Problems with PVR 250 and MythTV

[Vadim Mikhailov]

Matt Stegmeir wrote:

> Joe.  As far as I know no one has done the work to make the remote work
> with lirc (but I may be wrong)
> 
> This guy's code will show you if the remote hardware is working and
> provide a starting point if you want to roll your own remote code.  It
> works with my pvr-350.
> 
> http://www.arcknowledge.com/gmane.comp.hardware.lirc/2006-03/msg00018.html

  Yes, that was me - I made LIRC work with PVR350 on FreeBSD back in
March 2006. I have never published my work because my approach was
rather crude and remote was not very responsive - it used polling.

  You can get my old patched port here:
http://mikhailov.org/files/lirc-0.7.2-cxm-patched-port.tar.gz
I never got to create full patch against LIRC though, so use at your own
risk.

  Few months ago I decided to stop fighting windmills and converted
FreeBSD MythTV box to Linux, and boy, how much better experience it is!
Everything just works out of the box - no patching of cxm driver to
bring V4L2 ioctls, MythTV never crashes, tuner appears to get much
better picture - I have no idea why.

  I love FreeBSD a lot, but in multimedia it lags behind Linux
considerably. It's pleasure to see that you guys trying to change it to
the better.

  Talking about REAL fix for PVR350 remote: I believe the only good
solution to this is to enhance cxm kernel driver to create another
device like /dev/cxmr0 (in addition to /dev/cxm0) for remote control, so
select() on it could be used by LIRC and avoid polling.
This will also make creating LIRC driver extremely simple. In fact,
hw_cxm may become simplest driver of all LIRC drivers - almost all heavy
lifting will happen in kernel. Actually, such heavy lifting is already
done by bktr (and REMOTE_GETKEY ioctl can use it as is), it only needs
to do it via device other than tuner device, and should support read()
and select().

  Good luck!

Vadim Mikhailov