Things continue to be busy here at KernelLabs. This week submitted a patch upstream which results in the IR receiver support starting to work on the HVR-1150 and HVR-1120 boards. This was something that several people had been mentioning to me as an issue over the last nine months.
Thanks go out to Fernando Laudares Camargos for sponsoring the work that finally got this stuff fixed.
Last week we also loaned out a couple of boards to Jarod Wilson to help him do some debugging on the IR support for the cx88 and saa7134 based products. For those of you who don’t know Jarod (http://wilsonet.com/), he has been doing a stellar job over the last year or so fixing up the in-kernel IR support. This has included large amounts of work on getting LIRC support finally upstream as well as drivers such as the HD-PVR and a variety of other devices.
Unfortunately, providing a robust interface for IR that behaves consistently across products is largely a thankless task that only catches peoples’ attention when their board stops working like it did in whatever previous kernel they had installed. In other words, if you run across “j-rod” in the #linuxtv IRC channel, you may wish to take a moment to thank him for his tireless effort.
I continue to get complaints from users who cannot build the PCTV 340e or PCTV 80e HG trees that I put up almost a year ago. I understand their frustration, but just haven’t had the time to keep those trees up to date as the mainline kernel continues to change their internal interfaces with each successive revision. It is on my TODO list though, so don’t lose hope!
Unrelated, I’m reaching the point where the VLC closed captioning support is finally reaching a point that I’m happy with, so am looking forward to getting that stuff upstream. A nasty bug was pointed out to me last week related to rendering lines that contain uppercase international characters such as É or Ñ, so I’ve been watching quite a bit of Telemundo and Univision lately. Hoping to get that wrapped up next week…
My lack of knowledge is going to show here, but will this patch be part of the kernel, or the v4l software/firmware.
I have the HVR-1120, and still have no luck with IR with an up to date system.
Thanks.
Hi JD,
The changes just went into the kernel, so unless you are running the latest media_build tree, you won’t have thee necessary patches.
If you are still having trouble, please provide exactly which code you installed.
Devin
I compiled the lasted dvb-media-tree and installed the modules, on reboot I can now see an entry for my IR device (which I never previously) in /proc/bus/input/devices which points to /dev/input/event5.
I’m under the impression if I read this file (cat /dev/input/event5) then I should to output to the screen when pressing a button on the remote, but I don’t.
On a side not, with the latest media tree, my Arch Linux system crashes once I try to access the TV card to watch TV (through line-in composite, and not DVB).
Here is my dmesg once the crash happens.
http://codepad.org/q5MxDqAI
Thanks.
Hi JD,
You cannot just do a “cat /dev/input/event5” and get IR events. That’s not how inputdev works. If you have general end-user issues with IR, you should address them to the linux-media mailing list (or you can try the #linuxtv IRC channel).
Likewise, if you encounter a general regression in the latest code for your device you should address such to the mailing list. I simply don’t have the cycles to do general end-user tech support.
Regards,
Devin
Ok, I understand.
Thanks Devin.
Add one more to the number waiting for a working PCTV 80e (mini stick) driver. I have limited experience but am willing to help fix it if I can. Let me know.