There's a built-in IR blaster on the face of the 5000.
It's bounce its light off of everything in the room,
reflecting back to your VCR (as long as it's not blocked
from receiving light). It's very powerful.
Get into the System Setup menu, Installation, VCR Setup.
You'll be asked for the 3-digit code of your analog VCR
which hopefully is supported by its code base. It'll walk
you through a test as well.
When you program timer events, you can select "VCR" or
"auto-tune". VCR is what you want, and you must do the
following: (1) put a tape in the VCR, and (2) leave it
powered on. One of the characteristics of the DISH
approach to VCR control is to only facilitate RECORD/STOP.
The POWER ON/OFF functions are not supported. This is the
opposite of how DirectTV receivers work, where you must
leave the VCR turned off, as the event timer pushes POWER
ON first.
You may or may not like this, depending on what you get
used to. It does, however, allow you to be watching
something through your VCR line inputs to the TV line inputs
when an event activates. And it will automatically start
recording after tuning to the event channel. This is a
good thing, by my reasoning, as you won't lose an event
just because you were watching TV on some other channel
when the event activates.
If you're going out of town, you probably won't want to
leave your VCR powered on the whole time. I always set my
5000 events to be "auto-tune" in this case (to inhibit the
IR blaster from accidentally interfering with my VCR) and
manually set my VCR to record at the specified event times.
I know this is a bit contrary to one-button mode which I
use on a daily basis for my analog VCR. But I don't want
to leave my VCR powered on for 1-2 weeks when I'm away.
