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.

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:

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:

kodi

Helpful links

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