Better LIRC support

Summary

LIRC is used in many media applications to provide support for Infra-red remote controls. This feature makes it easy to connect to remote controls and have them just work in many applications.

Owner

Name: BastienNocera

Current status

Targeted release: Fedora 10
Last updated: 18 July 2008
Percentage of completion: 70%

LIRC is used in many media applications to provide support for Infra-red remote controls. Any Windows Media Center supported remote should work fine in lirc itself. The complete list of supported devices is too long to list. LIRC has a list sorted by hardware vendor.

LIRC, before gnome-lirc-properties, was very hard to configure, and it was tricky to configure the applications to use it.

All the required lirc patches are in lirc upstream and in rawhide. Upstream work on gnome-lirc-properties is finished, and gnome-lirc-properties was accepted in Fedora.

More changes will be necessary to allow applications to provide some sensible default keybindings.

Detailed Description

Currently setting up LIRC remote controls requires a lot of editing, by hand, with little or no hand-holding. It should be possible to use an infra-red remote control without needing to use a terminal, or edit text files by hand.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora becomes easier to use in media-center scenarios where a remote control may come handy.

Scope

Will require changes to lirc, as well as inclusion of gnome-lirc-properties. We might also need to modify some applications to be setup out of the box.

Test Plan

Using a supported remote control, we should be able to control Totem or Rhythmbox without needing access to a terminal.

User Experience

After launching the "Infrared Remote Control" preferences in the menus, clicking "Auto-detect" should be enough to get the remote working. See for screenshots.

Applications should have a default configuration which makes them work with a large number of remote controls without any further configuration changes.

Dependencies

Contingency Plan

This feature does not affect any other parts of the system, so no contingency plans are required.

Documentation

Release Notes

gnome-lirc-properties is a new graphical frontend to LIRC that makes it easy to connect and configure Infra-Red remote controls. Multimedia applications such as rhythmbox and totem can be remotely controlled in this way. To access the graphical frontend, use the "Infrared Remote Control" item in the menus.

Comments and Discussion

See Talk:Features/BetterLIRCSupport

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