.  Either way there is different circuitry involved with the remote vs. the panel buttons.

[stethacantus]

I've already checked for jammed buttons. Also for any leaks from batteries. I did think of the universal remote. But the one I have from cable only has Cable, TV, VCR and DVD. I took a chance that I could set the remote  on the DVD button. The problem is the remote came with no code. I found about a dozen LG remote codes online, but have no idea which code works on my remote. I have tried putting them all in but failed to get it to work. I have no idea if the cable remote doesn't work on Blu-rays, or if I even have the right codes.

I discovered something last night. As I already said, you need to hold down a button for 16 seconds. But then if you immediately press a different button, it works right away. If you don't press another button within the next second, then it reverts back to taking  16 seconds to work.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Another trick to try is point the remote at a camera and look for the flashes on the camera's live display as you press buttons on the remote, most cameras will see the IR LED as a white dot and you should see different patterns of flashes as you press buttons on the remote.  If you hold down a button on the remote the same pattern should repeat.  It will be like Morse code, long and short flashes of light.

[stethacantus]

UPDATE:
Several people have suggested I try the camera trick. The one problem being only some digital cameras register the flash from a remote, and I had no idea if the reason I wasn't seeing a flash on my phone camera was that it wasn't happening, or because the camera was unable to register the light. Then I realized I could test the camera on a remote I knew worked. And I saw the remote light up, which meant it was the Blu-ray remote that wasn't working. Sort of good news/bad news. Good news because that meant the Blu-ray player was not broken, bad news because it could only be used via remote.

I took the remote to be fixed, and it turned out to be unfixable. The problem was coming from the processor, which doesn't send out a signal for a good 20 to 70 seconds.   I have had remotes that crashed before, and the remedy was to remove the batteries and hold the power button for 20 seconds so it can reboot. This one will not do it. It is reboot proof.

So my last option was the universal remote control for my Spectrum cable box. The instruction booklet that came with it didn't have codes for Blu-ray players. So I called up Spectrum and they said I need a different remote. So I blocked out a couple of hours last Saturday to go to their payment center for a new remote, only to find out the remote I brought in was Blu-ray ready. So back home where I waited a couple of days for an email of the remote code from LG. So now the Blu-ray player is again.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

That's a lot of running around but glad it worked out.

I would have just gone to Home Depot or Target and picked up a $10 universal remote.