metaruss

I am documenting here, for posterity, my journey while trying to maintain support for the Adesso Vista MCE remote control on my MythTV front ends.  Yes, I still use Myth and I believe I have had a backend running continuously since 2004, possibly earlier.  I’ve had plenty of misadventures with it over the years, but the one thorn that has always been in my side is IR remote control support.  In the early days, this was pretty clumsy as it required the use of LIRC: an out-of-tree set of drivers to support IR receivers through a serial interface.  I would usually use it with some generic universal remote control or a remote that came with a video capture card.  Once it was working, it usually worked fine for a while.  However when it came time to perform an OS upgrade, the remote would always be broken because of issues between LIRC and the kernel.  LIRC went through several generations of config changes as well, so my painstakingly-created lircrc would often not work even when I managed to get LIRC itself working.  Eventually I threw in the towel and bought a bespoke MCE remote that was supposed to “just work”.  There were a number of these available that were designed to work with Windows Media Center.  I chose…poorly.

(continue reading…)