[mythtv-users] Rasberry Pi 4 - New FE

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 11 Jun 2021 09:40:47 +0100, you wrote:

>I've just got to figure out how to get Myth TV to work with some of the
>buttons on my basic usb fake keyboard/mouse remote control.
>
>As the Pi runs without X , these buttons are not recognised by Myth - but
>the same remotes all work fine and the buttons are seen in Myths edit keys
>when X runs on x86.
>
>I can see the button presses using showkey and evtest  ( KEY_VOLUMEDOWN
>KEY_VOLUMEUP  KEY_HOMEPAGE) but trying to set them inside Myth Frontends
>Settings->Edit Keys have the error: Pressed Key Not Recognised
>
>Does anyone have any ideas?

I have a feeling that MythTV only works with real character
keystrokes.  It simply does not handle anything else like the
KEY_VOLUME* keys.  When you are using lirc with an IR remote, you have
to get those sorts of keystrokes translated by lirc to something that
MythTV recognises, so KEY_VOLUMEUP gets translated to ] and
KEY_VOLUMEDOWN gets translated to [.  The system somewhere (in X?)
does recognise those keystrokes and in Ubuntu will change the system
volume when it sees them.  But if you try to use them with MythTV
programs without lirc translating them, they do not work.  So I expect
that the same happens when they come from a keyboard instead of an IR
remote.

If that is what is happening, then the only way to use those keys with
MythTV will be to translate them.  There is a way to redefine the
character generated from each key, but the effect will be system wide,
not just for MythTV, so if the Pi is recognising KEY_VOLUME* and
changing the system volume outside MythTV, if you redefine the key
value that is generated, that will stop working.

It may be possible to write a wrapper program that is run first and
then runs mythfrontend.  It would get the keystrokes and translate
them and pass them on to mythfrontend, in a similar way to what lirc
does.  But it would be a fair bit of work to find out how to do that
and write such a program.  It may be worth doing an Internet search to
see if such a thing already exists.