Saturday 21 April 2012

XBMC Live remote not working?

Slightly off topic but my son was watching Thomas the Tank Engine on the TV yesterday (via XBMC live on a Foxconn NT-A3500). Everything was fine. I put him to bed, came down and the remote wouldn't work anymore.

I have an MCE remote I bought from maplins (model RC118) that just worked. Didn't need to perform any button translation which was good. Now its broke. Tried a few things:


  • Restart xbmc (service lightdm restart)
  • Restart server
  • Reseat Infrared receiver
Nothing works. 

dmesg shows me that the Infrared receiver is registering:

mceusb 8-2:1.0: Registered Formosa21 eHome Infrared Transceiver on usb8:2
XBMC just isn't able to understand the key presses. Now I know from reading the xbmc forums that lirc is partly responsible for remote controls. I try to restart lirc (service lirc restart) and it complains about missing kernel modules. w000000t. Nothing has happened on the media centre to remove kernel modules in the time I was (ahem, I mean my son was) watching Thomas the Tank Engine.

To google.....

Found the 'irw' command:
irw
000000037ff05bf2 00 Home mceusb_hauppauge

It works which proves the hardware is functioning. Now whats up with XBMC. Nothing obvious in the logs (other than the reference to lirc not starting). Google tells me to check ~userdata/Lircmap.xml. Oh, right. That doesn't exist. I'm assuming thats my problem. But this worked like an hour ago. Whats caused the file to disappear? (i still dont have a clue).

Oh well, to resolve:

cp -p /usr/share/xbmc/system/Lircmap.xml /home/bleh/.xbmc/userdata/

Edit Lircmap.xml in the new location. I deleted all sections other than the one starting:

<lircmap>
        <remote device="mceusb">
<---------Stuff--------->
        </remote
</lircmap>

Then I renamed mceusb to the name irw was showing the device as (mceusb_hauppauge). I then had to edit the /etc/lirc/hardware.conf file to remove the offending kernel module:

REMOTE_MODULES="lirc_dev "

Restarted lirc, followed by restarting XBMC and voila. A working remote.

I need to read up to understand what happened, whether removing the kernel module (lirc_mceusb2) has any nasty side effects and on lirc in general.

Hope this helps anyone with the same issue!


2 comments:

  1. I just encountered this exact problem on my Acer Revo AR3610 running XBMCbuntu Eden.

    It looks like what happened is that the device name changed from mceusb to mceusb_hauppauge. Copying the xml file and changing that name, then rebooting fixed it for me. I didn't have to mess with modules or anything.

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  2. I uninstalled it form device mag. and pluged it back in and its fine now

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