Control Your PS3 with a Standard Infra-Red Remote


The PS3 has become the Blu-ray player du jour for many and with good reason, it’s highly versatile, relatively easy to use, relatively inexpensive and one of the few profile 2.0 players available, it is not however perfect unto itself. The omission of any inherent ability to be controlled via infra-red makes it difficult to be integrated into home theaters with IR universal remotes, luckily though third party manufacturers have supplied solutions to this problem.

There are several different solutions to use a IR remote with the PS3 but one of the cleanest has to be the IR2BT (IR to Bluetooth) converter. In a nutshell the adapter receives PS2 IR commands (those remotes are still available) and converts them into the PS3’s Bluetooth commands. It really couldn’t get much simpler than that, well that is unless the PS3 already worked with IR. The device sells for $55 and is available direct from the manufacturer.

The other solution, specifically the Nyko “Blu-Wave” infra-red remote uses a IR dongle to receive the Nyko’s remote commands but from what I’ve been able to gather the Nyko remote lacks a few functions available from the PS3 controller, functions that are available with the PS2 IR controller as well. So in essence, if you just want to integrate basic shuttle commands into your universal remote the Nyko may be the way to go, on the other hand if you want 100% functionality with IR source codes, the IR2BT is well worth a look.