[mythtv-users] TiVo Slide Remote, Linux and Scan Codes

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Wayne Thomas <waynethomas69 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The dongle actually tries to register all of those as possible hid
>> usages as well, according to debug spew I'd added to
>> hidinput_configure_usage(). They're not strictly necessary to get just
>> the remote working, but they're technically all more or less proper
>> extensions of the linux hid driver, so they'll be already there when a
>> device that actually reports those comes along. :)
>
> Right, that makes sense.  I thought I was missing something and it
> turns out I was :o)

I'd actually sorta forgot I put those in, so its good you mentioned
it. I added a note along those lines to the upstream submission.

> So what is your verdict on the remote itself?

Its smaller than I thought it was (considerably shorter than the
normal tivo remote), but its fairly thick and feels quite well built.
I really like the layout of the direction pad, select, play, pause and
skip, which are by far the most used buttons in my mythtv usage. Also
really like that I can have the power, input and volume buttons
overridden to send IR learned from my tv and amp remotes. Ultimately,
I'm thinking I may run a ~50ft hdmi cable from the rack in my basement
where my master backend lives, to the tv hanging on the wall in the
finished part of the basement, completely eliminating the need for a
separate frontend machine, which should be doable with the move to
bluetooth instead of IR for myth box communications. The keyboard is
quite usable, though no ctrl or alt, and the whole remote has
backlighting that comes up automatically when the lights are down,
which is a nice plus.

Now, there are one or two caveats to point out.

First, a time or two, I've managed to do something to the dongle that
the hid or bluetooth driver doesn't like. When the device is plugged
in, the keyboard interface probe would fail, and the remote could
never be properly associated. When this happened, I had no problem
getting the remote to associate plugging the dongle into a Mac OS X
system or (amusingly) into my cable box (the dongle has a button on it
to initiate association if there's no OS driver to do it for you).

Second, upon rebooting, I've occasionally had to force re-association
-- hold the tivo and blue B key on the remote until it starts flashing
blue, then choose 'connect' from the bluetooth applet in gnome. Not
always though. Re-association seems to work okay as long as you don't
try pushing any buttons on the remote until the desktop is all the way
back up though (if you hit keys w/no dongle ready, it reverts from bt
mode to pure IR mode), and it seems to mostly pick back up okay after
going to sleep. So it might not work that well for not-always-on
setups.

Will try deploying it for actual mythtv usage tonight, thus far, its
only been talking to my laptop while getting all the keys to register
properly.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com