[mythtv-users] HD-PVR as IR receiver under Mythbuntu, advice needed

[Jarod Wilson]

On Nov 24, 2009, at 4:15 PM, Jerry Rubinow wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 4:06 PM, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> On Nov 24, 2009, at 4:02 PM, Jerry Rubinow wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Jarod Wilson <jarod at wilsonet.com> wrote:
> > On Nov 24, 2009, at 1:04 PM, Jerry Rubinow wrote:
> >
> > > So I've been planning my upgrade to 0.22, along with adding an HD-PVR and replacing my frontend hardware with a Revo. The Revo doesn't have a serial port, so my IR sensor will no longer be usable. However, the HD-PVR has an IR sensor built-in, and from what I can gather, there is support for it in lirc, but this support is kind of an in-progress thing.  I want to use Mythbuntu for my myth system, and upgrade the lirc drivers to handle the HD-PVR sensor.
> > >
> > > In this message:
> > >
> > > http://mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/2009-September/263197.htmll
> > >
> > > Jarod talks about ways to upgrade lirc to work with the HD-PVR. However, I think his examples all pertain to Fedora.
> >
> > No. Everything after option 1 there pertains to Linux, nothing Fedora-specific at all.
> >
> > For Fedora 12 though, it should all Just Work, right out of the box.
> >
> > > Does anyone have advice on what route to take to get this working under Mythbuntu?  I have some, but not a lot (and not in several years), of experience with kernel rebuilding, if that ends up being necessary.
> >
> > Its not. See option 3 in the url you referenced. (but I'd use the latest git head, rather than the version referenced there).
> >
> > Excellent.  Is the receiver code pretty stable at this point?  I read somewhere in my searching something about the HD-PVR becoming unresponsive or something occasionally when using lirc with it.  If this is not an issue, that means I can go ahead and order the Revo with the knowledge that I'll be able to get it working with not too much pain and suffering on my part.
> 
> There are reports of the unit essentially locking itself up during recording if the ir part is being polled by the lirc_zilog driver, yes. Not sure if that's an issue with the hdpvr driver or the lirc_zilog driver at this point. I don't actually use my hdpvr for much of anything at the moment, and haven't had time to dig into it.
> 
> Hmmm.  Does use of the HD-PVR receiver necessitate use of lirc_zilog?

Yes.

> Is lirc_zilog always polling the IR?

If loaded and bound to the hdpvr, yes.

> Is there any way to prevent polling,

Don't load lirc_zilog, or rewrite lirc_zilog to be interrupt-driven. (Not even sure if that's possible... It'd definitely be preferred if it was though).

> and what implications does that have?

Non-functional IR receiver. If you're not polling it, you're not going to see any incoming IR signals.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com