Revision as of 18:11, 27 July 2018

Customizing Key Usage

Most people use a remote control with MythTV. Many remote controls emulate a keyboard and send keystrokes in response to button presses. The keystrokes sent may not match desired operations in MythTV, and in that case you will want to modify the key assignments. In some cases the remote may have few buttons and you will need to decide which operations to map to the available buttons.

Edit Keys

In the MythTV frontend Edit Keys screen you can assign up to 4 keystroke combinations for each action. Any of those keystroke combinations will invoke that action from the appropriate place in the system. When assigning keys to a remote control device, press the desired key on the remote when prompted, to get that key assigned to the required action.

When editing a key, you may be rejected because the key is already assigned to another task, for example when setting up Fast Forward on an Ortek remote it tells me that this is already assigned to night-time mode. Since it makes no sense for fast forward on the remote to invoke night-time mode on MythTV, search for the night-time setting and remove the assignment there, then you will be able to add it to the correct action.

Long Press

If your remote supports it, you can assign actions that are invoked on a Long Press of a key or key combination. If you assign a Long Press action, then repeat action on the key is disabled. With Long Press you can assign two actions to a key or key combination, one that gets invoked on a short press and another that is invoked on a long press. You can select up to 16 keys or key combinations that support Long Press.

Remotes that emulate a keyboard support long press. Others may not support it. If your remote does not support long press, remove all entries from the Long Press context.

In the Long Press context add the keystrokes you want to use with long press. You can add them to any of the 4 LONGPRESS actions. Save your changes and then go back into Edit Keys. Now you can navigate to an action that you want to use with Long Press and assign by pressing the key or key combination until it registers on the screen. Long Press key combinations are shown as Meta+key which is the same as is generated by pressing the Windows key with another key. The Action of long pressing a key simulates the action of pressing it with the Windows key, even where you have no windows key on your remote or keyboard.

By default, Long Press of Enter is assigned to the global menu action. If you associate Enter with Long Press, then a long press of Enter will bring up the menu associated with the screen you are in at the time.

CEC

Some systems support CEC, which allows the TV remote to control MythTV through the HDMI interface. Some examples are:

• Raspberry Pi
• NVidia Shield
• Pulse-Eight CEC adapter

You can use the "Edit Keys" frontend setting page to choose what actions are triggered from your TV remote, just as you can customize actions for a keyboard remote.

Minimal Remote Controls

There are some remote controls with very few buttons.

• NVidia Shield TV has a remote with 4 directional buttons on a ring, select, back and home buttons.
• CEC through the TV may only provide access to a few of the available buttons.

Some features have been added to the frontend to enable use of these remotes.

OSD Navigation

There is an on-screen navigation display that can be configured. By default no key is assigned to it. The on-screen navigation display can be invoked while playing a recording or video. It shows a row of icons with commonly used navigation actions. By default it is not assigned to any key. You can assign OSD Navigation to the main button of your minimal remote, enter or select. As long as you have left and right buttons available, this will give access to skipping, fast forwarding, and a number of other actions.

OSD Navigation is themable and additional actions can be added with no code change. For details see osd.xml.

Menu

During playback the menu provides access top most actions that are not on the OSD Navigation screen. It is accessed from the M key, Long Press Enter, or an icon in OSD navigation.

Zoom

During playback, Zoom can be accessed from the menu. If you use zoom to get rid of tickers on the screen or for other reasons, you will know that normal page up and page down are used to change the size of the picture. If using a minimal remote, assign Left to Zoomin and Right to Zoomout in the TV playback context. Normal zooming does not involve moving the picture left and right and you can use left and right to better advantage this way. This does not affect other uses of left and right keys.

Also note there are icons in the OSD Navigation for Aspect Ratio and Fill that use a preset series of screen stretching parameters. One of the presets may be suitable for your use instead of using the Zoom controls.

Default Keyboard commands

The file keys.txt in your documentation directory (typically /usr/share/doc/mythtv/ or /usr/local/share/doc/mythtv/) describes what the various keyboard commands are. You can change the keys in frontend setup "Edit Keys".

mythfrontend

Watching TV or a recording

Without the stickykeys option selected

With Stickykeys option selected

In fast forward or rewind mode

While video is paused

Watching TV only

Watching a recording only

In edit mode

LiveTV Browse Mode

Playback Recording Zoom Mode

If you have two or more tuner cards

Electronic Program Guide

Setting Program or Channel Recording Priorities

Viewing Scheduled Recordings/Resolving Conflicts

Viewing Search Listings

Recording Profiles Setup Screen

Recording Groups

In the Watch Recordings screen, Recording Groups allow you to separate programs into user-defined categories, such as "Kids", "Alice", "Bob", etc. This can be used to reduce clutter, or to segregate content if you use the PIN function.

Remote Controls

If you are using MythTV with just a remote control then it is suggested that you map the remote control keys as described below. Your remote control may not have the same set of keys as those named below, the names are only a suggestion that roughly correspond to the function.

If you are adding new key bindings to the program then consideration of this suggested list will help users with remote controls.

This list assumes a minimal remote control that only has 20 keys, nearly all features can be used with this configuration. If you have more keys then you can access all of the features. With only 16 keys most features are usable.

More information

You can control just about any program with your remote control from MythTV by using Lirc. With this you can bind any key or combination of keyboard keys to an remotecontrol button.

http://www.lirc.org/ - Lirc