[mythtv-users] low-cost low-grief remote

[Rod Smith]

On Tuesday 27 March 2007 22:41, Angus wrote:
> Rod Smith wrote:
> >> already tried running MythTV with a keyboard, and I found that some
> >> menus just wouldn't work.
> >
> > Can you be more specific? I've never had problems getting menus to
> > respond to my keyboards.
>
>     Not really This is a few installations ago. I was trying to get
> MythTV to work with my TV out, and eventually got to a menu that
> wouldn't respond to mouse or keyboard very well. At that point I read
> something about the menus being designed to work with remotes, not mice
> or keyboards, so I figured I'd probably have to get a remote working
> before I could hope to get any further.

The menus are definitely designed to work from keyboards, but mouse clicks 
don't always work with them. I seem to recall reading a comment about the 
MythTV menus not always working with mice in some online documentation, but I 
don't have a URL. My memory of this comment is that it specifically said that 
keyboard input WOULD work but that mouse input might not. I suspect we're 
remembering the same comment but that you're not remembering it correctly, 
since your memory of the comment (that MythTV wasn't designed for keyboard 
input) is counter to everything I know about the way MythTV accepts input 
from users.

Without knowing what menu was giving you problems it's hard to offer more than 
general speculation, but some ideas that spring to mind include:

1) MythTV's response to input can be confusing at times. There are menus where
   the right-arrow key moves the cursor left and vice-versa, for instance. I
   personally found this absolutely infuriating when I started out, since the
   user interface was responding in what seemed an almost arbitrary way at
   times, and of course Murphy's Law said that I'd run into a new user
   interface quirk whenever something else was going wrong. Once you've
   learned it you can get around, but it can take a while to figure out the
   bizarre user interface conventions. It could be you were running into
   something similar.

2) The MythTV user interface can and does occasionally lock up. If this
   happened to you, you might have misattributed it to a lack of keyboard
   support.

3) It's possible to remap the way particular keystrokes map to specific
   MythTV functions. It's possible that the documentation you were reading
   described an obsolete mapping (I don't know how often these have changed)
   or that your system was somehow reconfigured in a non-standard way.
   This could lead you to think that the keyboard wasn't working when in
   fact it was.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com