[mythtv-users] 0.25 Remote setup

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Tue Jan 11 21:26:05 UTC 2011


  On 01/11/2011 03:23 PM, Robert McNamara wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Simon Jones wrote:
>>> I think that you may have misunderstood something--
>> nothing new for me there.....
>>
>> but it was this line in the wiki
>>
>>       Remove "LIRC Keypress Application" setting and functionality
>>
>> that got me?
> Correct, it was the removal of a superfluous setting, not of LIRC
> functionality itself.

Specifically a setting (and the supporting code) that allowed you to run 
a script on every LIRC button event received by MythTV.

Way more detail than you wanted:

The implementation meant that the script would be executed for every 
single button on your remote that was mapped to MythTV, and the same 
script would be executed for every single button, and the script 
execution would be repeated when you held down, say, the volume button 
(for each separate button repeat sent by LIRC), and it only worked with 
LIRC button presses (so no audio feedback when using a keyboard to 
initiate an action).

So, to make it somewhat useful, you had to write a very complex script 
that knew what to do for each button press and when to ignore button 
presses/repeats and when to apply a delay before repeats and ... 
basically, you had to re-implement irexec in your script.  So I just cut 
out the middle man and now you can use irexec--the LIRC program that was 
specifically written to run a script on a button press.

Note, also, that irexec is /not/ irxevent (which is likely what you're 
thinking of).  It does not send an X key press to an app (as does 
irxevent), it executes a script on a button press (but with full support 
for per-button mapping, repeat, delay, ...).

AFAIR, the setting was originally added as a hack to allow playing an 
audio sample on button presses for audio feedback, but its 
implementation was so primitive that it was useless for that purpose, so 
I doubt many have ever used it (and that anyone who has used it kept it 
enabled for more than a few minutes--I tested it before removing it and 
was extremely annoyed withing 30s).  Using irexec has only benefits and 
no downsides--once you figure out how you can take your mythtv config in 
lircrc and use global search/replace to morph it into an irexec config 
that works exactly like the legacy MythTV setting--and then can start to 
customize it to make, for example, different buttons play different 
audio files (be-boop for fast-forward and boop-be for rewind and no 
audio feedback for toggle), use different LIRC repeat and delay settings 
(which needn't be tied to the settings used by MythTV), ...

If anyone wants real support in MythTV for audio feedback on actions, 
they need to do a proper implementation that does not use a hack (such 
as spawning a new process for each beep through a system call to a 
script--it needs to use MythTV's built-in audio support), that is not 
hardware specific (i.e. works the same for all actions, whether received 
via keyboard, LIRC, network control, ...), and that allows proper 
customization (likely through some sort of audio theme).

Mike


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