Anyone understand remote.conf?

trogggy · August 17, 2016 at 1:48 PM

I've been messing with a remote.conf for a pivos xios ds, to use with a Harmony and give me lots of buttons on my minimxiii.
I have something that's okay, with a lot of trial and error, but hoping someone can explain what I'm actually changing.

In remote.conf are the following:

Quote

repeat_delay =

repeat_peroid =

release_delay =

For release delay I've found:

Quote

unit:ms.release will report from kernel to user layer after this period of time from press or repeat triggered.

I'm hoping someone can explain in (reasonably) simple terms what each of the settings does.

Ta in advance (or not! )

JonSnow · August 17, 2016 at 7:52 PM

Here what i did after adding the remote.conf of a different remote.

Install keymap editor addon, launch the addon and start assiging kodi commands to each button. It does not matter what you add as long as you know the kodi command, i just used the navigation buttons and pressed keys from in order. I know i could have just used the addon to configure but i wanted to used my old keyboard.xml file.

It will create a new xml file in the keymap folder which you can then open to get the button ID and assign it to whatever kodi command you want.

trogggy · August 17, 2016 at 8:08 PM

Yep, I'm quite happy editing the keys in remote.conf and keyboard.xml - I do it manually rather than using keymap editor, just get the keycodes from the kodi log and linux keycodes from t'internet. I try to keep the remote behaviour as consistent as I can across devices.

What I'm trying to do here is to get the Harmony keypresses working as well as possible... there are settings in the harmony software (inter-key delay, key repeat delay, interdevice delay) that can be tweaked. And then there's the stuff in my first post.I've looked at more than a few remote.conf files, and the values for release_delay, repeat_peroid and repeat_delay are often different.
Which is why I'm wondering what each one does....

Ta for the input anyhow.

oksmb · August 19, 2016 at 12:15 AM

As far as I can tell, these are all parameters that should control how button hold-down works. When you hold down a button on the remote, dmesg looks like:

Code

[  235.317924@0] remote: press ircode = 0x1a,
[  235.317965@0] remote: scancode = 0x0069,maptable = 0,code:0xe51aff00
[  235.545763@0] remote: repeat ircode = 0x1a,
[  235.545787@0] remote: scancode = 0x0069, maptable = 0,code:0x00000000
[  235.653543@0] remote: repeat ircode = 0x1a,
[  235.653546@0] remote: scancode = 0x0069, maptable = 0,code:0x00000000
[  235.761321@0] remote: repeat ircode = 0x1a,
[  235.761342@0] remote: scancode = 0x0069, maptable = 0,code:0x00000000
[  235.869118@0] remote: repeat ircode = 0x1a,
[  235.869122@0] remote: scancode = 0x0069, maptable = 0,code:0x00000000
[  235.976899@0] remote: repeat ircode = 0x1a,
[  235.976911@0] remote: scancode = 0x0069, maptable = 0,code:0x00000000
[  236.105223@0] remote: release ircode = 0x1a,
[  236.105226@0] remote: scancode = 0x0069, maptable = 0,code:0x00000000

Display More

There seem to be a couple timers at work here. When the remote driver detects a button being held down, it waits 228 msec before beginning to repeat the scancode. Then it repeats the code every 108 msec. Finally when the button is released it waits for 128 msec before sending the last scancode.

After playing with the values though I am still not sure exactly how everything translates. The only one that seems to have an effect is release_delay. The time between the final repeat scancode and the release scancode is always = 100 msec + value of release_delay. It is interesting that this is the only value that seems to have an effect as some of the "stock" remote.conf files only include this value and do not include repeat_delay or repeat_peroid.

The only thing I can manage to accomplish by tweaking repeat_delay and repeat_period is to break repeat completely. When these values get too small, holding down a button does not repeat the button (same as if repeat_enable=0). So obviously these values are being read but I don't understand what the driver does with them.

A comment in the source code states that repeat_delay is "time interval from the first frame end to first repeat end". To me this sounds like it should control the 228 msec timer. But it doesn't.

trogggy · August 19, 2016 at 12:24 AM

Thanks for that - you've given me a new angle to think about it from. When I first connected the Harmony on default settings the repeats were a pain - that's the main thing I've been trying to fix, preferably without hacks in keyboard.xml or Harmony settings. It's still a work in progress.