MythTV Reloaded – Day 19

Today was spent primarily on cleanup work.  Most of the time was creating the lircrc file for MythTV to use, which maps the remote control button codes to commands within an application.  Luckily for me I had a backup of the lircrc files that I had been using before the upgrade.  The only problem is that all of the button names changed with the update of LIRC. So instead of “Play” I had to change the config file to act on “KEY_PLAY”.  They standardized all of the names on me.  So most of my time was spent figuring out what the proper name was for all of the buttons on my remote and mapping those to the correct commands in MythTV.  

Once that was done I had all of the functionality that I had in my previous install. I figured, however, that as long as I was doing this I might as well go for gold.  There were two scripts that I had found and tweaked early in my MythTV days that I was never able to get working on my previous installation of MythTV.  The first script cycled the MythTV frontend application via a button press – so if it hung I could kill the app and if it crashed and died I could restart it.  The second script suspended and woke up the computer via a button push.  I was able to wake up the frontend via a button push but was not able to get suspend to work prop ferly; every time I wanted to watch TV I would have to wait for a minute or two while the frontend booted.  Annoying, but luckily my wife was very tolerant on this problem.  As luck would have it, the frontend cycling script only needed a couple of tweaks to get it running.  The suspend script ended up using a completely new power management interface to get suspend to function properly as a user and not root, but luckily someone had already figured out how to do it and it was a non-trivial matter of Googling to find the solution.

With those two additions in place, I am declaring my remote fully functional.  I think that the frontend is finally ready!  Hopefully I’ll have time to set it up tomorrow.

The saga is nearly at an end! I hope…