Friday 21 May 2010

More on remotes and receivers

After receiving a load of new remotes last week, it was only fair I hacked on gnome-lirc-properties and fixed a number of the long-standing bugs, and release gnome-lirc-properties 0.5.0.



So, what happened

Before the 0.5.0 release, we had a very small number of remotes and receivers combination declared, and unless you owned a receiver and remote that the developers did, you had to select your receiver/remote combination by hand.

Johannes Schmid fixed half of that problem by creating a script that'll go through the lirc sources to add all those remotes to our remotes list. I fixed up a number of bugs, added quirks, and support for parsing user-space drivers.

With that, we went from around 10 remotes/receivers combinations to just short of a hundred.

What's next

ir-core work is ongoing in the kernel, and will provide drivers for a number of receivers with a default keymap. That means that things will work as soon as you plug them in.

A number of receivers also already have input drivers, one level down from ir-core, and work out of the box, such as the ati_remote and appleir drivers.

As we can receive events from the remotes, we just need to funnel them to the desktop. That'll be the work of lircd in the short-term, until XKB2 shows up.

Can I help?

Sure you can. Plug in your receiver, launch gnome-lirc-properties and report whether the receiver is not auto-detected, or whether no remote is selected by default. You can also get me one of the listed remotes on this Amazon wishlist :)

4 comments:

Murray said...

I saw from Bugzilla that you've been incredibly busy. Many thanks.

> With that, we went from around 10 remotes/receivers combinations to just short of a hundred.

Of course, that's still just theoretical. It's lirc, so we don't know it works until it's tested. We knew that about (most) of the remotes that we (now you) actually owned.

Fabio said...

what about USER like me that want to buy a remote?

Valent said...

Can users help via grabing IR codes from their remotes and sending them to you so that they get added? How?

Bastien Nocera said...

Fabio: Your best bet is to look through the list of supported devices. The Streamzap remote works well, as should any mark as "Windows Media Center" compatible.

Valent: Not really, the remote definitions are provided by lirc itself, help mapping the receivers to particular remote definitions is actually more helpful in the short-term, and so would reporting if a receiver did not work.