I have posted about me setting up a new box for XBMC and here is a second part to that post, now that I arrived to Dublin and I actually set it up on my living room as part of my system. There are a few things that needs better be described.
The first problem I had was how to set up the infrared receiver for the remote control. I originally intended to use my Galaxy Note as it has an IR blaster for I have no idea what reason; but then I realized I have a better option.
While the NUC does not, unfortunately, support CEC input, my receiver, a Yamaha RX-V475 comes with a programmable remote controller, which – after a very quick check cat-ing the event input device node – appeared sending signals in the right frequency for the built-in IR sensor to pick it up. So the question was to find a way to map the buttons on the remote to action to XBMC.
Important note: a lot of the documentation out there tells you that the nuvoton driver is buggy and requires to play with /sys files and the DSDT tables. This is outdated, just make sure you use kernel version 3.15 or later and it works perfectly fine.
The first obvious option, which I have seen documented basically everywhere, is to use lirc. Now that’s a piece of software that I know a little too well for comfort. Not everybody knows this, both because I went by a different nickname at the time, and because it happened a long time before I joined Gentoo, and definitely before I started keeping a blog. But as things are, back in the days when Linux 2.5 was a thing, I did the first initial port of the lirc driver to a newer kernel, mostly as an external patch to apply on top of the kernel. I even implemented devfs, since while I was doing that I finally moved to Gentoo, and I needed devfs to use it.
I wanted to find an alternative to using lirc for this and other reasons. Among other things, last time I have used it, I was using it on computer that was not dedicated as an HTPC, so this looked like a much easier task with a single user-facing process in the system. After looking around quite a bit I found that you can make the driver output X-compatible key events instead of IR events by loading the right keymap. While there are multiple ways to do this, I ended up using ir-keytable which comes in v4l-utils.
The remote control only had to be set to send codes for a VDR for the brand “Microsoft” — which I assume puts it in a mode compatible with Windows XP Media Center Edition. Funnily enough they actually put a separate section for Apple TV codes. After that, the RC6/MCE table can be used, and that will send proper keypresses fr things like the arrows and the number buttons.
I only had to change a couple of keys, namely Enter and Exit to send KEY_RETURN and KEY_BACKSPACE respectively, so that they map to actions in XBMC. It would probably be simple enough to change the bindings to XBMC directly, but I find it more reliable for it to send a different key altogether. The trick is to edit /etc/rc_keymaps/rc6_mce to change the key that is sent, and then re-run ir-keytable -a /etc/rc_maps.cfg, and the problem is solved (udev rules are in place so that the map is loaded at reboot).
And this is one more problem solved, now I’m actually watching things with XBMC so it seems to be working fine.
