The TechniSat SkyStar HD2 DVB-S Card
The TechniSat SkyStar HD2 itself works out of the box (HDTV too) with only
free drivers and firmware. The remote control (mine has
“TTS35AI” printed on the back) however is a problem.
- It sends the same raw codes (as reported by LIRC) for Up/Channel+ and Down/Channel-. This does not seem to be kernel thing that could be fixed. However, the remote can be resoldered to activate the buttons. The functionality of PROG and volume are switched after the procedure, but it's better than before.
The “0” button doesn't work at all. This seems to be a kernel issue, because it affects the original remote
as well as all other remotes that are recognized by this IR receiver.
- Apart from that, the remote has too few buttons in the first place. There's no “record”, for example.
- Switching channels takes a little bit more than 1 second on my P3. This is the first DVB card I've seen, so I don't know
if this is good or not. Amazon reviews are very mixed on that topic, and it's seldom that people get specific.
In the end I gave up all the petty stuff described on this page and just bought a wireless keyboard.
LIRC
/etc/lirc/lircd.conf is just the configuration for the init-script!
lircd itself wants the driver and the
configuration file containing the remote control codes as command line parameters. That's the configuration. The IR keycode file can be
tested with:
- lircd -H devinput -d /path/to/devicefile /path/to/keycodefile to start the LIRC daemon.
“devinput” is the driver for using Linux /dev/input/ files.
irw
should show the name defined in the configuration file.
Understanding LIRC configuration
The
configuration from the LIRC page didn't work for me, so I had
to create my own. It's easy, but a bit annoying. Just start
irrecord -H devinput -d /dev/input/event6 /tmp/TTS35AI.conf
and follow the instructions. Which input device is the correct one can be looked up in
/proc/bus/input/devices
(Mantis VP-1041 IR Receiver). The resulting file should be copied to
/etc/lirc/.
Problem: X11 recognizes the IR as a keyboard
Linux provides the IR sensor as normal input device. Keypresses on the remote will show up on the console, just as if they were
pressed on the keyboard. There's a problem though: all numbers are shifted by one, and “1” is conveniently mapped to
“Power Button”. So if
acpid is running the computer will shut down (“power button pressed”). This
itself doesn't affect the funcionality of
lircd. However, it still generates a problem: X will detect the IR as a keyboard,
and VDR will never see the LIRC keypresses, but will receive X_KEYSYM events. So X has to be instructed to
ignore the IR sensors with the following file (e.g.
ignore_IR.conf) in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Ignore TechniSat SkyStar HD2 IR"
MatchProduct "VP-1041"
MatchIsKeyboard "true"
Option "Ignore" "true"
EndSection
xev
(
apt-get install x11-utils
) should no longer react to the keypresses of the IR.
According to the archlinux Wiki another solution is to
echo lirc >> /sys/class/rc/rc0/protocols
, but that results only in Oopses for me. Maybe this would also have
helped with the missing 0 and duplicated keycodes, because it is supposed to send all received IR codes directly to userspace.
VDR
What really held me back for a time was the simple realization:
The VDR plugin “vdr-plugin-xineliboutput” together
with “xineliboutput-sxfe” can be used to view the VDR output on an local (or remote) X server! It even provides HTTP streaming, which
means the TV program can be recorded with
wget ;-)
Other notes:
- VDR's remote.conf is the mapping of LIRC codes to internal functions. That's what's generated by the learning
process. To start the learning again, this file must be deleted.
- /etc/vdr/ is not really the place where VDR looks for its config files. That's /var/lib/vdr/. The files
in /etc/ are linked there, but at one time I deleted /etc/remote.conf to rerun the remote learning
procedure, and wondered why it didn't start. The reason was that the file was no longer a symlink. Maybe some error on my part.
- VDR is butt-ugly.
- Playing Tetris with a remote control is pointless.
- 4 of 4 tested TV distributions either didn't install, didn't work, or both. Oh the fun I had.
- No HDTV with VDR 1.6! 1.7 works, in principle – the computer is too slow.
kodi
- to map buttons to kodi functionality, create your own keymap in $HOME/.kodi/userdata/keymaps/your_keymap.xml. The list of Action IDs might also be useful
- To map LIRC buttons to Kodi buttons, create $HOME/.kodi/userdata/Lircmap.xml
The format is <XBMC_button>LIRC_button</XBMC_button>.
<XBMC_button> is called, when >LIRC_button< is pressed. For all the needed tags and examples see the default configuration in /usr/share/kodi/system/Lircmap.xml.
Helpful links
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