Important change in LE13 remote handling

Thanks to long-time joint effort work Kodi now has significantly improved input handling.

This allowed us to finally drop the eventlircd workaround and use standard linux (lib)input handling for remotes, too.

Currently LE13 images are building and the next nightlies will contain this change.

One of the benefits is that Kodi now supports a lot more buttons/keys and the majority of the remotes should now work out-of-the-box.

Another benefit of standard Kodi input handling is that you no longer need to fiddle around with Lircmap.xml or remote.xml to remap the buttons but can use the keymap editor addon from the kodi repo (or modify keyboard.xml).

And this finally brings long-press support to remotes, too - which helps a lot if your remote has very few buttons. eg longpress-OK will open the context menu.

As with every big change there will be some minor disruptions:

If you previously adjusted the button mapping with remote.xml you'll now have to redo it.

Even if you didn't change it the mapping may now be a bit different - just use the keymap editor addon to adjust it to your preferences.

And although kodi now supports a lot more buttons it could be that your remote uses some keycodes that kodi doesn't support (yet).

In this case we need your help so we can further improve Kodi and LibreELEC:

Please tell us about the vendor and model of your remote and which buttons are not working and also post a kodi debug log:
Enable debug logging in the kodi settings, then reboot, then just press the non-working keys and then upload the log - either by running "pastekodi" over ssh or with the log upload function in the LibreELEC settings - and post the URL to the log.

so long,

Hias

Create a keyboard.xml with a keyboard instead of a remote section.

The key/button codes are a bit different (remote had special remote button codes), eg instead of mute you likely have to use volume_mute - if in doubt check the HandleKey lines in kodi.log in debug mode.

so eg this should work:

<keymap>
  <global>
    <keyboard>
      <volume_mute>RunScript(/storage/.config/BTconnect.py)</volume_mute>
      <record>ToggleWatched</record>
    </keyboard>
  </global>
</keymap>

Have a look at the system keyboard.xml for current default mappings and available key codes.

Edit: kodi log shows it's tripping over the media and exit button/keycodes in your xmls.

so long,

Hias

Ah, likely you had media and exit buttons in a remote section - that won't work.

The lirc/ir remote handler is quite limited, it only supports a handful button codes - see https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob…slator.cpp#L161

You had to map linux input codes (like KEY_MENU) to those kodi remote button codes via a Lircmap.xml and then map the kodi remote buttons to kodi actions in remote.xml.

Quite annoying, especially if you had a remote with lots of buttons.

Fortunately all this is gone now

so long,

Hias