Serial IR homebrew support

[webwalker]

First time poster, looking to jump ship from mythtv.

Currently I use LIRC to listen for ir events from my pioneer VXX2870 (possibly the finest remote ever built, which is why I went to the extra effort of making it work in Mythtv.

I'm interested in SAGE for its stability, support and development community. But I need to know that I'm going to be able to continue to use the existing hardware, esp. the remote and the serial IR. I have searched and found 'girder' and 'winlirc' but my basic questions are:

1) "Does Sage internally support this technology"

2) "If Sage DOESN'T support this, how much PITA is this going to be, If I've already done my due diligence with Unix based LIRC."

My current rig--
backend:
Asus AV7333v AthlonXP1.7 Ghz 512gb RAM
40gb boot drive, 2x200GB storage
PVR-150 encoder for SDTV feed from DTV D11 sat box controlled with a Patterson TVtranslator Serial-to-USB device. 100Mb network.
HD HomeRun for OTA ATSC HDTV (dual tuner)

frontend: Shuttle SN85G4v3 Athlon64 1.7Ghz 1gb RAM
40 GB boot drive, NVidia 6200 passive cooled - component video out
SPDIF optical out

Display
Mitsubishi WS43351 1080i Component in / DVI in (HDCP)

[GKusnick]

I'm not familiar with LIRC or WinLIRC, so I can't say what's involved in getting your existing IR receiver to work with Sage. To my knowledge there's no built-in support for homebrew receivers of this sort.

Probably the simplest solution is to buy a USB-UIRT (~$50), which is natively supported by Sage. Then spend maybe 20 minutes mapping IR codes from your existing remote to Sage commands. This is very easy to do: just select the command you want to map and push the button on your remote. Repeat until all buttons have been mapped.

[CollinR]

Look into EventGhost it doesn't seem to have a WinLIRC plugin however it can read from the RS232 port.

It also has direct control over SageTV.


However once you start playing with it you might consider a FireFly remote, addressable and RF based I love mine.

Also the USB UIRT is supported by EventGhost as well.

[webwalker]

Part of the reason that I wanted to avoid changing remotes, or even remote receivers is because of the exceptional industrial design of the Tivo remote.

Read about it here:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...51c0a9629c8b63

I'm a little bit of an oddball in a room full of oddballs: We all have very specific things that we want our media systems to do. Some people want to have a TV in every room (like a recent thread putting a display in the shower.) Some folks want to have enough storage to replicate the whole Netflix catalog at home.

I've only got one goal: unobtrusiveness. We have ONE TV, the 48" Mitsu. No TVs in bedrooms, etc. We have just ONE entertainment center. And all of it is as well hidden as I can get it...and that includes the IR receiver, which is well hidden in a plant.

As such, I don't want to blow any more money on what has already been an expensive build out. So I'm looking for a way to make the best of what I have. I'm changing OS and Application horses to make this work already. Having completely overspec'd my rig for Myth, I'm hoping that Sage will be able to accommodate the hard work I've already put in to this setup.

I'll take a close look at Event-ghost. I'm going to review WinLIRC tonight, if anyone has any additional comments about it specifically that have been helpful.

For those of you who may be curious, I'm jumping ship from Myth for three reasons:

1. Not as full featured as I was lead to believe. Many of the components are still lagging behind products like sage. I was horrified to discover that only in the forthcoming release will it actually be able to deal with MP3 ID3v2 embedded album art. The burn to DVD feature only works if you condense your whole rig to a single box. And on and on. It is good. And it is open. And that leads to the next issue...

2. Because it is under such heavy development, it iterates quickly. This means that instructions for installation or configuration, or troubleshooting are outdated almost as fast as they are written. And since they are written only by users, they rarely mention which version they apply to. In configuring Myth, I spent well over a hundred hours, both in trial and error and reading documentation. This is an awfully steep price to pay for 'free.' (Remember, I configure Big Iron Linux for a living.) I'm used to having to read the docs and read between the lines. But this was ridiculous.

