[vdr] Attaching additional 'keyboards' to vdr...remote plugin?

[Oliver Endriss]

Laz wrote:
> 
> I'm in the process of building a new vdr box with an Epia mini-itx motherboard 
> and I intend to build it into the case of an old video recorder. The front 
> panel has loads of buttons on it such as play, pause, rew, stop, rec, etc. 
> and it would be really good if I could connect these up.
> 
> :-)
> 
> I have bought a USB numeric keypad (meant for laptops) that I found cheap in a 
> sale and I have rewired the buttons on the front panel of the video into a 
> matrix and connected them in place of the numeric keypad (it is basically 
> just a small usb module with a keypad membrane plugged into it). All seems to 
> work: I get a new usb input device when I attach it and if I cat the relevant 
> input device, I can see the keypresses. So far so good.
> 
> My problem now is how to actually use the thing to control vdr! At the moment, 
> the keyboard driver is grabbing it and all I get is a series of keycodes such 
> as numbers, *, /, -, etc. I am using vdr with a LIRC remote but it also has 
> the keyboard remote compiled in, and, at the moment, pressing random buttons 
> on the front panel does strange things, as would be expected!
> 
> I can see at least two options:
> 
> 1. Delete my remote.conf and program the 'keyboard' remote using the front 
> panel (I won't be able to use the proper keyboard to control vdr but I'm sure 
> I can cope with that!).
> 
> 2. Use the remote plugin with the input device. If I do this, I will still be 
> getting random commands sent to vdr through the keyboard driver, unless I can 
> remove the usb keyboard driver and get the remote plugin to talk to the 
> remote plugin using a raw device, or something.

Option 2 should work if
- you are using kernel 2.6.x and
- specify the event device of the usb keyboard with the -i option.

The remote plugin will grab the event device for exclusive access and
the keyboard driver will be disconnected.

Note that this will work with 2.6.x kernels only!

Oliver

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VDR Remote Plugin available at
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