Sunday, April 14, 2013

Getting an IR receiver to work with a different remote with LIRC

I've been using MythTV for a long time, and recently I decided to upgrade my DVR to become a dedicated box, using Mythbuntu (replacing my old Debian setup).

The installation went pretty smoothly, but I had a ton of trouble getting my Hauppauge PVR-350 remote working with my Pinnacle PCTV USB TV Tuner / IR Receiver and LIRC. I know I got it working before on Debian only a month ago, so I figured it would be easy.

Of course, it wasn't. I think I spent longer trying to figure out what I'd done before than it would have taken me to fix it from scratch, and that's when I knew it was time to write a Google Fodder entry.

In recent versions of Linux, the kernel has support for many IR Receivers built in, and exposes it to LIRC via the "devinput" protocol. LIRC itself does not have any idea what kind of hardware is being used, nor should it. (I mistakenly tried telling LIRC about the actual remote I was using, but that was a dead end.) By default, each piece of hardware loads the keymap associated with the corresponding remote. This mapping of hardware to keymap is done by udev and contolled by the file /etc/rc_maps.cfg. To tell udev to load a different keymap, you can change rc_maps.cfg to point to your custom remote in /etc/rc_keymaps/. The syntax of these files are a little finicky so be sure to use ir-keytable to test your work. (Notably, I couldn't put comments in my keymap file.) Since /etc/rc_maps.cfg is used at boot time, the fix is actually very easy, which might explain why I forgot it. I've seen forum posts all over the place advocating for running some special ir-keytable commands at boot time, but that's not necessary.

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