new spec drafted: support for IR remote controls - comments needed!

[Otto Kekäläinen]

Hello,

su, 2008-09-07 kello 20:01 +0200, Wouter Stomp kirjoitti:
> On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 6:21 PM, Otto Kekäläinen <otto at sange.fi> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I noticed that the IR remote control support in current Linux
> > applications suck. Actually fixing the matter is quite easy, so I
> > drafted a spec and a plan how to go about it:
> >
> > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/IRRemoteControlSupport
> >
> > Comments?
> >
> 
> Fedora just implemented this for their upcoming release. You can
> probably reuse most of their work.
> 
> See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/BetterLIRCSupport
> 
> And perhaps there could even be a feature freeze exception to include
> gnome-lirc-properties in intrepid? It seems really useful.

Thanks for a quick reply!

However I think you missed my point. My suggestion was to skip lirc
completely - the applications can support special key codes directly,
since the key codes come from the Linux input layer. There wouldn't be
_any_ need for configuration. Just plug in the input device (which does
not even need to be a remote - also multimedia keyboards and multimedia
mouses work) and press the buttons to get playing.

The most elegant solution would be to support these key codes
out-of-the-box with most media applications, since they won't cause any
overhead or conflicts with any normal keyboards / input devices. Then
the lirc specific stuff could be in lirc plugins for non
input-device-users.


BTW, I've tried the Gnome-lirc-properties app a few day ago, and at
least on my computer it refuses to recognize my remote control and
insists to use my mouse (event4) as the input device (and I can't
manually force it to use /dev/input/event6). Also there is no need to
select what remote to use, since the driver already puts out the correct
button actions (key codes) through linux-input-device. Selecting the
device would be enough. However I wouldn't want to select just one
device - I want all of my devices to work (keyboard, mouse, remote). No
matter how I look at this, the best solution would be to skip lirc and
support the special key codes in the applications directly.



-- 
| Otto Kekäläinen
| http://www.sange.fi/