[OS2008] Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

I have been for some time been developing Irreco. Im starting this thread so people can talk about Irreco. So tell me whats good, whats bad, and how to improve :)

About Irreco (copy paste from website):
Irreco is a remote control application for Nokia Internet Tablets. With Irreco and the help of external IR transceiver you can control IR compatible devices like televisions, DVD players and AV Receivers. Irreco also has a remote editor which you can use to place buttons to the screen and build the kind of remote you want to use.

Website:
http://irreco.garage.maemo.org/

Re: Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

It looks nice. I would have to buy an external IR transciever? How much would it cost? I presume that to, say, use it on the upstairs tv and the downstairs tv, I would have to either buy multiple exernal IR transcievers or move the external transciever to the location where it was being used?

Re: Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

Yes, not much you do about that since N8xx doesnt have IR leds.

Well, there are some simple IR trancievers like this: http://www.iguanaworks.net/products.psp that you can use. Or you could by those expensive IRTrans devices from here http://www.irtrans.de/en/

Thats the way it is. But on the other hand the remote IR tranciever can also be and advantage. You dont have to be anywhere near the your tv or amplifier because Irreco uses the tranciever remotely. So you can change channels from the other end of your house if you want to.

Re: Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

I am interested in using it to control MythTV :) I suppose I don't need IR hardware for that?

How about more buttons? Like for up, down, left and right, for instance?

~Niels

Re: Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

I use it to control my myth frontend - it works great for that. No IR hardware needed, it works through a telnet connection to the machine.

I'm at work right now so I don't have the tablet or remember the exact steps, but basically you need to enable telnet control of the frontend (in the frontend, select Setup - General - General I think ), open up the port (6549 or something, it says it in the frontend) in your firewall and off you go :). Just create a new remote and set it to control myth - you'll see the options in the program. Very easy.

Like I told eXeonical above, I have a remote setup for this and can of course send it to you if that'll help. I was thinking of fine-tuning it a bit by at least properly lining up the icons and such before sending it out to him. Nothing special and you can make one for yourself with all the same buttons in a few mintues but yeah, it works well. I have ESC, OSD, UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT, VOL+/VOL- and aspect ration buttons on it. Real handy.

Re: Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

How about support for vdr? Should be very easy.

Re: Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

Really nice looking project page :)

Re: Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

Yes...but I think you should have used a drop cloth before you painted the trimwork red. You've splattered all over...

Re: Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

It actualy works pretty ok over the telnet connection. I remotecontrol my myth with this tool though I have a problem. It works very nice to run around in the menues, but after turning on a movie it seems to stop working!? No volume, osd or not even escape work while mplayer is playing the movie. When I get back to myth again I handle it. Anyone know why this happens?

Re: Irreco - Ir Remote Controller
 

First of all, a question to eXeonical: where are the remotes saved? I found the program data at /usr/lib/irreco but can't seem to locate where the user-created remotes are kept. So could you please let me know which files to copy over if I want to share my two humble myth remotes with you / whoever is interested. A warning though: they're not exactly masterpieces but I guess could be useful as a "first remote" to just test out the program.

And *ahem* since you asked for suggestions/feedback, here goes :)

First of all, I truly like this application A LOT. I've seen plenty of half-finished applications floating around here and in general, in other Linux forums, and it struck me how finished the look of this thing is. The buttons are beautiful and such, easy to use menus etc. So with all that positive spin in mind, here's a bunch of suggestions: (keep in mind that I've only used this with Myth, so these are all myth-specific things that I'd like to see when editing a remote for myself)

1) It'd be great to able to map more buttons. We have the major frontend functions available now (left, right, enter etc.) but there's still a bunch of very common ones missing. The important ones that come to mind right away are E (edit), R (record), P (pause), Z (skip commercials) and such, but there's plenty of commands you can use in a myth frontend. Things like "list upcoming episodes" etc. could be stuff that some people like to use. "Change input / capture card", b or something? That's a common one for people with multiple capture cards too. A lot of stuff can be configured under "Keys" in myth, so it'd be great to have all of these available and just be able to map your normal computer shortcut key, "r" or whatever, to a button you create, that sorta thing.

2) An option for choosing landscape or portrait remotes. The N810 (and N800 I'm sure) resembles a "normal remote" more if you hold it lenghtwise but at the moment all the text in the buttons will be sideways if you do that. So would this be possible? "Flip remote" option or whatever that would flip the text in the buttons 90 degrees.

3) Different sizes of buttons. Some things, like the arrows, need to be big but I'd like to put a row of small, seldom used buttons at the bottom of a remote. So could we have smaller buttons to choose from?

4) Symbols to put into buttons instead of text. Things like the "power symbol" (red thing whatever) and arrows pointing at various directions etc. for the direction keys. Even putting your own pics into them? If possible.

5) More shapes for buttons: Now we have circles and squares. Triangles (with the tip pointing either up, down, l or r) would be great for arrow keys.

6) Scrollable remotes / second and third pages of buttons? For making a remote that's HUGE, as in larger than the screen, and that you could scroll while using. This way you could map everything under the sun onto a "page 2" of the remote, and just keep the first page nice and clean and go click a "list upcoming episodes" button or something from page 3 of your enormous remote when you need it. For myth, this would truly be needed if one were to use the N8X0 as the "main remote" for a frontend, otherwise you'd never be able to fit all the functions (assuming they can be mapped later, see #1) onto a remote.

I think that's about it for now, hopefully all of that wasn't too unrealistic :)