Hi,
Anyway, I have been using Knoppmyth for a while now, and I’ve been using Myth even longer, they’re both incredibly amazing if I do say so myself! So I recently received a Streamzap PC remote, which looks really great, and I’ve heard that it works very well with Myth. The only problem is that I can’t get it up and running… When I installed myth it asked me to install the lirc, but because I did not have a remote I didn’t feel that I needed to install it so I didn’t. Well, I shutdown my myth box, and connected the usb receiver, no problems at all, then I threw some batteries into the remote and whenever I pressed any buttons on the remote a light would flash on the receiver, so I know for sure that the receiver and remote are working, but just not with Myth. Because pressing any of the buttons does absolutely nothing… I’m sure that I need to configure lirc (I think it’s: /etc/lirc.conf) but I’m not sure how to configure it to work with the Streamzap… And I just need help getting the remote to work with Myth… If you need any clarification or have any questions for me please just ask and I will try to elaborate. Thank you very much in advance and merry Christmas.

First, you'll need to compile LIRC to support your remove. Then you'll need an /etc/lirc.conf for your remove, then /home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc needs to correspond to your remove. install-i686-l will install mythtv w/ native LIRC support.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

hey,
oookk, so I've pretty much tried that... well, let me explain.

1. download lirc cvs
2. apply patch according to: http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=67023&release_id=177518
3. finish compiling and installing lirc
4. double checked to see that /etc/lirc.conf has the correct remote, which it does
5. moved lircrc.example to /home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc
6. ran the command (as root) install-i686-l

ok... that's pretty much what I did... I can clarrify if you need me to. So then I tried to run "irw" which does NOTHING it just sits there while I frantically press anything on my remote, to absolutely no avail. So, that's how far I've gotten.. but now I'm kinda stuck...

I spent time on a similar project last night, basically messed with my box and messed it up as much as I could so I could get a better understanding of how it all works as I fixed things.

Anyway, the source for LIRC is already there on your box in /usr/src/lirc-0.7.0pre2.tar.bz2

This is what you want to compile. I made the mistake of doing an apt-get of lirc and never got it to work. I also played with the /etc/init.d/lirc for a bit to get that working, I think what I have now is a kludge, but it works and works on boot. I don't remember if it was my kludging things up or if it was in the init script, but something in the init.d/lirc pointing at /usr/sbin for the binaries when they are located in /usr/local/sbin so you may need to edit your init scripts and verify the daemons are running. I also had to add module lirc_gpio but that was for my Leadtek Winfast supplied remote, but when I compiled lirc it did say it would be needed.

Hope that offers a little insight to your project.

hey,
well, ok, the only thing I'm wondering is that I don't know if that could be the issue, because I can use "irrecord" and it actually takes button presses from the remote so I think that my build of lirc is working... I'm not sure if that's what it means... so, I hope that helps some...

so irrecord works, but irw doesn't?

I did see one problem in that the lircrc example probably won't work as a drop in for the .mythtv/lircrc , because of the format. Take a look at the two and you will see what I'm talking about the default one is built to use irxevent, not native mythtv.

of course I would not think that the above problem would matter if irw is not working.

well, ok, that should help some things... but now I just need to figure out how to correctly make the lircrc file... I did find this, but it's for freevo:

http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/freevo/freevo/contrib/lirc/streamzap?rev=1.1

so... um... it would be great if you could just take a real quick look at that and just make some suggestions about what I might need to do... that would be amazing...

sorry, I'm a total newbie to lirc...

well, thank you very much for all the help so far =)

just take a look at the .mythtv/lircrc and modify your's appropriately, basically you have to put in the program mythtv line for each button.

well... ok, I'm pretty much ready to give up, this is extremely frustrating, I modified the /home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc file so that it includes mythtv as the program entry. absolutely no change. So I decided that maybe I just need to rebuild lirc (*again*, I don't really know how many times I've rebuilt it now...) and this changed nothing at all... "irw" still does nothing, and myth doesn't respond at all to the remote... I really have no idea what to do now...

well like I said I didn't figure that the changes to the lircrc file would do you any good if irw did not work. It will just save you some time once irw does work. If irw does not work the remote will not work with mythtv. I would make sure that the correct modules are loaded, and make sure that you have the proper lircd.conf file in /etc and that lircd is started.

woohoo, ok, so it works... just if you were wondering... I'm not positive WHY it works... but ya know, that's ok, I'm not complaining

thank you all very much for your help, Happy New Year

oookkk, well, I just have one more little question... I can't let lirc to load correctly on startup... and what I have to do every time I startup is as follows:
modprobe lirc_streamzap
/etc/init.d/lirc stop
/etc/init.d/lircd stop
/etc/init.d/lirc force-reload
rm /var/run/lircd.pid
/etc/init.d/lircd force-reload

I'm almost positive that alot of those don't even need to be done... but it seems like all I'm doing is loading lirc_streamzap with modprobe, then just restarting lircd... so, shouldn't I just need to do the "modprobe lirc_streamzap" line on startup, then it will load lircd correctly?

edit /etc/modutils/lirc and replace lirc_i2c with lirc_snapstream there that should get that module to load on boot, and lirc is already loading so that should fix you up.

After I expanded the tarball, and applied the 0.04 patch, I ended up with a menu that did not include the Streamzap remote (receiver actually I believe) under any of the setup.sh options. canceled out and ran the scripts as noted on the patch pages (for 0.04) as applied to the Gentoo distribution.

Following that procedure I was able to get a lirc_streamzap module that would load, and with which I was able to generate a lirc.streamzap.conf that supported the remote.

I ran into one problem with the remote however in that the irrecord program never saw a toggle bit, however when you hit a button two times in succession, it generates two different scancodes. After thinking about it a bit, I realized that the "codes" were the significant/key elements, and that I could define whatever string I wanted so I just entered each label twice, collecting the code each time.

This resolved the primary problem I had encoutnered which was that I would have to press some buttons twice to get them recognized. "Mute" muted, but would have to be pressed twice again to unmute.

I modified the .mythtv/lircd file and now most of the streamzap buttons match the grey remote controlls. There are a couple of buttons I would like to map that at the moment don't seem to be functioning as expected. Specifically I would like to map the fast-forward and rewind buttons (a.k.a. the >> and << buttons) to '>' and '<' to behave as 'sticky' fast forward and rewind. Excerpt from that file looks like:



My suspicion is that in this file the characters '<' and '>' may not be handled as "characters".

Any thoughts or comments?

I'm just trying to get my streamzap working; when I patch lirc I get an awful lot of FAILED messages among the succeededs.

How did you guys get around this?

I'm applying the 0.04 diff to the pre4 lirc sources that came with knoppmyth.

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Gushy