On May 11, 2000, I ordered our first DVR. It was a ReplayTV 2020, capable of recording 20 hours of TV on its 20GB hard drive. We had previously used a VCR for recording several shows, but the DVR experience was so much better that we never even got around to watching some shows that we had previously recorded on VHS. Five years later, we replaced the ReplayTV with MythTV. I've refreshed the hardware, but the database has carried over, reporting that our first recording was on February 20, 2004 (and episode of CSI).
I could go on and on about how wonderful MythTV is, though I wouldn't recommend it unless you like to tinker with all sorts of Linux oddities to keep everything working just right. One of those oddities is dealing with a remote control. While you can use a wireless keyboard (which we do), it's often much nicer to use a standard universal remote. Which brings us to the point of this post.
To receive IR signals, you need an IR receiver. Today there are several USB-based solutions, including a programmable FLIRC device that remembers IR signals and converts them into the keystrokes of your choice. While I would probably get one of those if I were starting fresh today, I have an old PVR-250 card that included an IR receiver. I keep the card for digitizing VHS tapes, and take advantage of the IR receiver.
All was good, until my remote control suddenly died. I tried new batteries. No luck. And of course the remote is no longer being made, as even something as standard as a universal remote has to be changed every few years, so I ended up ordering a new universal remote.
Programming a universal remote for use with MythTV should be fairly simple. It doesn't really matter what codes the remote sends, as long as the computer can receive them, and as long as each button sends a different key. Making this a little trickier, the receiver I have only parses the RC-5 protocol used by Philips. So I set the remote to a code set for a Philips TV that sent signals on most of the buttons. I managed to find another universal remote, and I programmed it to a different Philips code set, then used the learning mode on the new remote to program the remaining buttons so that each button sent a different signal.
To program the Linux side, there are three places to set up codes. The kernel has a mapping of codes to key codes in the input layer. LIRC has a mapping in /etc/lirc/lircd.conf, and applications have a mapping in ~/.lircrc.
Fortunately, the lircd.conf mapping can be ignored once it's set up, as the key code to symbol mapping is standard regardless of the remote. While you still need the file, its purpose was to do the mapping now in the input layer for older drivers that didn't use that layer.
The ~/.lircrc file is where the real magic of using LIRC comes in. If the remote worked like a keyboard, then all applications would see the same key for each button. But with LIRC, you can set up different actions for a given button for each program. For example, you can tell MythTV that the PLAY button has the action of 'P' on the keyboard, while for Xine the same PLAY button has the action of the space bar.
The tricky part is setting up the initial mapping from remote codes to key symbols in the kernel. For this, there's the input-utils package. First, the 'lsinput' command told me that my remote was input 4. Knowing this, I used 'input-events 4' to watch the raw scan codes for each button on the remote. I found that a few were duplicates, so I had to use the learning mode to learn different codes for those buttons.
Then it should have been a simple matter of using 'input-kbd' to program a new set of mappings. This program takes a mapping from scan codes to keyboard codes (which LIRC then passes on to the programs). I had a file that mapped the codes for my previous remote, and even the remote from before that (which we went back to using briefly, despite some buttons not working on it). I was able to add the codes for the new remote. But that's when things fell apart.
Somehow, after sending the new mapping file to the kernel using input-kbd, displaying the active map would show that some buttons reverted back to a previous value. I was absolutely convinced that I was doing everything correctly, so I was going to report this as a kernel bug. In preparing to send the report, I ran input-kbd under strace so that I could cite the exact ioctls that were misbehaving, and much to my surprise, I saw that input-kbd was sending my mapping, followed by a bunch of old mappings.
So it was time to look at the source for input-kbd.
Since I use Gentoo Linux, I had the source already downloaded. Looking at the source, and knowing the behavior I was seeing, the bug was fairly obvious. The program was written assuming that anyone submitting a new mapping would want to remap all the same codes as the old map, so it read the old map, then overwrote it with the new map, but when sending the map back to the kernel, used the size of the original map.
So I wrote a patch to fix that bug. I also took the time to allow comments in the input file (saving my init script having to strip them out with sed and grep before loading them). Again, as a Gentoo user, I was able to put the patches in /etc/portage/patches/sys-apps/input-utils/, and now the patches are automatically applied whenever I install the package.
But being a responsible person, I also looked for a place to report the bug back to the developer. The project is on Git Hub, but there is no issue tracker there or anywhere else that I could find. So I resorted to emailing the developer, hoping that the published address was still valid. I'm pleased to report that the patches got through and were immediately applied (with a few tweaks). I've sent one more iteration of improvements, but hopefully when input-utils-1.2 is released, this bug will be gone.
So having done all that, I decided to take the remote apart and see what was wrong with it. I pried it apart with a screwdriver. It's just one circuit board with a single chip. I couldn't see any indication of cracked solder or anything like that, so I put it back together. I put the batteries back in, and...
The old remote works just fine.
Well, I learned a bit about how the mapping of remotes works in Linux, and I rather like the new remote. In any case, I'll have something to switch to when the old one dies again.
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