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

Rod Smith mythtv at rodsbooks.com
Tue Mar 27 18:54:40 UTC 2007


On Tuesday 27 March 2007 13:26, jedi at mishnet.org wrote:
> > 1) MythTV is a keyboard-controlled application. MythTV itself has, AFAIK,
> >    no awareness of remote controls. To use a remote with MythTV, you
> >    must have a way to make the remote "look" like a keyboard to MythTV.
> >    Typically, this is the job of LIRC, but there are other options.
>
> MythTV is very much a remote control aware application.
>
> It accepts messages passed from lirc just fine. No shenanigans like
> converting button events to keyboard events is required.

I was under the impression that the whole point of LIRC was to convert 
received IR signals into keypresses, and that MythTV was responding to these. 
That said, I've never configured or used LIRC, so it's quite possible that 
I'm mistaken about how LIRC works and interacts with MythTV.

In any event, the main thrust of my above-quoted point was that you don't 
configure MythTV to use a remote; you configure LIRC to respond to a remote 
or use some non-LIRC solution (such as an infrared keyboard and, optionally, 
a universal remote configured to emulate the IR keyboard). MythTV itself 
responds to keypresses; you configure MythTV to activate its pause function 
in response to the "P" key (or whatever), etc. I've never seen anything in 
the MythTV UI or in MythTV documentation about configuring MythTV to pause 
when you hit the pause button on a remote, except indirectly by having LIRC 
map particular remote button presses to keystrokes and then having MythTV 
respond to those. In some ways this is more complex than having MythTV 
respond directly to remotes, but it's also more flexible and it's more in 
keeping with the Unix philosophy of having small tools work together to do 
complex tasks rather than write big monolithic programs that attempt to do 
everything.

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


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