3. Dubious driver support. Let's face it: most of the drivers for consumer grade products (like PCs and especially video and audio cards) are targeted at Windows. As a former Microsoftie, now a Linux Architect, I don't like this. But that is how it is. Sage seems to have done a good job dealing with this reality. Myth cannot, as it is implicitly tied to one OS platform.

Comments welcome.

3.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by webwalker

In configuring Myth, I spent well over a hundred hours, both in trial and error and reading documentation. This is an awfully steep price to pay for 'free.'

That's more or less why I suggested the USB-UIRT. Sure, it's another $50. But it will work with Sage right out of the box, with no additional software, and without a lot of research or trial-and-error configuration on your part. With enough tinkering, you can probably get WinLIRC, Girder, EventGhost or some combination thereof to work. But it's a question of how much is your time worth?

[webwalker]

Well, let's just say my LIFE won't be worth a plug-nickel if I don't get this rig running soon, though I'm not sure telling my wife that I'm going to have to go in for another $150 to shift from MYTH. ($100 for SAGE+Client and $50 for USB-UIRT.)

I'm already in it for $450 in hardware upgrades. Hitting the $600 might endanger my life.

But I do see what you're saying. I'm just surprised that SAGE hasn't taken advantage of the vast amount of free code out there for cheap solutions like this to really thrive; it would take the sting out of the software cost.

M

[CollinR]

How much more free code do you want, and how much have you learned about SageTV?

[webwalker]

OK, let me try again.

I'm not trying to find a way to use usb-uirt.

I'm look for anyone who has experience with using a toolchain to pass serial receiver data to sagetv. I've looked at both Girder and eventghost. Girder is expensive and as pointless as killing a gnat with a cannon for my application. (This is why I said I was surprised that more effort hadn't gone in to using free software to solve the same problem.)

Anyway, does anyone have one of these rigs working?

M

[MeInMaui]

Is there any command line app. for LIRC that would take the channel number as an input? If so, then you could use the ExeTuner or ExeMultiTuner plugins to pass the channel number from sage to the command line app. Just a thought.

Aloha,
Mike

[GKusnick]

Wrong direction, Mike. He's already got control of the STB through the Paterson Tech device. What he's looking for is a way to receive IR commands into Sage from his remote using a homebrew IR sensor.

I don't know of any off-the-shelf tools for doing this, but if you're willing to write some code it can probably be done through the Windows SendMessage API. See "Sending Commands via Windows Messages" in Chapter 5 of the SageTV manual for details, but basically any Sage command that can be linked to an IR code can also be invoked via SendMessage. So however you write event handlers for WinLIRC, just have them call SendMessage with the appropriate command codes per the table in Chapter 5. There's also a SendMessage.exe utility distributed with Sage that lets you invoke SendMessage from the command line, if that helps (Appendix J of the manual).

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

Wrong direction, Mike. He's already got control of the STB through the Paterson Tech device. What he's looking for is a way to receive IR commands into Sage from his remote using a homebrew IR sensor.

Oh.....nevermind.

Thanks for setting me straight. I guess I didn't read the posts carefully enough.

[webwalker]

Gkusnick,

Well, I certainly can't complain that no one knows the architecture.

One item that I had run across in the forums was the question of whether windows could interrupt fast enough to deal with a realtime device like a homebrew IR to run reliably, and would the Ring0 hole that allows free software to function might be closed in the near future, forcing the F/OSS developers to buy a proprietary dev kit, or give up their product entirely.

If the answer is simply, "you can make it work if you buy Girder, but you must inherit all of Girder's overhead" then I might sigh and stick with Myth. If the answer is "To work the way you want it to work (e.g., like an appliance) get a USB-UIRT because despite the chaff about interrupt speeds, the USB-UIRT will 'Just Work" then I'll probably swear, sell a few more of my children, and buy it. But if that is the case, it does seem indicative of the Windows mentality that every-every-everything SHALL BE abstracted, no matter what the penalty in real time.

M

[Kamandi5433]

Using Girder and wanting to control by Yamaha receiver using a serial port,can anyone point me to software that could do this? Don't want to use MainLobby, just some software that I can integrate into girder - Thanks.