RivaTV - user guide - remote control

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Intended audience

Some of the Asus TV-Box's versions are shipped with an infrared remote control. If you have this piece of hardware, this page is for you. The GNU/Linux system provides a generic remote control support interface, namely LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control). Using this interface your remote control isn't limited to control a TV application only, but can start arbitrary applications, move your mouse cursor on screen... anything you can think of.

Get your remote control working

Currently we support the PCF8574 chip which is located somewhere within the Asus TV-Box (not in the remote control itself). This chip is an I/O expander with an I2C interface. The chip provides 8 input/output channels, channel 1 is connected to the receiving IR controller. We are interested to learn whether your setup is similar. Let us know!

To get started, you need to download lirc-0.6.6.tar.gz from the LIRC project. Then get the latest lirc patch. Apply the patch:


    /usr/src/lirc-0.6.6$ patch -p0 < lirc.diff

After this you can configure, build and install the lirc package.

    
    /usr/src/lirc-0.6.6$ ./configure --with-driver=tvbox OR
    /usr/src/lirc-0.6.6$ ./configure --with-driver=breakoutbox
    /usr/src/lirc-0.6.6$ make
    /usr/src/lirc-0.6.6# make install

This will install a remote control server, some kernel modules, a client library and a global configuration file (/etc/lircd.conf) which is tailored to the use of an Asus TV-Box with remote.

Now you are ready to load the kernel modules and start the remote control server.

    
    # modprobe lirc_dev
    # modprobe lirc_i2c
    # lircd

Your syslog (usually /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog) should tell you whether your remote control has been detected or not.

Application support

The events (button press/release) delivered by your remote control are now provided through a global interface: the lircd daemon. Each application which wants to map these event to actions must communicate with this daemon via a well defined interface (a network protocol connection) or access the character device file /dev/lirc directly.

Most applications (like XawTV) provide their own configuration file format. Here follows a list of downloadable configurations which were created by some users of RivaTV. We thank all of you for contributing, and more contributions are always welcome!

Future LIRC support

The maintainers of the LIRC project have applied our patches after the lirc-0.6.6 release cycle (right now already in CVS). Thus it may be possible that you can use the lirc package out of the box without patching. We will update this page to reflect the latest developments.