[mythtv-users] Rasberry Pi 4 - New FE

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 11 Jun 2021 22:16:41 -0400, you wrote:

>On 2021-06-11 4:40 a.m., Adam Skinner wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>      > I've just got a new Rasberry Pi 4 as a Frontend only.  The wiki
>>     has been a
>>      > useful source of information and I've had mixed success.
>
>> 
>> 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?
>> 
>
>It's back to the wiki at https://www.mythtv.org/wiki/HID_Remotes
>
>I've been using the ir_keytable method set out on that page, with 
>success and dispensed with lirc. You re-map the keys *before* they are 
>passed to your program (or X if you are running X). Basically turns your 
>remote into a keyboard so KEY_VOLUMEDOWN is interpreted as ].
>
>Geoff

That is for IR remotes though.  Lirc and ir-keytable do not work for
keyboards, so if the OP's fake keyboard type remote is interfaced as a
keyboard instead of an IR remote, neither lirc or ir-keytable will
work.

And, while ir-keytable mapping does work for IR remotes, it has some
limitations.  In my case, I use mplayer as an auxiliary video player
in mythfrontend, to play video files that do not work in
mythfrontend's builtin player (such as old .wmv files).  So I need to
have two different IR setups, one for mythfrontend and one for
mplayer, which you simply can not do with ir-keytable mapping.  So
lirc is the only way to do that.

Getting lirc to work is not as difficult as people make it out to be,
and it does work very well once it is configured.  The worst problems
are that old lirc configurations stopped working when the new version
started doing things a different way, and that on Ubuntu, the lirc
package as installed is broken in several different ways.  For Ubuntu
(on x86), I have a script that fixes the broken package problem:

http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/lirc-ubuntu-18.04-install.sh
http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/lirc-ubuntu-20.04-install.sh

After that, you can use the new setup tools to configure it, and I am
happy to help.  There are also various threads on this list where lirc
configuration for the new version has been discussed.